mcfleck

Do you REALLY think, that ED asked the US government if they could create the most advanced and still HIGHLY classified plane like the F-35 and the government would freely say "sure, why not", while when HB asked them about a plane from the 80ies they would answer with "hold your horses... There are maybe still a couple of F14A somewhere in the desert and after half a century in service we don't want Iran to get ideas from a commercial game/sim and try to retrofit some mid 90ies tech into their historic planes"? Really? They seem to be contacting two entirely different departments as it seems. The F-35 underlies ITAR regulations. Even the construction company that is building the hangars outside of the US for this plane has to be picked/agreed upon by the US government (just to be clear: in a FOREIGN country, that has bought the plane and is about to introduce it) I just see two extremes while talking about this topic. If I absolutely had to pick one of the two, I would rather prefer the HB way. But to be honest I think the best solution to problems in general is finding a a good balance between the extremes. Do we really NEED to have the specific radar frequency, scanrate, pulse modulation, jam resistance, side lobe surpression/cancelation algorithms for the AWG in the game? Certain things can be approximated and guesstimated. No one (except for the ones really flown the plane) will know the difference. I mean the EF will also be redacted in all sensitive areas and no one will care, or or rather be glad to have it. Would I love to see the F14-B(U) or even better the D? HELL YEA. Insta buy for me! If rhe B(U) comes as a free addon even better, as I already love my tomcat. Would I buy the Super Tomcat 21? Probably not... But that is just my opinion. If the market is big enough for the DCS X-Wing, ED or whoever wants to shell develop it, as long as it does not have a negative impact on the "core" development.

Actually now that ED is creating the F-35, the argument about the Iranians having tomcats in their arsenal and little avaliable information is not holding up anymore. Just make things up straight from thin air and hearsay. Heck, what does even hinder you from crating the super tomcat? *sarcasm off*

To be honest, I have mixed feelings about the F35 announcement. On one hand, sure I love modern aircraft (planes, choppers, all of them) on the other hand I enjoy at least some level of credibility. All requests in the past about other aircraft like newer red planes, the KA 52, the super Hornet were dismissed with: There isn't enough public information available for these aircraft, as they are still in active service and we don't want to guess. So is what we see here a general change of company policy regarding new projects? At this point I would be willing to bet, that it would be way easier to get an F18E or a Growler, or ANY other western plane into the game than the F35 guesswork. Why not opening something like Flaming Cliffs 4/5 (now that MAC is probably dead) and bring a bunch of planes with simplistic avionics, but a good flight model? You could pump those out rather quickly and bring in all the jets you don't have the classified information for. Like an SU57, SU35, J20, F22, F35, Raffaele, Gripen release for flaming cliffs? Booom top seller Could all be done by reverse engineering pictures, getting the aerodynamics right and don't care about the highly classified systems.

You are 100% overtorquing your aircraft my friend. As you might know the amount of lift is proportional to velocity square, meaning when your rotor RPM starts drooping, you will lose lift quickly although you still have a lot of (more than allowed) collective applied. At the current state of development sure, you can fly for days with 120% TQ applied and increase the collective until your engines are unable to provide enough power to keep the Rotor RPM at the nominal level without any negative permanent effects on your aircraft. I wouldn't recommend trying it out in RL though. Usually under normal circumstances your gearbox is the first limiting factor. Breaking and overstressing it will result in a crash as you will lose the ability to autorotate and just fall out of the sky. When you apply such an amount of collective that your engines are not able to keep the rotor from drooping, you already have damaged your MGB. This may happen by either not setting the power levers to flight or by applying to much collective for the given circumstances. Try limiting yourself to 100% TQ max for take off and landings and stay in the green during cruise. Everything above that should only be used in an absolute emergency or as last resort. Be ahead of the aircraft especially in high gross weight situations and act rather than react. While slowing down for an approach for example do not forget that you will need to apply a substantial amount of collective once your speed starts dropping below 30 KIAS.

RL practice is either a significant power change, i. e. reduce, build up some descent rate and pull power again or as already mentioned, entering a turn. You'll get the best results combining both, but on a transition flight, you may not want to fly turns all the time and possibly induce an oscillation again by leveling out too quickly. You also should reconsider your airspeed, as some loads really tend to swing way more at 110 kts than let's say at 80 kts. Going faster isn't always the proper solution.

I edited my post above with all you need to make it work. The basic idea for that was mainly looking into the CPG default.lua and copying the corresponding lines I needed into the PLT default.lua. I had to "cockpit_device_id" to "devices.TEDAC" instead of "devices.TEDAC_INPUT" to make it work. Hafe fun with it

Hi Amarok, don't know if you are aware, but with a little bit of tinkering it is possible. You will have to add a couple of lines to your controllers "default.lua" in order to create all the keybindings you are interested in. In my opinion the following are nearly mandatory: - Control TADS FOV - Switch between TADS TV/FLIR - Enable automatic/manual LST mode There are two ways to achieve that. 1. The manual method: Go to your "DCS World\Mods\aircraft\AH-64D\Input\AH-64D_PLT\joystick" folder add the following lines below the line "join(res.keyCommands,{" for additional keybindings and bind them in DCS afterwards: 2. Easy method using the Quaggles command line Injector Mod: I prefer and highly recommend using this tiny, but very handy mod. It basically uses a file including your custom commands and APPENDS them automatically to your original default.lua without changing the original file itself. That means in case of an update by ED, you won't have to redo the changes. So first download and install the mod: https://github.com/Quaggles/dcs-input-command-injector/releases Create a folder structure as follows: Saved Games\DCS\InputCommands\AH-64D\Input\AH-64D_PLT\joystick place my attached default.lua in the newly created folder be happy and bind the new commands within DCS --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A couple of closing words: I created different bindings for the LST, a version for switches that stay in their position (... Else Off) and one more suitable for button commands Chose whatever you prefer and fits best to your desired controls. I have mine on the Warthog throttle boat switch (the "... Else Off" binding) and it works fine. In order for the LST binding to work, the frontseater should be in TADS mode. You can easily achieve that by slaving the TADS with George to any random position like you would normally do searching for targets There are a couple more commands in my attached default.lua, that I needed and you may find usefull (again depending on your controls and layout). You will find all of them in the category "Special" in the controls editor. Control TADS FOV Control TADS TV/FLIR mode (TV has way more zoom) Pilot NVS 3-way switch binding -> I use the Pinky 3-way on the throttle for that Power lever Idle/Off commands -> I use the ENG OPER switches. Center in my case would be OFF, forward (spring loaded) engages the starter, aft switches the power lever from OFF to IDLE EXPERIMENTAL: Binding for storing targets George has his TSD in NAV mode by default, so if you would use the "STORE" function, you would create waypoints. In order to create target points, youll have to switch his TSD to ATK ONCE. There is also a binding for that, so you won't need to jump in the front seat for that. It is really not that hard and expands your AH64 experience, so I would encourage you to give it a try. Please let me know if you encounter any problems, I will be glad to help you out. default.lua

You could calculate that if it is necessary at any given time (V-SlantSpeed = Sqrt(VGroundSpeed^2 + VClimbrate^2). Bare in mind that you would need to convert climbrate from the feet/min to nm/h(kts) first. But to be honest: I struggle to see any usecase for the "slant speed". The aircrafts computer could do it for you as it has all the data, but I never heard anyone interested in that specific value. Could you please elaborate what that speed could be used for?

Sure that there was no wind set in the mission? I experience these kind of issues only after quite long flights (1,5h plus) due to excessive INS drift without the GPS auto update feature. This seems to influence the vertical speed indicator as well as the IAS. Also noticeable by the acceleration cue in the IHADS being way off in a stable hover.

It has been a while and please correct me if I am wrong: IAS: Indicated Airspeed. Assumes the air is incompressible, temperature and pressure is constant CAS: Calibrated Airspeed, correct explanation, in modern aircraft with digital instruments you could say CAS is nearly equal to IAS TAS: True Airspeed, CAS corrected for non standard (ISA) temperature and pressure/altitude. Nothing to do with wind. The "Airspeed corrected for wind" you are talking about is indeed your Groundspeed. Hovering at a ground speed of 0kts, your IAS will show you the current wind speed at your nose. In order to get your vertical speed, you will refer to your vertical speed indicator, which simply visualizes an ambient pressure change and by that directly shows your vertical speed without wind in ft/min. Wind is just a word for a moving airmass. With an airspeed of 0, you just move with that mass like a hot air balloon. Any other speed means you move relative to said air mass. There are mainly 2 situations where you care about wind: Navigation, as it influences your time enroute and your ground track and being close to the ground like during takeoffs and landings

You might have mixed transverse flow with dissymmetry of lift (advancing blade experiencing more lift than retreating blade, gyroscopic effect results in the force manifesting with a phase shift of 90°, front part of the disk up, rear down, aka "blowback") The transverse flow would push you to the right roughly during ETL speed when the front part of the rotor disk is exposed to "fresh" horizontal flow, while the rear part has not yet outrun the "dirty" air with the downward component. More lift in the front, manifesting 90° later on the left side of the rotor disk => right push (Not as pronounced in DCS in my opinion) Is the 20% pitch authority additionally related to the NOE mode? You might require more pitch authority when the horizontal stabilator kicks in and starts pushing the nose down? Just guessing at this point. Thanks for the information so far.

As I already mentioned in the related thread where this topic came up: Torque is not everything and not the only limiting factor. You cannot expect your helicopter to provide you 100% Tq in each and every condition. I reproduced your mission with the given parameters. What you see, when you check the ENG page is, that even in an IGE hover you have to pull into your 30 min TGT Limit. Rising your Tq above 87ish% will cause a Nr decay resulting in a loss of lift. So adding torque will not help you in these situations, it would rather exacerbate it. What seems to be wrong though is the MAX Q indication seen on the PERF page. By definition this value should represent: Displays the maximum torque available from the engines, based on air density and engine condition. The values in this status window are used to assess how much torque can be demanded from the engines without causing a decay in rotor RPM (NR); also known as “rotor droop”. This is definitely a bug, as MAX Q is displayed with 105ish% and the rotor decay occurs at roughly 87%. With that in mind, you just would not have enough grunt in your engines in order to maintain an OGE Hover. Nothing wrong with George in that case.

Dude, 50°C... I don't know the operational OAT limits for the Apache, but the helicopter types I flew (military and civil) were/are all limited to ISA +35°C. With ISA being 15 degrees at sea level, 50°C is an extreme stress for the aircraft and all its parts. You cannot expect being able to hover in such conditions. Have you looked into your engines page? What is the limiting factor? In hot/high conditions it is not necessarily your torque. Your engines might run out of power (T4/TOT or N1/Ng being the limiting factor) before your gearbox reaches its torque limit. Btw: Sorry, but I have not looked into your track file, as I won't have my PC available for the next couple of days.

I have it in my local (client) saved games/mods folder, but I did not put it in the mission. I also did not add it to the dedicated server, that is hosting the mission. It shouldn't have an impact I guess.

What I meant with that is it would be nice to know what the blue AI is up to. I usually get informed about the commanders intent IRL [emoji16]

Something similar happens when ordering CAP flights. It seems like you are only able to task CAP flights for the northern area. A couple of other observations from our recent play test: - The Russian speaking voices originate from blue KA50s as it seems. - StopGap: Still seems to be not working on my side. Planes keep populating airfields and after selecting an aircraft you instantly crash it. Rechecked, that I set the corresponding configStopGap property to "no". The odd thing is that players reported that it seemed to work at some point (empty airfields), then after one player disconnected, the airfields filled up again with static aircraft. Without a mission restart or anything. I'll check if I can find the log file. - There seems to be a neverending spawn of BTR convoys from the east trying to capture Wasp factory. Is this intentional? They line up on the street to the Wasp factory with a couple of kilometers in between them. Is there a possibility to destroy their home base or do we have to send CAS flights down that road frequently? - Is it intentional, that once you capture enemy airfields and farps, the former red units will spawn as blue ones? So suddenly you have blue SU33 from these airfields. - It would be really nice to know what objectives the AI is working on. Especially when they try to capture an enemy objective, you could plan your flights in order to support them. - Min Vody flipped sides to blue after killing all units there, without the need of bringing in a capturing squad. Is this intentional? Lots of "is this intentional" questions, I know. But I want to understand if the things I observed are rather bugs or features.

