Scrim

It's simple. To make the most out of essentially any military vehicle, you need to cram certain technological things into it. If you want it to be a potent attack helicopter, you're going to need quite a few of these things as you're essentially building an MBT that flies. That is obviously going to require people to handle things. Two seaters are complex enough as they are (the washout rate for Apache pilots exceed the washout rate for Navy SEALs IIRC, at least in the UK). Taking it down to one single pilot, and you've got to chose between a helicopter that won't fly, or a helicopter where the second pilot is replaced by machines. Since we have yet to reach the stage where machines trump humans in more than one dimension, that means you'll end up with a severely dumbed down helicopter. The Ka-50 is a helicopter that currently requires an autopilot for the pilot to be able to look around much. It has a very narrow FOV compared to contemporary attack helicopters, which means it has to fly a zig-zag pattern to look around. Considering that attack helicopters are essentially 50/50 attack and scouting, it's an almost worthless design. The best that upgrades could do would be to make it level with attack helicopters of the day it was first built, but nowhere close to current ones like the AH-64D or the WAH-64. In operations its lack of vision has forced it to fly with Ka-27s that are considerably slower, or with Hinds, the helicopter it was supposed to replace.

That seems rather contradictory. I get that you may feel it's unrealistic to have Western adversaries out of Eastern bases, but the Mig-21 is an interceptor that was built around the concept of downing NATO strategic bombers over the USSR using GCI. If we're going with that realism, then surely Mig-21s over Turkey would be equally unrealistic?

This, just this! Missions that start you off airborne are just wasted for a lot of said features, and those that aren't take their sweet time setting things up.

No disrespect for the Russian, Estonian, Belorussian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, etc. sacrifices, but didn't a few Western nations do something that deserves recognition as well?

If you have to argue against an obvious joke, you're obviously just arguing out of bias, or trying to pick a fight.

I'd take an autorotation every day of the week over the risk of one of those 6 rotor blades on a presumably very badly battle damaged Ka-50 not being blown off when I eject :P

^^ Sort of like how the Marine Corps M-60 Patton tanks were pared up with Abrams tanks in the Gulf war; It did not speak to their benefit. Let's face it. The Ka-50 has a very small FOV sensor compared to any other modern attack helicopter, and it relies on an autopilot to ease the workload of having a single pilot. Unless the pilot sets his autopilot on flying a zig-zag route, he's just not going to see very much with anything else than his MK1 Eyeballs. If the Ka-50 had been a sound concept, I don't think the Russian military would've ordered over 4x as many Mi-28s, an attack helicopter that is probably more fair to compare to the AH-64.

I'm guessing it's because it seems to be the most do-able module at the moment. Multi crew is far away it seems, and even when we get it, 95% of DCS flying is single player, so having a plane in which it's relatively easy to put in an AI crew makes sense.

The greater the HOF, the greater the spread. It's just common physics. That's real life, and DCS.

That may be the case, but with a service ceiling of 6400 meters (though I doubt the veracity of that claim, as that is ~3/4 up Mt. Everest), it still beats all mentioned attack helicopters by at least almost 1000 meters.

F-111, because it seems the most viable, at least regarding how to manage the crew implementation.

Just tried it. 10 T-80s in a column, stationary. 6 CBU-97s near perfectly dispersed over the entire column, front to rear. HOF 3000 feet with no wind, to ensure it was the CBU-97s that I was testing, not my own skills. The result was 8/10 tanks totally killed, with medium damage to 1/10, and 1/10 that got away with no damage. I feel that's very good for an unguided weapon. I'll tamper around a bit more. If the spacings are increased to overstretch the length of the column, that might result in a better spread, and thus a higher CBU/kill ratio. And regardless of the HOF, they will still wait until they get down to a very low altitude before they start hitting the targets. This makes possible the problem to some tanks being blocked by others.

Flagrum: Well, depends on. How close where the CBUs dropped to each other for example? If they were too close to each other, they might've just overkilled a few tanks. And the other way around, some might've ended up being dropped too far away from the tanks. Hard to say, but I'll give it a go. Also, -97s are unguided; Some might've missed the column completely. More than the graphical effects must've been decreased. A real life CBU-87 has 202 bomblets. Now, I've not counted the number of explosions from dropping one in DCS, but there is no way it was even 100.

