Fishbreath

I'm setting up a mission in which I fly as AFAC for my A-10 buddy. We'll be up in the mountains northeast of Tskhinvali in the wintertime, which puts me at about 2200 meters with deicing required, which is conditions where the engine governors are getting a serious workout. Here's the scenario: I'm in a hover with a heavy load (six Vikhrs and a launcher's worth of smoke rockets, plus two fuel tanks for added loiter time over the target area). The overhead panel warning lights say the governors are limiting engine speed, and I'm sinking at maybe one meter per three seconds or so. Blade angle is about 13 or 14 degrees, and rotor RPM is sitting at around 82%-83%. Is it better to reduce collective? That would mean the rotors are turning faster and the engines aren't working as hard, but is it generally the case that the increase in rotor RPM would be sufficient to counteract the lower blade angle?

Could I trouble you for some tips on throttle/prop RPM for formation flying? When I flew last night, I was juggling both to keep up with/not fly past my leader. Would setting RPM a little bit above his setting and working the throttle only be a better way to do it?

For one, multiplayer wouldn't have any ground commanders. :P

My procedure: 1. Hold the starter switch, and move the mouse over to the magneto switch at the same time. 2. Once the engine begins to sputter, immediately turn the mag switch to both. 3. Hit mixture lever as soon as possible. I'm not entirely sure the engine should be sputtering like it does at #2, but maybe it has enough compression to start dieseling or something. Anyway, this process usually gets me a start on the first go, while priming, then magnetos, then starter, then mixture seems to fail in some environmental conditions. I also got a friend to fly with me yesterday:

I find that a little slip in a loop isn't killer. When I start a loop, I glance down at the accelerometer by the oil temp/pressure gauge: starting a loop at 4.5g or 5g anywhere above about 225 mph is about the best you can do. More than that, and you'll end up at too high an angle of attack, and it won't work out well in the end.

For the first half of that, I thought you were actually talking about something I didn't know yet. Well done.

That's an odd position to take, given that the default joystick settings in DCS are absolute crap and that my first step on buying a new platform is to clear them all. The Warthog HOTAS in particular is a well-known device that has a pre-existing DCS profile. Would it be so hard to make a profile that assigns the axes in a sensible way? If I had a Warthog, I might want to switch prop RPM/manifold pressure around, but it's a pretty safe bet that I'd want one on one throttle and one on the other. In the same way, if I have something called 'CH Pro Pedals' or 'CH Throttle Quadrant' plugged in, you can be pretty sure I don't want pitch and roll on those.

I've found that holding the starter until the engine catches then quickly hitting the magneto switch and the mixture lever will work, if you're quick about it. I usually disable head tracking once I have the starter, magneto switch, and mixture lever in view to make them easier to get to.

I would imagine it's actual system memory usage--the fact that it doesn't change suggests it's everything, preloaded. I'm not a graphics expert by any means, but I would expect the graphics memory usage to change based on what's currently in the scene being rendered. You could verify that by making a mission, checking memory usage, adding more things out of sight range (across the theater would definitely be safe), and checking again.

I'll probably be venturing online one of these days, provided I can find a place. I might also look into whipping up a few A2G missions, or maybe some co-op air combat missions, for the P-51 multiplayer community specifically. Seems like a pretty limited set out there so far.

FWIW, I've never had problems with the CH pedals, even after a long time (and I fly more WWI hours than anything, so rudder use is near-constant!). For the helos, I've never had much use for the rudders-don't-stick-with-trim thing, so I do indeed end up with them centered most of the time, and although the Mustang does require a lot of rudder work, it almost never requires very much rudder deflection.

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.