We tried your updated mission yesterday and had tons of fun. The stackoverflow crash didn't reappear. If you are interested in feedback, I have a couple of suggestions/fixes: 1. AI CAP: -F-15s blue are armed with 4 aim9 only. Is this international? This way they will die to nearly any potential threat. -F-18s Equipped with a Datalink pod. Not necessary for an A2A load out. I would rather give them a fuel tank on the center station. 2. StopGap It is a cool feature, but I would like to disable it on my end due to hardware limitations. I set the corresponding trigger zone to no (or false, can't remember) acc. to the manual, but they still spawned. There were also blue planes on red bases and spawning into an aircraft led to its destruction in the first place. Might be a screw up on my end though. I'll have to recheck. 3. I really like the Idea of sending two Cobras and a Chinook to capture objectives. The Cobras are definitely underperforming with their TOW missiles though. The enemy has Hellfire Cobras and I think I will adjust the blue ones to match their loadout or exchange them with something that actually can score a couple of kills. They also tend to fly constantly to the same occupied objectives and get ripped apart with the CH47 going in first. That is most probably just DCS AI logic that you can't change for now. Maybe there is the possibility to first send in the Cobras and only in the case that they successfully cleared the objective, the Chinook will follow with a couple of minutes delay in between. 4. Feature request/suggestion Add an additional SAM Upgrade for Nalchik with NASAMS for example. Im ok with it being more expensive and having to safe your credits for it, but the Rolands just die instantly to enemy SU34 KH31 spam. 5. Feature Request: Regular Blue ground assaults or capture convoy that you can support with Apaches or the A10. Either purchasable or spawned by the Commander. Way slower than the air assault, but more robust with tanks and SHORAD 6. Bug? Some radio contacts on the blue side seem to speak Russian for some reason. I'll try to figure out which one the next time I play it. 7. Idea: Maybe enable CSAR for red pilots? Rescuing them could reveal random enemy positions on the map with a map marker for example. Or alternatively all units at a random objective or the objective they took off from. Final words: I already love your mission the way it is. I can tweak some minor points on my side like the AI loadout, but I'll have to redo it with every patch, so it would be cool to see it in the mission by default some day. (unless the current loadout is intentionally chosen the way it is.) All the other points are definitely just a nice to have from my perspective, but your milage may vary.

Well I changed all the Apaches special multiplayer control priority options to "equally responsible" as I want to take over the controls from my pilot in case of emergency without him having to click on accept. But that should be irrelevant for this kind of error. Other than that no other modifications. I skimmed through the log file and saw that the spawned RPG soldier caused some issues. May be related or not. The log file seems to contain several errors not related to the mission (like the missing damage model for the UH1). If I can help you analyzing and testing this issue further, hit me up. I'll be glad to assist you.

Yes I did and the persistance works. I was able to load into the previous state after the first crash.

Hey cfrag. Had the chance to try your mission with a couple of friends on a dedicated server. Unfortunately we ran into an error (stackoverflow) twice in a row. Circumstances: I picked up an infantry group with my UH1 from Nalchik and deployed them to Wasp factory. It might have contributed to the error. (see log and screenshot) Greetings and thanks for providing this cool mission. Btw: I changed the AI loadouts a bit. The CAP F18 were equiped with a datalink pod instead of a fuel tank for example. dcs.log

