Fishbreath

If he's not, I would take it. :P

I wish it were that simple! I'm no Ka-50 expert, but I have plenty of hours in it, and the few hours I've put into the Huey so far have not made me look very good. :P It's the whole anti-torque/collective thing I still haven't quite gotten used to.

Flying the convoy escort mission in the Ka-50 Deployment campaign for the first time, I ended up almost directly over the ambush, and lost my HUD entirely. Even without any aiming cues, I was able to put some rockets on target by firing one pair, then correcting.

I'm not sure I follow—do you mean that wingman, target type, send is for sending a target that hasn't been saved ahead of time? If so, that's handy enough that I should probably put it on the sheet too.

Really? Huh. I could've sworn I didn't get the launch authorization last time I tried it without the switch. I'll have to test it one of these days. I tested the second way (as listed on the sheet) a few nights ago, which worked correctly. It may work the other way too? Something else to check out next time I play.

I did up a little set of checklists and such for a Steam guide, so I figured I'd reproduce it here. This is handwritten on the reverse of my HOTAS cheat sheet, so it features into a lot of my Ka-50 play time. I hope some other people find it useful. ka-50-guide.pdf

This is an adage that holds for basically any precision pursuit from, say, fencing to simulated flying: slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

Speaking as a recent learner myself, I have to say that the gun is a delightful place to start. Lining up on a target and letting loose with a hundred-round burst while PAC keeps you in line is a great feeling. Guided bombs (JDAMs especially) aren't too hard either, and they teach you a good deal about data management, Sensor of Interest vs. Sensor Point of Interest, and HOTAS controls relating to those.

FWIW, I prefer the Ka-50-style rudder trim, as it makes all of my primary controls behave the same with respect to the trimmer.

I know, right? I fired it up last night while my friend was breaking the sound barrier in a Su-25 vertical dive, and had a great time just zipping around the airfield. Forgot how much I like it.

If we're dreaming, I'd take DCS Su-25SM over DCS Su-25T, but in the meantime, adding some convenience would make me happy. :P

The keybinds for 'Zoom in slow' and 'Zoom out slow' change the FoV (and, by extension, zoom the view) smoothly. I have them bound to half of a hat on my HOTAS.

Wrong bug. The other one says ripple and salvo don't function. This one says that the switch to go to instant salvo mode (i.e. the separate 'salvo mode' keybind) doesn't move. I've never really used it, though, since setting the salvo knob to 'all' and the ripple knob to 'salvo' has the same effect.

Okay, cool. I'll give that a try later—so set an attack-some-unit task on the waypoint with an AI wingman? With a little luck, I'll be able to do some trigger-fu to get that feature without actually having to bring an AI wingman.

The best thing about the Ka-50 is how easy the INU is to use. I've heard it said that it uses GLONASS fixes to keep the INU aligned in-flight, and the whole Shkval-at-fix-point bit is just so easy.

Although I don't expect it to get a lot of work, there are two things that would improve the experience in the -25T immensely. 1. Keybind for 'toggle HUD display of current waypoint' or Bring back the FC2-era mission editor option to mark a waypoint as a target. This is within the capabilities of the aircraft as modeled: you can right click to get a crosshair and left-click to mark a target, or you can play the Instant Action mission (which has the target markers). Having a way to either set it up in flight for an arbitrary waypoint (as the first option would allow) or make it pre-planned in the DCS World mission editor would be very nice, and make re-attacking much simpler. 2. Keybind for 'disable waypoint auto-cycle'. This one could be done for all the Flaming Cliffs-fidelity aircraft, and would be handy if #1 isn't feasible. It would let us Su-25T drivers use the HSI to cue us onto waypoints without having to cycle through all our waypoints for every run.

I wasn't able to get it to work--crosshair yes, but in the vicinity of a bunch of ground vehicles, no diamond. Does it have to be right overtop of something? That's hard to do from a distance/with headtracking, but if it's a route toward working out how to include them in missions, I'll have to give it a try later.

It's odd that the actual navigation stuff—the next waypoint indicator and the like—point correctly even when the compass reads wrong.

Two yellow levers on the left side of the cockpit in the back, aft of the Shkval control panel. Pageup once, I dunno; pageup twice is auto, pageup three times is either manual or maximum? Someone else will know. The alarm is a warning for rotor RPM, I think--you'll also sometimes hear it if you're carrying a heavy load and demand too much from the engines. Radar altimeter measures altitude above ground level, barometric altimeter measures height above sea level. You definitely want to do whatever you have to to use the main throttle handle.

Strange—I was hosting a mission with a friend, and 2/3 times he was able to launch on an H50 radar without missiles blowing up. A server restart fixed it when it didn't work.

It might be possible to tease out some data after doing that in a Prepare Mission setting. I was probably also looking in the wrong place in the mission file—if that's how you do it in the cockpit, it's probably not in the route list in the mission file. I'll play around with it again tonight.

Can't you make an immediate follow-up shot with launch authorization override, too? I don't think I've ever tried it, but I seem to recall someone saying that worked.

In addition to an option to show hidden units in the editor and a way to make a unit invisible from the cockpit but not invisible from the F10 map or the ABRIS, I would very much like a way to mark a waypoint as a target for the Su-25T. (See research into the mission feature in this thread). According to posters there, it was possible to mark a waypoint as a target for the Su-25T in the Flaming Cliffs 2 editor, which would cause it to show up on the HUD as a diamond in air-to-ground mode. Having this feature available would be a huge quality of life improvement for the Frogfoot, and the code is likely already knocking around somewhere, given that it's a former feature we're now missing

Quick update: copying the waypoint in yields a mission that doesn't load at all, which is an obvious step backward. I've posted in the mission editor feature request thread, so sound off there if you want the target diamond feature back.