Zorrin

That's me :)

It all boils down to what you are going to use the Mac for. I grew up on PeeCees but have been using Macs for the last few years. While yes you pay a premium for the "if it's made by Apple and it's shiny" aspect, it does just work. I'm currently using a MacBook Pro 2.2GHz 15". I've upgraded the Hard Drive and also upgraded it to 4gb of RAM. Although if you replace the hard drive on the MBP you void the warranty. If you are you doing heavy graphical work or design work then the Mac is the best bet, plus the general lack of viruses for them makes things nice too. There are now so many little features in OS X that I take for granted that I can't do in Windows. The only downside to a Mac is that you can't really use it for games, but then you can bootcamp which solves that problem. Windows seems to run better on my Mac than it does on any PC I've ever used. I also use an iMac which is great because it's all inside the display it's easy to move and is hasslefree compared to a tower. The main reason for my Mac use is however because of Adobe CS3 et al. As a student you can get a discount on anything from Apple if you check out their Education store. Also applies to software, I got my CS3 for less than £300 through there, as opposed to the £1,800 retail price! The other thing that makes me like my Mac is that on the lappie, if the light level changes the screen will automatically adjust the brightness and if it drops too much, well the built in keyboard lights up too. Magentic power supply, brilliant clarity on the screen etc etc. But, it's not worth the price if you are just going to do e-mail and internet. You'd be better of buying one of the cheap notebooks from the nearest supermarket. Bootcamping is easy, as long as you back up your disk first!

....\Eagle Dynamics\Ka-50\Bazar\World\Shapes That's where the LOM files are, but make sure you create a backup before you tinker with anything in there, else you may find yourself having to reinstall... Simply copy and paste the one you want to use, for example AH-64A, and rename it to the relevant KA-50. There are however, 14 LOM files associated with the AH-64A so you will have to do some trial and error to see which ones you need to save (probably all of them...) At least, in theory...

I love the Flight Director and 99% of the time I'll use that, but with the AP stabilisation channels on (excluding Alt). Otherwise the workload becomes far too high in a combat environment when you are single pilot. Sure, if it's a nice cool day where I have oodles of power to spare and there is zero chance of something dangerous then yeah why not.

Does it matter what they are from? I probably have some shot from a Cessna 172 into grass strips? In the meantime, I dug around and found a few aerial shots over Southern and Southeastern England. Sorry for some of the poor-resolutions if they're helpful I can dig out the higher res ones or grab more next time I fly.

I'm running DCS:BS on may MacBook Pro using Bootcamp and Win 7RCx32 without a hitch. However, I've yet to get DCS Max to work it won't change the affinity nor can I set the affinity manually. DCS Max also cannot launch DCS multiplayer gives me some crap about not finding the .exe or having permissions. Other than that I've had no issues, but this is with a Nvidia card. I have however been plagued with problems on the PeeCee using an ATI HD3870 card and Vista. The last set of drivers that I could run BS with under Vista was 8.12. If you can, see if you can get a set of those and see if that works for you? I also found that I needed to make sure full screen was enabled for BS to run properly in Win 7. I normally plug the laptop into the TV and run at max resolution, but multiplayer games would only load and work correctly if full screen was set in the GUI config menus first. Failing that, try running BS at the same res as your desktop (if you haven't already) and double check all your drivers... I'm only running one user for Win 7 but do have the Single Player .exe set to run as admin.

Which is exactly why I don't fly it at night! Why would you man? You're on your own you don't stand a chance! :)

In that case use the Flight Director. It will give you the dampening without the heading hold. (The fifth blue autopilot button)

Every self respecting pilot needs sheepskin seats! Make your stand and show Boris that you won't settle for this hard solid crappy ejection seat discomfort!

How heavy are you? I tend to try and keep 130km/h, if possible, IAS as that's your optimum climb speed, and according to the manual you can pull as much collective as required to maintain no less than 86% Rotor RPM - which I assume means regardless of power limit lights. Moreoever the manual's stated "service limitations" suggests 90 minutes of OEI (ie running the remaning engine at maxmium power). Personally when I lose an engine I will pull as much power as I need out of the remaining engine to get me out of trouble, if that one quits on me too then I guess I was having a really bad day...

But, you don't need a large explosive to bring down an airliner. Especially if the bomb is at the front of the aircraft there wouldn't be anything to suggest such at the tail. But, it's all speculation until more wreckage is found.

I don't follow you Joey? I've not remapped any key commands from default. I don't use TrackIR and use the mouse to click things in the cockpit rather than remember a million and one key combos. But that's exactly what I'm getting PanzerTard. The LAlt+C seems to clear it too. Guess it's just another manifestation of a known bug then?