Sorry Bradmick, but in this point I do not agree with you. The more horizontal flow will give you more lift with the same angle of incidence as your effective angle of attack is increased (due to less induced flow as you rightly said). What you basically achieve is that the vortices at the blade tips get smaller and thus more of the air that is moved is used to create lift instead of drag. The total ammount of drag and thus torque does not change significantly due to more horizontal flow (always assuming you keep your collective position constant all the time). The vert stab is definitely taking over a large portion of yaw stability at a certain speed unless the aircraft designers have screwed up. It is usually designed as an airfoil in order to create "sideways" lift additionally to the weather vane effect. As you certainly know lift increases quadratically with the increasing speed. Combine that with the rather large lever arm of your tail boom and there you go. If it would not be like that (the vert stab compensating the main rotor torque), the designers would have just created an additional parasite drag area. Flying SAS OFF you will also notice that you need significantly less left pedal going with 70 kts. Btw. That is exactly what you use in the EP for a Tail rotor drive failure or stuck pedals (at least in the 3 Helicopters I am rated in), that says you have to keep your airspeed above 70 kts and so on... It says that because you effectively barley need any tail rotor thrust above this speeds. Not having flown the Apache, the intricacies of this particular AC might be special here and there, but it should still kind of follow basic aerodynamic concepts and logic. Sure the Apache's vert stab is way smaller than the ones I am referring to... Please correct me if I made wrong assumptions regarding the AH64 in this context. Would be an interesting chat and discussion I guess. Having said all that the conventional tail rotor in general may require up to 15 % of your total torque. The Apache values of course may vary. The flight school I went through had at least one Overtorque incident where the pretty heavy AC climbed out of a confined area, the student pilot was not aware of the wind direction, had to add sudden left pedal input in order to maintain heading and exceeded the TQ limit. TLDR: Whatever the explanation for the "freed up power/torque" you are willing to accept, the effect is there and also works the other way around while getting slower. So be aware of the possible increased power requirements during the descend/landing.

Operating at MGW, you have to set yourself up for a rolling takeoff /level acceleration within ground effect in order to get above ETL. Once you have 30-40 kts, either aim for roughly 45-50kts which should be in the ball park for the best climb angle (steeper climb, but relatively slow) or around 65-70 kts for your best rate of climb (shallower climb, but will get you faster to the desired altitude) You can do all of it practically without touching the collective even once after setting the required power for the takeoff (i. e. Max continuous TQ of about 100%) until you reach your cruising altitude. You will observe, that your required total TQ will drop slightly above ETL as your vert. Stab is starting to work more and more efficiently, which reduces the power requirement for the tail rotor and thus reduces the total TQ, freeing up power that you could additionally use in your main rotor). Best practice for landing in these kind of situations is performing a rolling landing.

As propagation of sound is massively influenced by the general wind direction and speed, it can and will be used in order to mask your presence when possible. Additionally being in a dead hover over an hostile/unknown terrain is not necessarily the preferred option for this kind of situation. You would burn way more fuel, make more noise and make yourself an easy target. If you are cruising (flying a little pattern) at 45 kts or even better at 65 kts you might mitigate a lot of these problems.

Well the author... In post 28 and 30. Unless he changed his mind. Don't get me wrong. If he manages to become an official 3rd party developer would be an amazing addition and I would definitely buy the module. But developing a full fledged module is a completely different animal than developing a mod. Just getting all the licenses and documents from the manufacturer is a close to impossible task considering the fact that this helicopter is still in use by the Russians and they were extremely restrictive in the past in regards to releasing documents. There were a couple of projects that wanted to develop a full module and were halted in the process or being released as a mod instead (Tu 22/23 completely stopped, SU57 released as a great mod and maybe others I missed). Maybe I sound too pessimistic, but at this point I am just managing my expectations and eagerly waiting for everything that is to come. I would love to be surprised...

It is not about the cockpit, which is absolutely stunning in my opinion. As the OP already mentioned in this thread you will have to own at least the current Black Shark module. No mod can simply access the ED internal weapons SDK and create new stuff from scratch (as far as I am aware). So you will need to base this mod on a module that uses a similar weapon system. That would be the Black Shark.