Socket7

I finally got around to making a quickstart video to compliment the checklist startup. This one is only 6 minutes! :thumbup:

When I ran the mission on the MI-8 version, you just had to pick them up and drop them. Proximity to the drop point was just about personal pride, and did not effect mission completion. I think my worst drop was 21m away. Damaging the cargo didn't seem to cause problems.

So I've been investigating strange behavior on the standby generator. It appears to stop working after you turn the APU off and then back on again. I've attached a track file of my testing. I turned on the APU, and used the standby generator to charge both batteries before starting the engines. After starting the engines I ran various tests to make sure the standby generator works in various configurations of the rectifiers generators and inverters being on or off. The standby generator worked fine. I then turned off the standby generator and shut down the APU. I spent 5 minutes flying around the airport to let the APU cool, and then restarted it. After restarting the APU, The standby generator fails to produce a load on its ammeter, and the DC selector knob shows 0 volts while set to the standby gen position. :pilotfly: StandbyGeneratorFailure.trk

Eeeehhnnnn... I disagree with the mission editor being powerful. The mission editor is severely limited in a lot of ways, even when expanded with scripts. The UI is fine and dandy, but I'd love to have a lot more triggers, conditions, granularity in AI control... As a person who cannot write a single line of code, I'm constantly bumping into the limitations of the mission editor. While I won't be heartbroken if I don't get more features, it'd make me a very happy boy. I'd love to be able to have a scoreboard in my missions, that i could use flag values to keep track of.

The crew chief should give you verbal instructions for the drop point just like he does while picking up the sling load. It'd be nice if there was a scoring screen for it, but the mission just tells you how close each drop is.

Check to make sure that your cyclic is not bound to any other controls. This could be the result of a control conflict. If that is not the case, you will need to run a test from the windows joystick control panel, and see if the problem shows up there. If the problem shows up in the windows joystick control panel , It's something with your joystick. Try using a different USB port or hub, and make sure any other plugs for it are in place tightly. If the issue persists, you'll have to contact Saitek tech support.

Did A bit more testing, and confirmed that the batteries will charge properly off the MI-8's main engine generators. I then ran into a problem turning the standby generator on, while trying test it with the main engines running after charging the batteries... More testing is in order to draw anything conclusive from that. Some more info on the standby generator would be handy too. The fact that the batteries will charge off the engines makes this even more of a minor issue. I need to play around more with when the standby generator will work and when it won't though. That still seems a bit mysterious.

Oh my god. Las Vegas is beautiful! I was thinking of making a civilian transport campaign for the MI-8, but it always seemed like it'd be boring on the black sea map. I can make it work in Vegas!

The time wasn't wasted. I also ate breakfast and watched some saturday morning cartoons while I tested. :smartass:

So for a while now, I've been terribly confused by the operation of the standby generator in the MI-8. It appeared to be hopelessly broken. Turning it on would show a 100 amp load on it, and then a few minutes later, it would stop working without a failure message in the logs. At first, I thought that the problem was the generator, but then I considered that 100 amps is an enormous load for a helicopter that's mostly turned off, and began looking for the source of the loads. I turned off all the lights, all the inverters, and the only thing left connected to the bus were the batteries. Each battery was drawing 20-30 amps! That's absolutely crazy. By turning off one of the battery switches, and turning off all the other electrics, I was able to dramatically reduce the amperage load on the standby generator, and it stopped failing! This allowed me to spend 20 minutes sitting and monitoring the voltages of the batteries. The standby generator produces 27 volts, as shown by the DC voltmeter. Each battery starts out at just about 24 volts. After about 5 minutes of being charged by the DC generator, the batteries voltage rises to 25 volts, and the load it puts on the generator drops to about 10 amps. After letting the first battery charge for 5 minutes, I connected the second battery, and disconnected the first, letting the second battery also charge for 5 minutes with similar results. I then connected both batteries, and let them both charge at the same time for 10 more minutes. After charging for 20 minutes total, both batteries read at 27v on the DC voltmeter, and were putting around 5 amps of load or less on the standby generator. With the batteries fully charged, I had no problems connecting various electrics to the standby generator for testing. My conclusion is that the failure of the standby generator is accurate, and caused by the overloading of the standby generator. The overload is caused by the MI-8's batteries being almost completely flat at the start of a mission. The documentation I've found says that battery voltages should be at LEAST 24 volts, and it's only barely 24 volts. During APU startup, voltages aren't supposed to drop below 18 volts, and they drop as low as 15. Some notes: The use of ground power does not charge the batteries, even though it does appear to make the battery load needles (barely) move into the negative, which is supposed to indicate charging. The battery load needles do not drop into the negative when being charged by the standby generator. I do not believe the batteries are being charged off the main electrical systems during normal flight operation. I did not specifically test for this though. After shutting off the standby generator, its voltage on the DC voltmeter actually increased to 28v instead of dropping to 0v as it should, although the helicopter did behave as if the generator was disconnected. Even after shutting off the APU entirely, the voltmeter displayed positive voltage on the standby gen position. This did not prevent the restart of the APU. This doesn't really have any practical implications on gameplay, I suppose there are situations where you might want to try and use the standby generator to power aircraft systems after battle damage. If you are concerned about the issue, you can spend 20 minutes on your startup routine charging the batteries.

