Fishbreath

The last approach I flew last night, I was maintaining about 1500fpm of descent until I could see the runway on either side, then I just made a really aggressive flare.

Hey, I'm just delighted when I can actually see the runway at the end of my approach. That big engine out the front makes it a lot harder to come in as shallow as I'm used to doing.

True enough. I suppose, if Kamov had really been thinking about it, they might have had the helo kick in some extra rudder when it's firing the cannon, but this is the helicopter whose fancy, satellite-linked color moving map system can't direct the autopilot. Systems integration beyond the datalink/Shkval/navigation complex is more than I expect from them. :P

I had this problem after coming back recently from a long break. IIRC I had to reinstall the whole game to get it to recognize my prior purchase of the Ka-50. :( It might also work to uninstall and reinstall just the Huey.

I am not a Kamov engineer, but I think I understand exactly why it works how it does. There are two components interacting when you fire the cannon at a target: the gun-laying drive and the autopilot. The autopilot doesn't change modes at all when the gun is firing: all of the aim-point correction is being carried out by the gun-laying drive and the cannon's flexible mount. When the gun is close to its left-hand gimbal limit, recoil forces act on the helo, pushing it off of the autopilot's assigned course/attitude. Only once the helo leaves its assigned course/attitude does the autopilot kick in, and then only with 20% control authority—the flight control system isn't doing any pre-correction for recoil, only correcting with its usual authority when the helicopter's attitude changes in response to cannon fire, just as it would if you bumped the rudder pedals without holding in the trimmer. It's not a design problem, but a problem with your perception of the interaction of the systems. It's not like the A-10, which has an actual linkage between the cannon and autopilot to hold the nose in place for long bursts. It's two separate system: the autopilot trying to respond to a new force it can't fully counteract because of limited control authority, and the cannon flex mount running out of gimbal as the helicopter moves during the burst.

I do find myself in complete disagreement with the unchain-rudder-axis crowd—none of my other controls take on the new center position when I trim, and I have to return them to center; why should the rudder be different? Without a force-feedback stick, at least, I'm resigned to flying with the controls position indicator on, and the headache of having one control axis behave differently from the other two is more of a headache than just having a look at the rudder indicator to see where the pedals actually are. Mileage may vary, of course, but that's how I feel.

Really? I had no idea. If I were to complain, it would be about DCS engine performance, I think, and not about the Mustang. :P Edit: okay, now I have a question. In the cold start instant action mission, I can usually get the engine to catch and run on the first try. In a mission I authored, the ramp-start P-51s are a lot more reticent to come to life—they'll catch, but even after I set the mixture to run, they'll sputter and die, no matter what I do with the throttle or anything else. Sometimes some oil dilution makes it work, but other times I can lean on that switch for a minute or two and nothing happens. The fuel pumps are on, fuel pressure from the left-hand tank is good, the throttle is opened a bit, and prop RPM is set to full. Am I doing something else wrong?

Scoring a reliable 2-3 hits out of a 10-round slow burst at 3500 meters is part of what endears the Ka-50 to me. That's just crazy accurate.

I took the Mustang up and shot at some trucks after work today. I'm going to need some practice with the HVARs, but my machine gunnery was pretty good, and I neither blew up my engine nor failed to land (just bounced a bit)! I'll take it.

http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/myserials.php

I think it's generally okay to use the throttle alone for small adjustments—the big thing you don't want to be doing is low RPM/high throttle, as I understand.

I'm lucky enough to have some spinny wheels on my throttle for the engine speed. :P Before I got my current throttle, I just mapped two buttons to it in Il-2 and the like—one for higher engine speed, one for lower. I notice a teensy bit of adverse yaw, but the Mustang seems not to call for very much rudder once it's trimmed. The pedals take the lightest touch to coordinate turns, and otherwise it seems to me to be mainly a stick-and-throttle airplane. It's also a handful on the ground, but not quite as much of one as I expected from the forum. Once I worked out that locking the tailwheel doesn't work unless you're already going pretty straight with the tailwheel free-swiveling, and properly calibrated my toe brakes, I had taxiing pretty much down, and I tried three takeoffs (two with 100% assist, one with 0%), one regular landing, and one belly landing (I wasn't paying attention to the oil temperature and pressure gauges, and eventually the oil stopped oiling), and none of them seemed too hard (the missing landing was a bit of an augur, since I forgot to switch to the fuselage tank after takeoff, and ended up in an inverted spin at about 500 feet after half of a loop). The regular landing was a bit tricky for me, though, because I was following the slope indicator lights rather than an approach suited to the P-51's lengthy snout, and I was still a few hundred feet up and a good distance away from the field when I could no longer see the runnway. I still got it down, but I think I'm going to have to fly a much lower-power, steeper approach going forward, so that I can actually see the edges of the runway when I'm transitioning into the flare. Still, it's a hoot to fly, and I can't wait to shoot down my friend's A-10 the next time we get a chance to play. roob, I actually got the Huey, too, but the P-51 is almost certainly easier to learn and easier to fly, and I'm taking things one at a time here.

