arneh

In DCS all the objects you want to track are quite a bit darker than the surroundings, and the tracker would be somewhat helped by the pilot telling it the size of the object the shkval is trying to track (by adjusting the tracking gates). And I suspect it may actually just add to the realism if the tracker may lose track if the target gets too diffuse. That said I do realize this is not something trivial to do, and it's not very important. And I perfectly understand if ED rather want to use their time on something more important. But at least TrackIR and Freetrack has shown that doing image tracking in real time without much CPU is possible on a desktop PC.

And then you have freetrack which tracks a three lights 60 times a second without using notable CPU. Image tracking isn't necessarily expensive.

At least the last Army version of the Cobra, the AH-1F was underpowered and had to sacrifice fuel if flying with a full weapons load. The AH-1W has two engines, so in theory more power. However I believe the limitation is the transmission which can't handle the full power of two engines, so in practice the difference isn't big. In addition the W is heavier. The primary reason it has two engines is for safety in case one fails. I don't know how realistic the 30 or 45% fuel values are, but it seems likely that it won't be able to have both full fuel and full weapons load.

Hmm. I have used the fixed gun sight Shkval several times. I'm at work right now so can't test, but I thought all I needed to do was enable fixed sight. Maybe I uncaged the Shkval before switching to fixed sight, though I wouldn't think that should make any difference.

Actually, you can. But you must switch gun sight from auto to fixed (it's one of the switches on the weapons panel on the left). The gun (or rockets) will then fire straight ahead, and the shkval will show you where the rounds will hit (assuming you've lased for range, otherwise the hit point may be a little off).

The 10 km range is when fired from an aircraft, where the missile will get a bit more speed and altitude from the aircraft. From helicopters it's about 8 km. I've never seen anyone claim it has 15 km range. Do you have a reference?

I've only repaired once. But then it took about ten minutes. I did shut down the engines, but left the electrics turned on (I requested ground power), including the ABRIS. It was really obvious when the repairs were done. It looks pretty much like you suddenly just got a new helicopter. The screen froze for a little while (might have gone black for a moment too), the helicopter jumped a little on the suspension (like it does when you first enter the cockpit), and it was suddenly completly shut down, including the electrics.

Hmm, maybe that makes it dissapear in weapons mode too... I rarely use route mode, so that may be why I get the speed scale in weapons mode. Ok, thanks for the clarification, didn't know that.

It's not a numerical display, but a scale. Like this: Here I'm doing slightly under 200 kph.

That's the indicated airspeed, which only works above 50 kph. I.e. useless when trying to hover. And the same with the analog gauge. BTW, you do get a speed scale on the HUD when going above 50 kph too, even in weapons mode. Another little weird thing about the velocity on the HUD is the + sign that always prepends the number. The number is absolute so it will display +5 whether you're going 5 kph forwards, backwards or sideways. Which makes the + kind of redundant, since it will never be - in any case. The part about removing velocity below 50 kph in weapons mode really gets me questioning what they were thinking, as it's quite essential information. Questioning Kamov that is, not blaming ED, as I'm sure they've just implemented what the real bird has.

4200 m is plenty high enough. If you follow the waypoints in that mission the highest point is at about 3500 m. If you really want to get even higher you probably have to get the helicopter lighter by getting rid of some weapons or fuel.

No it's not. It's Mi-28s. And you can see Mi-24s and Mi-26s in the background, which clearly indicates it's a Mil factory, not Kamov.

I quoted from Strike Eagle about this incident earlier in this post.

I think you meant to say that A-models didn't have flares. The D-models do carry flares (at least sometimes). And I don't believe it's because of lack of funds that the A-models didn't have flares. They probably calculated that ground cover and the IR-jammer sufficed. And I've also heard that the flares were known to hit the tail rotor, or start brush fires at the altitudes the Apache operates, so at least in peace time it was best to avoid using them even if they had been carried.

It's very noticable in EECH, yes. But it's possible to have several stages of gradually more blur to make it a smoother transition, if it's too annoying. Though I personally don't find it too bothersome in helicopters, as you usually see the transition at most twice per mission :) And slowmo could still use the sharper rotors. Make the transition between blurred and static texture depend on the RPM the rotor animation is rendered, not the RPM of rotor in game time. Not sure if it's desired, but could easily be done.

Just to see how another sim does it, here's how the rotors look in EECH, a dx7 game. Or see around 1:30 here for how the static texture is replaced with the blur one. And it does the same for the cockpit fan. EECH looks nowhere near as good in most other respects, but the rotors do look more like they are rotating rather than flickering.

Which is nice, but helicopters sims have made rotors which looks blurred and car games have made blurred wheels for years before dx9 came about. It's just about using a different texture with blur added. To me the rotors in Black Shark look more like they are flickering than rotating. And that may be how it looks to a camera, but not how the eye perceives it in real life. I prefer what the eye sees to what it looks like to a camera. Though it's by no means a big deal which in any way ruins the game for me. Just a little thing I would like to see improved :)

Well that's your mistake right there. Due to the line above (if LockOn_Options.flight.easy_radar) the second line will only run in easy mode. So if you run in realistic mode the second line has no effect, and since you removed the first one that won't either. So I suggest you put the first line back in :)

Where do I get that? :) The AH-64A operator's manual is online here.

All the ones I've failed. "On the other side" I did three times in a row, the one after that (name of some town I can't remember now) also three times in a row, and the next one after that where you have a 50 minute flight to get to the action (that one I actually finished on first attempt, but then I when I started the next mission I realized when I entered the cockpit that I had forgotten to check all the pages of the briefing so I exited to read the briefing again. But then it gave me the previous mission with the 50 minute flight, which I then failed and now have to do a third time. Argggh!).

I wish. I want to go on to the next mission, but at least in the deployment campaign I'm doing now it only gives me the same mission to fly until it's successful. Wish I could just go on to the next mission whether I failed, succeeded or even died... As it is now I get to succeed missions not because I become a better pilot, but because I learn exactly where all the threats are and can take them out immediately.

You have to press it again to switch back to other weapons. It does more than just switch active weapon, it will also change the HUD, start slewing the cannon etc.

Check this post in the FAQ: http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=620292&postcount=53 If you do that you only need to use the gun trigger for all weapons.

Actually the rounds weight about the same (for the GAU-8 the HEI rounds are 365 g and the API are 425 g. From what I've found the 2A42 HE rounds are 390 g, don't know if the AP rounds are heavier. For comparison the Apache's M230 rounds are much lighter at just 240 g), and muzzle velocity is only slightly lower for the 2A42. But rate of fire is obviously much higher for the GAU-8, so that's the big difference. BTW the GSh-30-2 used on the Su-25 and the Mi-24P fire the same rounds as the 2A42, but with a firing rate almost as high as the GAU-8. So that would be more comparable.

For what it's worth, the Apache is capable of starting the second engine with bleed air from the first engine. Though that's not normally how it's done and I doubt it can be done in flight (maybe AlphaOneSix knows more precicly). From the AH-64A flight manual, section 2.30.2: