Mr_Blastman

I will try this and report back.

On release I could click on the MAN range button within WPN page and enter "A" into the keyboard and press ender and my IHAADS would switch from a range value of say 1.5 or 0.8 to A for Auto and it would adjust based on where I looked. This does not seem to work anymore. Inputting "A" does nothing and the fix value remains what the Apache calculates upon. Note: This is from the PILOT seat I am referring to.

The big box often does not appear for me when I have this issue and I am in pilot's seat. It is as if George isn't doing something right with his controls. I'll be within range, master arm on, trigger guard off--everything is correct, and he still won't fire, even when I am in stable, level flight, despite giving him consent over and over. Sometimes even cycling master arm on and off won't even fix this.

Yesterday I forced myself to attempt and succeed at a particularly difficult exercise that helped me learn how to take off, hover and fly way better than I could before: 1) Start from landing position in airbase, preferably a parking spot in a side lot. The Caucuses live fire range mission is a good one to try this with in instant action. 2) Increase collective to ~73% which should be enough to hover at 5 ft. From this point forward you are forbidden from touching your collective again until you land. The collective is now locked. You will not touch, no matter what. 3) Navigate apache out of parking area, take a left down taxi lane, left into next parking area, circle parked apache, then go back the way you came to your own area, circle within, then exit and do this several times. 4) After completing 3, leave parking area, float down taxi lane and pick up speed until you increase in altitude to approximately 400 ft. 5) Congratulations. You are at 400 ft AGL and now must figure out how to descend back to the ground safely without ever touching your collective -and- come to a stationary hover again -while- remaining within the constraints of the taxiway once you fly out over the field and turn around. Yes. This can be done. You can safely descend back to 5 ft AGL without touching the ground or crashing and not use collective. 6) Once you do this, float back down taxiway and do a few more in/outs into zones, then proceed to your starting spot and circle edges. 7) Land. You may now touch the collective again to set down. This entire exercise was extremely frustrating at times and I almost gave up repeatedly, yet I prevailed. So can anyone else. ****Note collective setting may vary depending on input device. The goal is to rise to 5 ft AGL and maintain stationary hover, so whatever collective setting needed on your rig to accomplish this is where you lock the device at for the duration of the exercise.

I think as George is refined and enhanced and gains the ability to actively seek and report threats the advantages of the dual-seat configuration in the Apache will become apparent. The KA-50 is airwolf to me but... my SA suffers immensely when I am fixating on the SHKVAL trying to find and engage targets. The extra eyes in the front seat frees me up in the back seat to pay better attention the environment and potential air threats or other situations that may arise.

Say you have George scan an area that is rich in threats--say 10 - 15+. This can take a while to cycle through using a hotas in order to pick what you want. Sometimes your priority target might be the last one in the list. When seconds count, this might mean the difference between you getting a shot off or not. Perhaps the listing algorithm needs to be refined as to reduce duplicates and relegate them to a sub menu. For example, George's first report might be as follows: AAA SAM TANK -------> Designate input pressed -------> New sub menu that lists all TANK/AAA/SAM/etc. you can select, or just shoot TANKs IVF MISC This could streamline things. Also, some clarity between AAA, SAM and Emitter would be useful. A single emitter might supply fire control for 5 - 10 launchers. If you destroy the emitter, problem solved, fly in and mop up with gun. Presently George does not discern clearly the difference between Emitter and Threat. I noticed in one instance yesterday he would say LR SAM and MR SAM. One would think LR SAM would be the emitter, but it wasn't, the MR SAM targets were. Lastly, his ability to perform IFF duty--discerning markings on vehicles as friend/foe would also be _very_ welcome. He's the front seater, after all.

The odd thing is I often prefer the satellite map for contrast reasons and being able to discern the text, yet I cannot zoom out beyond 25 before the satellite image disappears. In F 10 I can zoom all the way out and this is fine. Maybe a limitation of the real AH-64?

More evidence, have a nice day.

So a few times now I have crash landed and noticed the cockpit shaking violently except the chopper was not. It was sitting there, calmly while my pilots weren't. I now have video footage to show what was happening. In short, on the outside the helo is serene and docile, but as I press the 1 and 2 keys to switch position, their heads start shaking after I do, both internally and externally. Pay close attention:

For now I am such a bad pilot in the Apache I often over-torque the engine and cause the ENG page to pop up... all the time. This of course overrides my current selected page which is often a combo of ASE + TADS in the pilot seat at the worst possible time. Thus, I'm having to release controls such as the collective to grab my mouse and press buttons on the MFD to get my ASE back which... considering I'm using a modded HOTAS Cougar throttle... can cause it to fall to 0% thus making the situation worse because I'm not holding it for a few seconds. In short, is there or will there be a way to set priority pages so I can basically tell the flight computer "don't mess with my MFDs?" Thus, my ASE stays on screen at all times.

Interesting, but what about looking at the dot in #2 when they are not centered instead of making the cross centered with the round tube? i.e. cross centered on the central dot. My theory is there should be geometric computations built into the IHAADS software knowing that it is a collimated dot so they could determine your true head position from those calculations knowing you looked at the dot in the off center spot.

I cannot align my boresight while using track IR and have perfect circles without doing uncomfortable gymnastics. I literally have to become a contortionist.

My issue is if I press FMC release the only way to turn stuff back on is to go through a MFD and there's not a button to do the reverse.