Not bad considering the circumstances. Thing is that when they're so bunched up, the bomblets tend to center on the same targets. Had they been more spread out, in perhaps a wedge, I reckon there'd have been more hits. That, and I can't quite recall, but I think the number of bomblets for CBU-97s and -105s are less than IRL due to performance. The -87s and -103s definitely are, but I can't remember for sure if it was just those that got less bomblets than IRL. Also, due to the size and less than ideal aiming of the bomblets, you can't expect one kill for every single one. Some are doomed to malfunction in various ways, and a bunch of them will trigger at parts of the target that aren't the least vulnerable, like equipment strapped to the tank, turret mounted MGs and optics, tracks and wheels, armour at lousy angels, etc.

So we are to attribute to the Ka-50 a bunch of technology we have no source to indicate it has, as well as having done things we have no sources for either? Sure, that sounds like a fair comparison. Yes, having two pilots decreases the workload. If you think communicating with a single person in the same vehicle as yourself is hard, you have no idea about the workload that is flying attack helicopters. Or even monitoring the radios. You exaggerate the DCS flight sim community if you compare us with professional, real life pilots. Let's see. FLIR. So, the ability to do something at night. A decent FOV.

Kaktus: That's just incorrect. Both the A-10 and the AH-64 were designed with being deployed on the front lines of the Fulda Gap on day one of a WP tank flood in mind. The A-10 would hardly fare well against fighters if it's caught in the open, but neither would an Su-25. Definitely AH-64 over the Ka-50. Both it and the concept it's built around are well combat proven. It has two pilots which eases the workload and along with vastly superior sensors allow the to keep a good watch on their surroundings. The Ka-50 has neither of that.

Get hooked up with some local, I doubt he'd mind making a hundred bucks (probably a months worth of salary) or so by dismantling part of what he considers to be trash in his backyard. :P

I like the original WP Hinds for what they are, and can't wait until the Hind module is finished. However, modernized Hinds, nooo thank you. Modernized is just another word for "I can only afford WP technology, but I want Western technology". It's basically a drag queen Hind, trying to be something it is not, and failing miserably. On its own you can see virtues, such as ruggedness, simplicity, etc., but with modernization you just end up with the worst parts of having WP technology and Western technology: The technological shortcomings of WP technology, but with the lack of ruggedness that you find in Western technology.

In Vietnam, I've read at least one account of how official regulations allowed anything up to an SKS rifle to be sent home by mail.

There's no good, single answer to this. Is there wind to take into account? The CBU-97 and -105 bomblets are parachute suspended, and thus extremely liable to being blown off course by even light winds, especially if they deploy from higher altitudes. That's all about training, trial and error, etc. Eventually you'll have it pretty well figured out. Trying to hit moving targets with something as erratic as -97 and -105 bomblets in a sense are is not easy. The more you do it against easier targets, the closer you'll come to learning how to do it against moving targets. HOF is obvious. The higher they deploy, the greater the spread. Since this is a very wide area weapon, as long as you can control where the spread goes, the greater the spread the better, as this ensures that multiple targets are hit. But as mentioned, the greater the HOF, the longer it'll take for the bomblets to go off. IMO, use CCRP, especially if you have a TGP. It allows you to fly a more stable path, and in my experience, CBUs tend to misjudge their altitude to a certain degree when dropped with CCIP. And as previously mentioned, due to the wide area effect, the pinpoint accuracy that CCIP can give you over CCRP is uncalled for.

TH Warthog, definitely. Even if you don't have rudder pedals. You can assign the antenna switch (or whatever it's called) for them. The TM Warthog is just the best off the shelf HOTAS you can get. There's nothing like it when flying the A-10C.

This. Don't be like I tend to be, and say "you can pry my countermeasures out of my cold dead hands" reasoning that "if I use them now, I might not have any if a SAM is launched at me later". Weird, quite unhealthy instinct :P

1: Why a Vietnam map for that? All of that are things that you can see in every single war since helicopters turned up. Every single one. 2: The Sabre is completely irrelevant for Vietnam. The Mi-8MTV2 flew for the first time in '75, the year the war ended. I certainly wouldn't mind a Vietnam map, but unless trees have become collidable and blocking the AI's view, it'll be a complete waste of times for obvious reasons, unless they ignore the jungles.

Yeah, massively helpful...

Or a GPS. Or functioning cockpit light system. Or a winch. Or a door gunner throwing a smoke grenade to mark the LZ. Or anything else that comes before outright fictional CoD weapon systems.