$15.99 was exactly the right price for the P-51 for me, so I sprang for it earlier today. In half an hour or so, I'm going to go downstairs and give it a shot. Who else is new here?

The thing about the Ka-50 is that it's another layer on top of the flying—the tao of Shark, if you will, is to learn to let the helicopter fly itself while you get on with doing all the complicated targeting and weapons system employment. That said, I'm looking forward to the Huey (wooo, summer sale!) as a purer expression of pilotage. I'm also looking forward to the Mustang, because it's just a cool airplane to have modeled in such detail.

I'm very happy with my CH pedals, although some people like the Saitek ones more.

If you're on a tight budget, you could maybe get by with the Thrustmaster T-Flight wotcha or something else with an analog rocker switch for rudder, but given how often you need rudder opposite your stick position, I agree that stick twist probably wouldn't cut it.

Just following up: if the autopilot is in desired track mode, waypoint ordering doesn't work at all. When it does work, the selected waypoint coordinates will disappear from the screen when you press enter. After disabling waypoint mode to save the new order, I think desired track mode will work again.

Yup, any order you like.

You can set it up to follow an arbitrary sequence of waypoints in-flight. There's a process in the manual, and it's worked for me in both single and multiplayer in the last week or two. 0. Disable route mode. 1. Toggle whichever PVI mode you're in to off, so that there are no lights on the panel, and make sure the knob is in OPER mode. 2. Set the desired heading/desired track switch on the AP panel to desired heading. (You might be able to leave this one out—it's not on the checklist I keep by my computer, but I can't remember if it works without it). 3. Press the Waypoint (WP) button on the PVI. 4. Press the number button for the first waypoint in the route, then press enter. 5. Repeat for subsequent waypoints in the sequence. 6. Press the Waypoint button on the PVI again to turn off waypoint mode and save the sequence. 7. Press the WP button again to turn waypoint mode back on, then engage route mode. The helo should then follow the new route, lighting up the NEXT WP light and turning as appropriate. I'll test this tomorrow to be sure of the procedure, but I can set up the autopilot to fly pretty much arbitrary routes automatically.

I'm not at all familiar with autoexec.cfg tweaks, but wouldn't 'options.graphics.render3D = false' seem to suggest that the game wouldn't render anything?

The two banks of gauges are for pressure (the left/forward side) and temperature (the right/aft side). The rightmost gauge in each bank is for the transmission. It shows the main transmission by default, and the switch to the right of the gauges, when held to the left or right, shows the left/right temperature and pressure. Edit: page 151 of the manual has the information on that.

There are gearbox oil gauges on top of the wall panel aft of the fire extinguisher controls. If you're worried about it during a cold start, the warning will go away once the engines get up to speed.

The only time I've ever seen my laser fail is when I accidentally had it mapped to the push-to-talk button. I can see how it might be an issue in long missions, but at the same time, I think waiting the three minutes for repairs is an okay solution (provided it's available like that in single-player?).

Awesome. This bothers me to no end—thanks for finding the fix.

That sounds like it could be an artifact of the autopilot. Does the same thing happen if you have Flight Director mode engaged, or if all the autopilot channels are off? Here's my thinking: with flight director mode off and the autopilot channels on, the autopilot will try to maintain the heading/attitude you had when you released the trimmer, and will use 20% control authority to get there. If you just move the stick and tap the trimmer when you get where you want to be, you have an extra 20% control input fed in (because you had to fight the autopilot's 20% to get there), and the autopilot can't counteract that. FWIW, although I don't have a force feedback stick, I always do hold trimmer->fly new attitude->release trimmer when I'm not flying by hand.