HMD gunnery is a skill same as looking down iron sights and hitting targets at 50, 100 and 500 yards. Remember, bullets inherit angular velocity from their firing platform, too, so you have to adjust your lead to compensate. Also, setting your zero down from 1500 meters helps, too. Try 800 for starters and you'll find less round impacting far above where you're aiming at up close. Same as iron or holographic sights, when you set your zero you still have to compensate when you fire a rifle for the bullets arcing in flight. Think of this like setting a zero at 50 yards--at 100 yards you have to aim lower because the bullets are arcing higher once they pass this point, but somewhere between 200 and 250 yards they cross back to zero again and beyond that you have to aim higher than what you're trying to hit because of bullet drop. This article has some useful tables to illustrate my point: https://unclezo.com/2020/11/25/the-mythical-50-200-yard-zero/

Gymnastics such as this do not seem correct to me. I don't think that is how the system is intended to work. That means someone must move to an unnatural position and then what happens if they move back afterwards?

This seems to be a contested, confused subject. Per the quick start guide, Now, I have seen a few interpretations of this. Mostly though, including in videos, I see users insisting and illustrating one must do physical gymnastics in order to make a perfect bullseye and then and only then put the IHAADS crosshairs on the center dot... assuming you can keep the dot in the spot once the crosshairs reach this. To me, the concept of having to contort my back and move around in my seat seems silly and absurd. This can't be right, can it? My natural position for my head puts the dot off center, always, and most often towards the top of the boresight in Image #1: That is achieved with no gymnastics. I look down at the boresight using my track IR and that is where I must center. Certainly this disagrees with what I have seen, that "no, I am doing it wrong." If I twist in my seat, bend the back of my chair, cause strain on my own lower back and neck, and become a proverbial faux midget I can get it to look like this, but notice my crosshairs are below the boresight. If I tilt my head at that point... they go off center, but before tilting and much great discomfort in Image #2: In other words, I feel Image #1 should be acceptable and okay. I don't think one should have to do gymnastics in their cockpit to form a perfect bullseye, should they? After all, the boresight is a collimated sight, and thus the IHAADS boresighting system should have code that adapts based on looking at the dot from your "natural seated position" which includes that dot being off center like in Image #1. Thus, no gymnastics required, it should understand that if crosshairs are at top of ring then my natural head position is higher than if the dot were in the center, thus, if one were to do gymnastics to get the dot in the center then when you are done the alignment would be porked because you'd be returning your head to the natural spot. Am I making sense? I would like some clarification on this once and for all. I think everyone would benefit from this. Thanks.

I get this all the time, especially in LOAL LO/HI. He has never, ever fired once for me in LOAL. He won't do it. Only way I can get him to fire is in LOBL DIR, and I have noticed a few times he would say "firing" but not fire and I had to cycle master arm off and then on to get him to finally launch. That trick doesn't work with LOAL though.

This is amazing! Thank you! Idea: One thing I miss from "that other sim" is the ability to input threats into the aircraft such as SAMs and AAA--which say in the F-16 HSD would show threat circles. The Apache also has the ability to display threat circles--or will. Any plans on adding this addition feature to designate threats? BMS has a great way to manually define and input these and is an essential part of pre-flight on every sortie.

Apache was my first combat aircraft I ever learned how to fly all the way back in 1987 in the original Gunship, so no. I love the other helos in DCS. Especially the KA-50, which to me will forever be "Airwolf."

sweet!

Any plans on giving George the ability to freely search for targets like our gunner would in Gunship 2000, Longbow 2 or Gunship! ? This would be really nice for him to call out these targets/threats as he sees them without the pilot having to spot them, turn the Apache and then issue a search area command. In Gunship 2000 he would say stuff such as "target right" or "target left" etc. but nowadays I bet he could call them out by the o'clock position or bearing.

OKAY I deleted leopard-2a4.zip and the BTR82A.zip files from the main DCS install, ran the repair tool and it FINALLY detected them as a problem(because they were missing) and re-downloaded them. I then ran the updater again... and it finished unpacking. It is now copying files off the spoofed hard link platter drive to the SSD. The repair tool should have detected those two files as problematic before, saving me hours of frustration. edit: Updated successfully! I now have to re-download Syria What a mess this update has been. so cliffs notes: 1) hard link/junction link a directory on a platter drive to spoof the _downloads folder in main DCS install so downloads are tricked to downloading on separate hard drive where they will also unpack before copying to SSD. See above posts for details. https://mywindowshub.com/how-to-create-and-delete-a-junction-link-on-windows-10/ 2) spam the updater for a few hours until it downloads everything after crashing repeatedly 3) deleted the two files as mentioned earlier in this post, ran repair tool, re-downloaded, then updated again. These files may be different for other users. Check the log and find a pattern where it keeps failing while unpacking. Not sure why there isn't built-in redundancy here to try and re-download them when this sort of error occurs during install. ED: I saved the two broken files in case you need them...

Failed yet again on leopard-2a4.zip (cyclic redundancy check). I need a proper version of this file to try again and test. autoupdate_log.txt

Failed again, this time with the BTR82A.zip I have two files causing the problems. ED, can you supply me with fixed versions of these files? I open them manually in windows explorer and everything looks fine... autoupdate_log_old.txt

Made it to 90% on this attempt while unpacking... THEN FAILED leopard-2a4.zip: (1117) The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error. I'm willing to bet the problem with this update has to do with the FLIR textures. autoupdate_log.txt