Blackeye

Didn't know that either but in hindsight it makes a lot of sense to have them.

And now imagine a Doppler radar without a gryo keeping it pointed downwards - it would happily track the vertical speed because it now would be pointed sideways. Which again is my point: You need some additional device besides the radar itself. Whether it is coupling to the ADI, a gyro stabilized platform or some altitude information. The misunderstanding seems to be that you are talking about the DISS system as fully implemented in the Mi-8, while my comments refer to a Doppler radar without those features, stating that the DISS system needs something beyond that if you want it to be correct over sloped surfaces. Which apparently it has in form of at least gyro stabilization.

The one you project your flight path on, i.e. the distance traveled in the horizontal plane.

Correct but it doesn't solve the orientation problem. Which is exactly my point of needing to know the orientation, because it does not change the signal but will influence the distance on the map. Which explains where the additional required information about orientation comes from and solves the problem nicely, but it is not part of the Doppler radar itself.

It analyses the Doppler shift of radar beams which is indicative of the relative speed to the ground, which then is used to determine the distance traveled. Without knowing the orientation of the ground or your flight path altitude I don't see a way to derive the location without that error. Unless you're talking about storing the ground profile and then trying to match features to stored data like the Viggen does, but that\s not how the radar on the MI-8 works afaik.

We're not talking about uneven we are talking about slanted. The radar can only measure movement relative to the ground - there is no way the radar itself can detect how an otherwise even surface is oriented in space (unless it has access to other sensors). If the helicopter was capable of going straight up with its nose pointing upwards along a vertical surface the radar would measure that in the same way as if it was flying horizontally over a similar surface. In the former case the "map distance" would be zero though as you're going straight up. Obviously no helicopter is capable of that but following a 15 degrees slope should not be a problem and the distance measured that way would be about 3.5% longer than the distance on the map.

Imagine the helicopter flying over a level field for a mile (with markers) following the terrain. Now if that field was tilted down (or up) a few degrees the only thing that would change from the helicopters perspective is the relation between attitude, collective and speed because the gravity vector is now tilted and slightly adding (or subtracting) to the forces pushing it forward. However as far as a radar looking at the ground is concerned nothing has changed and the distance between the markers is still a mile (which it is). However since the field is now tilted the distance measured parallel to the sea level is actually less. Since the latter is what is usually given as distance between two points the radar would indicate a longer distance than you would measure on a map. That difference is very small for lower angles (less than 1% for a 5 degree slope) but for steeper flanks it could be noticeable.

That's assuming the doppler navigation has no way of figuring out that it is going uphill. Throw the altimeter into the mix and now assessing the vertical component of the movement is possible. Even without that you could probably draw some conclusions about the ground's orientation from the distances of each beam. Now I don't know what the capabilities of the real system in the Mi-8 are and it is quite possible that DCS is cheating here, but I think it's not impossible to take hills and slopes into account to some extent.

So you basically agree then - a nose dip but no bouncing.

I don't think so. The high rate of descent and the high AoA make sure that you have quite a bit of weight on the wheels on touchdown immediately overcoming any ground effect. The gear is designed to not only withstand those hard landings but also dampen the impact and not act as a spring. And once the nose drops the reduction in AoA reduces the lift even further so that the aircraft will firmly stick to the ground, not to mention the rapid deceleration. The nose will probably dip down during this but nothing crazy. Here's a nice video of an F-14 landing on a carrier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y45rzmDaABI&t=231 It's certainly a bit violent but there's no deck hopping.

Same here. With the left engine running both left and right OFF flags disappear while the right engine does not seem to have any influence on either flag.

FWIIW I got it working again: I discovered that repairing DCS with the file removal option does not remove the files in DCS World\Scripts\Aircrafts\_Common\Cockpit\VAICOMPRO. So I manually removed that folder and restarted VA to recreate it and that seems to have fixed the kneeboard.

