Fishbreath

I have a deep strike mission I originally wrote for the Frogfoot which should adapt well to a Viggen, or possibly to a mix of aircraft with different opposition based on player choice, a la Asset Extraction. I have a lovely dynamic weather setup all ready for it. It isn't all that hard, although bafflingly, there's no way to adjust it in the editor. You either have to fiddle with pressure centers until they're placed randomly more or less where you want, or edit the mission file to place them by hand. (You can adjust the pressures, though.)

Watch the autopilot/SAS needles at the same time, or alternately, turn off the pitch/roll/yaw SAS channels. It may be that you have to push past the SAS before your inputs start mattering. Just a guess.

With dynamic weather on, yes. With normal weather, as far as I know the answer is no—the pressure is the same across the whole map.

Whoa, a name for a unit I've never seen before. Nifty.

The gauge is labeled 'Кг/см2' in Mike's picture (that is, kg/cm^2). Edit: and 100 kpa = 1 kg/cm^2, not 1 = 1, isn't it?

I don't recall whether the radar has the concept of a 'lock'. I don't think it does, from my reading of the manual. Here's what's going on, from my understanding (which may be wrong): 0. You select a target waypoint. 1. You see a target on your radar screen. You want to drop a bomb on it. 2. You pull the fix trigger to the first detent. The radar cursor appears. 3. You move the radar cursor to the desired position. 4. You pull the fix trigger to the second detent. If you have a target waypoint selected, this moves the target waypoint, and the target waypoint alone, to the position under the radar cursor. That point will become the reference point for all weapons launches. If your navigation system has accumulated error, that's still fine. Unguided weapons don't care, so long as you meet all the other conditions for an attack. INS-guided weapons will inherit that error, but that doesn't matter: although their perceived launch and target positions are not accurate, the bearing and range between their perceived positions and the actual positions is the same, so they will guide along that bearing to that range and still hit their targets.

Look in the manual under 'target fix'. A radar target fix moves a target-type waypoint to the radar's look position, without changing anything else on the navigation system. (Not changing anything else is a feature. If you make a radar fix on a target and the navigation system has accumulated some error, the target fix will have the same error. The AJS-37's weapons are all INS-guided, and they take the aircraft's calculated position as the start position, so even if there's error in the calculated position, the offset from plane to target is correct, and the weapons will guide as expected.)

The FPM is the winged-and-tailed circle. The lines (to which I believe you're referring, since they're off to the left at 0:53 and gone at 1:06) are navigational information. When they're offset to the left, the AC is to the right of the desired heading. (Or is it the desired track? I don't know offhand.) You'll note that at 1:16 or 1:17 he flies back onto the desired heading and centers the post track again. At 1:06, the navigational reference disappears because it automatically declutters if the HUD Slave switch is set to ON and the altitude is <100 meters.

The MiG-21 is the only aircraft I've repeatedly had to re-activate for no discernible reason. I think it's reasonable to hope that Leatherneck have gotten their act in order a little more since the MiG-21 release.

AoA is always measured from the chord of the wing to the surrounding air. The manual is correct. Consider a MiG-21 hauling back on the stick in a 70-degree bank while maintaining altitude. The nose is pointing 20 degrees off of the TVV, but is level with the horizon. The AoA in that case is clearly 20 degrees, not 0.

That's one explanation. Another is that the tail is largely aerodynamic on the Ka-50, for stability in forward flight, and you might have enough cyclic range to counteract the extremely weird balance without a tail. The bigger problem is that your hydraulics go back that way, and I'm pretty sure I've heard someone in the know (AlphaOneSix, maybe?) say that the Ka-50 is not flyable without hydraulic assist for control-force reasons (not modeled), so you'd end up crashed anyway.

I maintain a mission purpose-built for that sort of practice, as it turns out.

You still have to tap the lock target button to get laser ranging data. You may have to do so once or twice. The solution will jump as you replace the naive slant range estimation with actual laser data.

On the weapons system panel on the left side of the cockpit, set the AT/GS switch to GS (that's automatic tracking/gunsight).

I've never had any trouble flying any of the helos with a purely linear CH Fighterstick, personally. If I were inclined to change the curves, I'd probably go with simply reducing saturation to match the length of my controls—unlike in airplanes, in my experience you never really need full controls deflection in a helo, since trimming changes the centerpoint anyway.

Yes, they are.

Intriguing! Do you find that the SA loss from watching the monitor is usually offset by the greater distance of detection? How often do threats come in from off-axis?

It's nifty being able to drop bombs on a point target (I have that process written down from some time back, and I want to include it in my Ka-50 guide the next time I sit down to write some), but I can't help but think that rockets are the better option in most moderate-intensity bomb delivery situations.

Thanks for the tips. The ABRIS is certainly an underutilized tool in the Ka-50. I hope to put some of these into practice next time I'm flying. Perhaps I'll catch you sometime in the next Blue Flag season.

I was doing a little DCS stuff lately, fired this up, and realized it didn't work. Here's an updated version: doesn't have everything I said it would, but does function, at least.

This is what I've always heard. It's probably also why you see PIC on the left more often as the helicopter gets bigger: in e.g. the Mi-8 or CH-47, you can usually be assured that you'll have a copilot and/or flight engineer to handle the switchflippery while you're busy flying.

We'll see. I've had a book release to prepare for in the evenings over the last two weeks, so I'll probably won't get to it until next week or the week after. If I find it too frustrating, I'll just cheat and edit the timer in the mission. :P

Thanks for your work on this campaign! I flew the first mission last night, and it was great. (Thanks also to Mikhail Mil and his successors, for designing the best helicopter. Seriously. I've never met any helo so easy to fly well. I'm doing things in the Mi-8 after maybe five or six hours of total flight time that I would never attempt in the Huey.)

The sim might, but IIRC, this mission dates from before the cargo system, so Socket7 probably just added cargo weight with triggers when you make a pickup.

I had the smoke, but the pickup zone is a little tricky. I landed about 5-10m away, outside the town, and had to taxi past them into the town to get them on board.