Beyond 250 kph, you'll start noticing a marked tendency for the MI-8 to want to pitch down and roll. It is accompanied with vibrations. The solution is to slow down. :) Stay below 250kph and you should be fine. In icing conditions however, you may find the vibrations persist all the way down to around 190 kph. The only time I use the heading autopilot is when I'm going to be traveling in a straight line for a long period of time, and want to be able to take my feet off the pedals. Continuous maneuvering with it enabled causes the pedals to end up trimmed in bad ways that require a trim reset. Since you're using a ministick for your pedals, it could be a handy tool, if you bind buttons to adjust it manually, and are liberal with trim reset. Flying a helicopter without pedals is a very tall order. Keeping the helicopter facing the way you want requires fine adjustment of the anti-torque pedals in response to other control inputs. It's not impossible, but some real pedals will help a lot, because you are adjusting them constantly. I have a tutorial video on the doppler navigation system. It includes a meter that helps you hover, and a meter that helps you tell if your helicopter is crabbing to the left or right when moving forward. Could be useful info for some of your troubles. Be patient! It's a very rewarding aircraft to fly once you get the hang of it!

The AI is terrible at flying helicopters. I feel your pain. Keep practicing though, It's possible to complete!

Cool stuff! Just tried out the first mission, I like it! A few thoughts. The co-pilot warning about sink rate is really neat! I like that falling a bit behind the lead does not result in a mission failure. I had a bit of trouble meeting up with them from the carrier. (Or did i not fall far enough behind?) Cool special effects! I also found 1 bug. The mission success dialog box showed up before I had landed and disembarked the troops.

I updated the mission to version 1.2 The only change is enabling the use of labels. It won't help you find much though, units only spawn when you get close enough to trigger smoke / flares. (It's cold out, and they stay in the buildings until they see you. ;) )

The locator beacon on channel 1 is on top of a building with 3 soldiers on top. They fire off a flare when you get close, as well as red smoke. There is a text prompt as well. The ADF needle will occasionally swing around for a moment or two during normal operation, but when you fly past a beacon it will swing around keep pointing towards it. It can take some slow hunting around to find, but if you keep turning to keep the ADF needle at 12 o clock, you will do a perfect flyover of the beacon. I've spent many minutes puttering around that beacon at 20kph trying to find it, and I placed it. ;) (It's that building type with the tower that has 3 little blocks on the top corners. I have players land on the same type of building in my precision landing mission.)

The huey is always touchy. It's one of the reasons I like the MI-8 more. I like to keep my curves as low as possible to maintain a linear response. Instead of using curves, I turn down the saturation. Try turning it down to 50% and then working upwards. If you turn your saturation on the cyclic down to 50%, then you'll double the range of movement you have to make with your joystick to deflect your cyclic any given amount. To use the full range of the cyclic, you'll have to use the trim button to change the centering point of the cyclic. As you get used to flying, turn up the saturation to as high as you can stand. I think I'm around 75% now.

Your years are 6 months long? :music_whistling: I attempted reasonable discussion, but that does not appear to be wanted from the people 'passionate' about this thread. I'll be taking my leave.

There are a bunch of quickstart videos around, but I hadn't seen anyone do anything with the checklist. I know it's painfully long, but it cannot be helped. Watch in 1.25x speed is my advice. Youtube pitch corrects audio so I won't sound like a chipmunk. ;) I kind of skimmed the auto pilot checks. It was like 3 pages worth of steps and I was exhausted.

http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=2199723&postcount=34

I've been making video tutorials. :joystick: MI-8 Startup via USAF official checklist. MI-8 Quickstart Sling loading in the MI-8 ARK9/ARK UD ADF navigation. Doppler navigation system. A terrible tutorial on weapons that I need to redo, because it leaves a few things out, and is generally confusing. :doh: Using rockets in the MI-8 Using UPK machine gun pods in the MI-8 Using GUV machine gun pods.

So I printed off a checklist I found here for a startup of the MI-8, and recorded going through it. Turns out you can do just about every part of the real world checklist in DCS world! Cool stuff.

I tend to think that belsimtek is trying to not duplicate effort. That is to say, I'm guessing DCS2.0 has expanded features that make for a much better EGT simulation than is possible now, and it makes no sense to pay someone to write an EGT simulation that's going to be depreciated right away. This idea that belsimtek has just "abandoned" modules is really very silly. It's also silly to think they aren't fully aware of glaring issues like this. If I were a dev, I would not want to visit a forum where people are saying I don't care about, or have abandoned the project I work on 40 hours a week and care passionately about.

You aren't flying fast enough. :P If you throw some icing into the mix it can become pretty pronounced down to as low as 200 kph. IIRC. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to find the values in question.

It's just a variation on the classic dual exposure. It's been going on for ages! Photoshop has just brought the practice of photo editing out of the darkroom and into reach of anyone with a PC. :)

The MI-8 is better than the Huey in my opinion! It's got a lot more power and lifting capacity, and it's entire character changes as it goes from lightly to heavily loaded. It's got the doppler system which is a fantastic navigational aid. It's faster than the huey, and it's stabilization autopilot makes it much less of a handful to keep steady. Systems management is a bit more involved, things like dust protection being left on can make a real difference when heavily loaded or at high altitude. I've recently gone through a USAF checklist for starting up an MI-8, and DCS matches it perfectly. The Huey and the MI-8 are both amazing machines, and you cannot go wrong with either of them.