Thank you. Unfortunately this does nothing for me - VAICOM does recognize the command (e.g. [Flip to Notes tab] in the debug info) however the kneeboard does not switch and stays emtpy/INOP.

Somehow the kneeboard stopped working for me. It worked fine initially however when I now open it, all I get is the header backdrop but no bookmark and the background is the metal back plate in VR (non-VR the board is transparent) and it seems to be non interactive. I can however switch back and forth to the normal kneeboard pages. Not sure what I did or what changed. So far I've tried resetting the lua code, repairing DCS and reinstalling VAICOM.

You are forgetting the equally longer downwind leg which is done on speed resulting in roughly half the GS. This means the extra downwind distance that breaking later has created is covered in twice the time of that break delay. Thus the spacing at landing will be roughly three times the breaking interval. In case of that 14 second break interval the spacing at landing will be 42 seconds.

I think those 2° ND originate from the NATOPS manual for shore-based operations: Trim for takeoff shall be 0° for both aileron and rudder. Shore-based pitch trim shall be 2° ND except when conducting a VTO in the TAV-8B,in which case 1°ND will be used. These trim settings are based upon rotation of the aircraft/nozzles at the calculated rotation airspeed while the stick remains guarded at the trimmed position. Use of additional airspeed in order to provide a performance pad will produce nose down pitching moments after rotation that will have to be arrested with aft stick deflections. It also calls for 2° nose down (4 if you don't hold the stick) during taxi to prevent the nose RCS from firing and kicking up debris: When taxiing with nozzles deflected, it is essential that the stick be held forward of 2° nose down or that the stabilator be appropriately trimmed so that the nose RCS valve will remain closed. (Since the stick will move fore and aft slightly during taxi, the stabilator should be trimmed to 4° ND if the stick is not going to be held during taxi.) I haven't found anything more substantial on carrier takeoff unfortunately.

Pretty much always headwind in aviation when touching the ground is involved: Carriers turn into the wind and speed up as necessary to maintain 20+ knots headwind over the deck. For runways you usually choose the one with the largest headwind component, unless the wind speed is really low and there's a good reason to pick another. This reduces the speed over ground and thus the energy the brakes (or wires) have to dissipate and reduces the landing distance - also it gives you more time during approach. Turning into the wind is mandatory for vertical landings in the Harrier AFAIK to avoid instabilities due to the weather vane effect and to prevent debris and hot air from being blown forward and ingested by the engine.

In your track I get a 8 knot tail wind which isn't helping. While the Harrier in DCS might be a little more unstable I think it's mainly down to practice, anticipation and muscle memory. As training exercise you could set up a mission with unlimited fuel and a light enough loadout for a hover (not super light though) and try hovering around the airfield for some time following the taxiways, etc. That way you can train keeping a controlled hover for a longer time and not just 30 seconds of each mission. Take it slow and use only minimal input to initiate maneuvers so you don't upset the aircraft.

Works for me on the latest OB - make sure you're pretty much level trimmed before engaging Alt HOLD. Also make sure the autopilot (AFC) is on otherwise Alt Hold won't engage.

Well they (Nick Grey) said they would make them optional in a reddit thread, but apparently they haven't gotten around to implement this - assuming that the devs actually know about it.

Well it is fixed for me in the latest open beta version (OB) and since stable is a bit behind OB I'd assume the bug is still present there. Either wait until the current beta fixes have propagated to stable or start using OB yourself.

It kind of works for me: it is flashing but the flash is not visible at certain view angles for me and it is really dim - esp during day. But then again the intensity of lights is wonky all over DCS at the moment.

Lights working in OB 2.5.6.50793 - thank you.

The lights that point straight to the ground are extra lights as far as I can tell -they are sitting in the fuselage fairly close to each other, while the taxi lights sit further astern and wider apart than the bright spots on the ground. Also the taxi lights seem to fold in bright side up. Not sure if those extra lights are supposed to come out as well.

Yes, custom mission - it needs to be night time, I think.