Well I currently have two computers that I use for Blackshark and the problem happens on them both - regardless of what joystick I'm using. Computer 1: PC running Vista Home Premium 32-bit Some Intel dual core E??? 2.0 (running at 2.0Ghz) ATI Radeon HD4850 512mb 2gb Ram Peripherals: Cougar/Saitek Pedals/MS Sidewinder 2/MS wireless keyboard & mouse Second computer: Apple MacBook Pro using BootCamped Windows 7 RC Build 7100 Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 @ 2.2Ghz 4Gb RAM Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT (128mb) 320gb WD Scorpio HD Apple wired USB Alumnimum Keyboard, Apple wired Mighty Mouse and MS Sidewinder. The mouse and joystick connect to the keyboard's USB ports. Given that I'm currently using the MBP installation the most there shouldn't be any sticking keys as I am using the mouse to click. The only issue I could think that might affect it is that I have mapped the right apple/windows key as my PTT. However, on the pure PC I have soundcard issues so cannot get microphone inputs to work. So that installation doesn't have a conflict with TS or anything as I used the MacBook for TS. PC is using Russian Download MBP is using Russian DVD

Now is this the aforementioned bug or is it something I am doing? At random points in time during a mission my mouse will automatically switch to mouselook and the only way to clear it is to switch to an external view. However, it seems that on servers with no externals the problem becomes amplified and occurs more frequently, in this instance the only way to clear this is to switch to F10 map view, if it's allowed. This happens in both SP and MP. Is there something I can change in the LUAs to stop this from happening or do I need to wait for the patch?

While a possibility I'm not sure it can be put down to fatigue. Aircraft certification, and certainly for large airliners, is incredibly stringent. More to the point, surely the aircraft in question is too young to have really suffered from fatigue? It's more likely that it was a bomb. There was a British Airways flight about 40 minutes ahead of the AF aircraft flying the same route. They'd said that the while the weather was bad it was not in anyway near bad enough to bring down an airliner. Of course it's all speculation until more of the aircraft and the black box can be found.

More importantly when can I come to Norway and try it out :thumbup::D

Thanks Yo-Yo. Panzertard: I think you're getting confused. An Out of Ground Effect hover at 4,000m would represent a hover at an altitude (i.e. above mean sea level) of 4,000m. So this ceiling represents the highest altitude that the Ka-50 can hover while being outside of the effects of ground effect. In Ground Effect hover ceilings are generally higher. The reason being that you may well be at an altitude (i.e. above mean sea level) of 4,500m but your height (i.e. above ground level) could be 2m - or close enough to the ground for the helicopter to be in ground effect where it can still maintain a hover relative to the reduced density of the air because of your overall altitude. Whereas without the aided benefit of ground effect helping to increase the lift/decrease the power required to maintain a hover the craft runs out of available power at 4,000m. And yes potentially if you are operating in mountainous regions and mountain FARPS, like those modelled in Black Shark, then an AGL height of 0m can be some 3,000m ASL. So for example if you are at an altitude of 4,500m you could expect to be able to hover while maintaing a height low enough for ground effect, but you would not expect to be able to do hover outside of ground effect. So, basically Panzer the way to think of it is that ground effect is affected only by height above ground level and is irrelevant to your altitude above mean sea level (within reason!).

I am using Win 7 32-bit on Bootcamp and found that DCSMax while it would run, I couldn't get it to work properly. It would pop up and give you the overlay message about affinity, but it would keep blinking so I just switched it off. Haven't yet manually managed to set the affinity because Windows says I'm not allowed!?! DCSMax was probably a case of needing to be run in Administrator mode to solve that I guess?

Not at all HellToupee, because AGL/ASL has no bearing on a helicopter's ability to hover. It's usually limited by the air density and any references to hover ceilings would be measured ASL. Thanks Alpha, at least that settles that then! Mastiff: I like Black Sharking :D Makes big boom boom!

I see your point wickedpenguin, but - a helicopter still has separate IGE/OGE hover ceilings, I just wanted to know what the IGE or OGE is compared to the stated 4,000m. At a guess, given that the service ceiling as stated in the manual is 5,000m that the 4,000m is an IGE ceiling. If that's the case, what's the OGE ceiling? For example the Bell 429 has: HIGE (ISA) 12,000 ft 3,658 M HOGE (ISA) 11,000 ft 2,835 M (data from: http://www.bellhelicopter.com/en/aircraft/commercial/bell429_prodSpecs.cfm, where ISA represents International Standard Atmosphere - or +15 degrees C surface temperature and a surface pressure of 1013mb) But with the 429 figures you have to accept that it is still in flight testing so those numbers may be subject to change. However, the fact that there are separate HIGE/HOGEs doesn't.

The manual states that the Ka-50's hover ceiling is 4,000m which is fair enough. But it doesn't differentiate between In Ground Effect or Out of Ground Effect. Nor does it give you more exact figures for OEI performance... Has anyone found this in the manual or can someone from ED shed some light on this? Thanks!

Tune in an NDB using the whatever it is on the left with rotary dials and then flip your audio switches to ADF. If you are in range you will hear the NDB's morse code identifier. This tells you that the radio navigation aid is working correctly and that you can use it for navigation purposes.

It's typically used to identify radio navigation aids, such as NDBs or VORs etc etc. Of course if you use the ABRIS you can just rely on that, but you are "supposed" to identify any radio aids you are using if you are using their radio frequencies. Thanks EB, I didn't really fancy digging out my morsecode alphabet...

Sawamura: Shouldn't that be GMT +2 because Europe's on Daylight Savings? Looks interesting though!