Ryujin

It seems so, I've flown over ground units before by accident and they didn't start shooting until after I'd passed over. Few seconds delay. Also seen similar when I popped up to shoot at a MANPADS team, not sure if they were maybe reloading, I might do a quick structured test of that later. As far as AA tactics employed by ground units, most do have fire control of some kind, even if its not guided munitions or radar controled. They tend to fire bursts of fire at you, but not really hold down the trigger as you pass over. you'll notice they will lase you to range before firing and most wester MBTs/PCs will put some fairly accurate fire on you if you stry into range. Also a wider range of units will put up ground fire now as opposed to LOMAC and even 7.62/12.7/14.7mm fire will take you down if theres enough of them, mostly the multiple engine hits are will break something. As far as wingmen, they're pretty good and you have a wide range of orders and the data linking, which makes getting them to do what you want them to do a ton easier.

@GG:Triming seems to have been the issue, I don't know how I missed that :doh: @Heatseeker: there's quite a lot of vehicles, many more than in those screens :smilewink:

hehe, yes. I stumbled across it when making a new payload. When you need something dead and it has to extra dead just to be sure, they work great. Also provides a bit more punch vs M1s, but you only have 2 shots.

EDIT: In reply to above concerns, I get smooth frame rates most of the time at 30 or a tad above. Haven't noticed any problems with flares. Large amounts of ground fire has caused small bumps in performance, but nothing too bad. specs: Core 2 @ 2.13 Ghz 3gbs RAM 8800 GTS 640mb XP I have to agree with EvilBivol, from my experience the options were fine and the sounds is quite awesome, I have a subwoofer so the cannon fire is quite impressive. It never struck me as LOMAC: rotary addition, its got a nice array of new features and such. Graphics, sound, and all else has run smoothly for me, no bugs. I've flown combat and practice missions so far and its and excellent sim when your in the cockpit. As a side note while I'm talking about the cockpit, I don't have trackIR, yet I found the 6DOF of freedom to not be too hard to use whit a little rebinding. I don't know what the procedure is, but I land sideways now to make the most out of being able to lean out of the door. As for combat, I'm still learning. But while the KA-50 is no Apache, its a tough, agile, chopper with a bit more firepower against soft targets. Handling a single seater like this when try to move AND fire in combat can be a handful, but you can alter your tactics and binds to make the most of it and it gets easier. The helmet mounted sight is invaluable and the shkval isn't all that hard to use while moving once your familiar with flying the aircraft. For those of you who are wondering about using the unusually mounted 30mm cannon, I've been pretty impressed with its performance so far. Mostly the stand-off capability, I've engaged targets at 5-6kms with HE with good results for the most part. Ground targets are much more dangerous now, I've been shot down by TOWs, cut up by 25mm and had 120mm shot at me (I think thats what it was :joystick: ). This where the spectacular as always damage model comes into play, the KA-50 is a pretty tough, just this afternoon I returned to base after some CAS to find I had been flying with with multiple 25mm HE/AP and 12.7mm hits on my aircraft (seemed to be about 6 or 7 25mm HE hits, including a 5 or so inch hole clean through the tail end of the body, from an AP round I think). Stingers can also make quite a mess out of a chopper. Night flying is alright with nods, but actually trying to fight in a KA-50 at night is quite tricky. The ABRIS can be very helpful here, but generally it can be very hard to find anything other than muzzle flashes. Overall, the KA-50 is pretty intuitive in its systems, if your even vaguely familiar with how a helicopter works, most of the switches and buttons will make sense. The weapon systems are also fairly straightforward, but I'm still kind of uncomfortable with the autopilot and auto hover, but I think I'm just missing something., I'm a tank simmer (SB Pro), not a virtual pilot for the most part. I'd certainly recommend this product and I have yet to stumble across any major faults. As EB said its not perfect, but I think they got an extremely solid piece of software here. PS: I think the static aircraft on airports are indestructible, as they seem to be treated like buildings, which was what was referred to in the above impression.

unfortunately, yes. I'll have to double check, but I'm pretty sure my KA-50 went through some trees at one point. (never occured to me to check if you could crash into trees, I kinda assumed you would :huh: )

Well, I could take a stab at doing a review.... I usually don't do reviews and things but I don't see anything else posted so I'll try my best :smartass: when I have time.

