Fishbreath

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.

The target point element is obviously still in the mission file and parsed/displayed by the game, so once I find the lua element that displays the target point, I'll post it in this thread with instructions for how to integrate it into a mission file.

Maybe tonight I'll dig into the instant action mission file and see if I can find how it's defined. It would be handy functionality to have in the Su-25T—a navigational marker in A2G HUD mode that isn't the crazy-effective wingman lighting up the exact location of targets for you.

Easy to test: lase right in front of the tall, narrow apartment building model, overfly it so the laser goes onto the far side, observe and report.

I fired a pair of S-25L rockets, leaving the launch pods behind. They were on the 2 and 10 pylons. On the 3 and 9 pylons, I had a pair of fuel tanks. I hit my key bind for weapons jettison (Ctrl-J), and the fuel tanks, which were inboard of the empty S-25 launchers and not weapons to boot, dropped before the empty S-25 launchers. I tried it again with rocket pods on the outer pylons, and weapons jettison dropped the fuel tanks first again. I feel like the weapons jettison key bind should never drop fuel tanks, or should drop fuel tanks last--there's a key bind already for jettison external tanks.

I mess with PVI waypoints all the time without playing around in the ABRIS, but that's mostly because I didn't put any ABRIS tasks on my avionics cheat sheet when I wrote it a few months ago, and now I've forgotten how to do everything on the ABRIS except for just using it as a moving map. :P One of these days I'll have to go through the interactive tutorial and learn it again.

That will delete waypoints in the ABRIS, but not from the PVI-800. Has anyone tried something like PVI 800 mode to Edit, select waypoint, Reset, Enter? Also, what's the upside of actually deleting waypoints, anyway? You can edit over top of existing ones, and you can set waypoint order to skip points you don't want to visit.

I haven't given this a try yet (if I get some Ka-50 time in tonight I will), but I'm considering a full-on autopilot approach: use route mode to line up on a Shkval target, and use altitude and onto the target.speed to control range of release. It would only be good for one pass at a time, but it would mostly take away the difficulties in flying the aiming pipper onto the target.

That's amazing. I wonder if it can be done with a PVI-800 target point instead of just a target datalinked to self.

Some quick testing last night suggested that a waypoint set to 'Fly over point' in the ME yields a point that doesn't show up in ENR mode in the Su-25T. A waypoint set to 'Turning point' does. Is this expected behavior?

I guess I'll try the mission with an AI wingman tonight or tomorrow night—if I get target diamonds then, that should be pretty reliable confirmation.

The one in the Instant Action mission doesn't seem to be directly over an enemy. It looks like it's just a cue for the waypoint, but IIRC it didn't change when I selected the next waypoint. (I'll have to investigate more later.) If there's a way to mark target areas ahead of time, that would make the aircraft a whole lot easier (for me) to use.

There's a diamond on the air-to-ground HUD at the start of the Instant Action ground attack mission, before any radio calls of targets from the wingman, and I've been trying to replicate that in the mission editor. I have no idea what's causing it to appear—the steerpoint in my mission is the same as the one in the Instant Action mission, but I don't see anything in my mission. Does anyone know how to make it show up?

I only own BS2, but a few of my friends own A-10C, and in making missions for them, I find that I don't have any of the options for placing non-steerpoints that I do for the Ka-50 (the Target Point tab on Ka-50 groups, for instance). Would there be a tab for A-10C mark points if I owned the sim, or is there a way to make such a tab show up for me, or to place such points in some other way?

I had the same problem with BS2 after updating to 1.2.4. I had to uninstall and reinstall everything to get it working again.