Any IR illuminators would have to be viewed through NVGs, so first off it'd be night only (not some thing the KA-50 was designed for, but doable). Then the question is do the Russians have/use IR equipment in large numbers. And last be not least I don't think DCS will support it. But something like this would be very useful in the AH-64 module.

not 8 mins, but a minute or two if you just turned the engine off (I'm not entirely sure). However, unless your trying to be sneaky, the tank is usually left at a combat idle in case you need to move quickly, rather than be stuck there for a bit if you come into contact. Having the ability to pop smoke and scoot on a moments notice is usually worth the fuel (assuming there's more coming, which is where your KA-50 would come in :joystick:) .

Hitting logistics would be the best way to attack armor with a KA-50 the M1 gets 0.6 miles to the gallon lol. That thing will use 50 gallons and hour just sitting in a combat idle :huh: .

If anyone's interested, the Vikhr has a penetration ability of 900mm RHAe (says FAS.org). The M1A2 has a frontal turret value of 1,320 - 1,620 RHAe vs HEAT and the glacis 510 - 1,050mm, and the lower hull 800 - 970mm. So It won't Peirce the front of the turret and it might or might not Peirce the frontal hull. However side or rear hits should knock it out, if not destroy it. As far as 30mm vs top of the turret, I doubt it would penetrate, especially because of the angle (unless your firing nearly straight down). However, the M1 can find and engage moving choppers at 3km with the main gun and with thermal it can find you pretty far out, so its not a sitting duck (I hope that tanks fire at you in DCS, gives you something to do with that laser warning thingy).

One thing I noticed in that new SimHQ video is that on his ABRIS there was a blue "bubble" around the ZSU at the target area that updated with its movement. Was that the effective range of the ZSU's guns or something? It didn't seem like a realistic radar range. Main thing is how does a chopper without any sort of RWR get that kinda of detailed info? Datalink from some other support aircraft?

I'm with EricJ on this, what I was trying to say was adding very basic CSAR using existing content, not this arma stuff people are coming up with. Think about how relevant your ideas are to a KA-50 sim. @Focha: Thats probably not likely to happen for a long, long time considering the amount of detail that goes into making a flyable chopper. However, I imagine the mission it self could be scripted.

EricJ, I'm not talking about any ArmA-like gameplay on foot. I'm talking about uses for a feature that does exist (as far as I know, I'm not a tester) and adding a minor tweak to it. Not taking out your sidearm and attacking something, but simply exiting a downed chooper and walking to another chopper and getting on the wing. No complex anything in that, just walking and attaching to the chopper via some sort of model swap or attaching the pilot model. Yes I know that feature is not going to be in the retail version and I'm suggesting its addition via a modification. No wild speculation here and the feature is at least partially implemented.

I think they could pull off damage to the windows, at minimum just decals for round/shrapnal impacts. However, I think they could make crackable/breakable glass on impact. Considering the physics they're using on the rest of the chopper this should be easy.

I'd like to see a mod that allows you to sit on the wings, like that one incendent with that apache. Yes, I know it only happened once and isn't perticularly realistic, but it would add some very basic rescue capability to multiplayer games. I say mod because we all know this feature won't make it into a study sim. Matter of fact I might do it myself when the game comes out. I'm a sound/texture guy, but I think I could pull it off as long as then engine is open enough to let me add 2 more seats. I'd need to get my hands on the engine to figure out how fesible it is.

I remember reading about the ability to get out of the KA-50 and walk around in a SimHQ preview. I'm kinda curious where ED is taking this and if we can walk out to the chopper... or get CSARed after smacking your ride into a tree. :joystick: