Stingray

Doesn't the HUD also not show up until the INU is ready?

X52 pro, the added quality is worth it

The goal is to be able to fly whatever aircraft you are in (jet, prop, helo), most of the time, without having to have your hand on the stick, rudder or throttle, so called "hands-off" flying. Now, of course when you are doing some maneuvers, you will of course be required to have pressure on the stick. As an example: lets say you are flying the good ole' F-15C in LOMAC, you are playing a mission, and manage to kill 4 Su-27 on the 169th online hyperlobby server, but one of your engines is damaged and you have 50 miles to travel back to Sochi airbase nd you would like to land so you get all of your points (plus bragging rights for having killed online + landed). Now, you notice that in order to fly your ship straight, you have to have loads of left-rudder, some roll, and some back pressure on the stick to keep your nose up. Rather than constantly having to apply this pressure on all 3 surfaces, you can use the trim. So, you trim your plane using the roll, aileron, and rudder trim, so that your damaged aircraft flies perfectly straight with the required input, but you can have your hands fully off the stick and rudder pedals, much easier to fly. The amount of trim that must be applied changes with every little aspect of your planes flight: altitude, attitude, airspeed, drag, everytime one of those things changes, you will need to re-trim your aircraft to maintain hands-off flight. So, lower your speed, drop your gear, both your airspeed and drag have changed, your going to need to re-trim. Once you get into the habbit of trimming it is a very, very, very valuable tool (especially when combined with modifying your joysticks input curve, I explain this below). I even make a lot of use of using elevator trim in dog-fights. By keeping my stick near the center position, I and modifying the input curve, I am keeping my stick nearest where its movements are the "most accurate", and my aiming ability in IL-2 and LO are improved. For IL2, with the gryo of the rotating prop and asympetric prop wash trim is very, very, very important. Now, you can do the same thing with the helo in DCS:BS. For flying forward most of the time at any speed, you are going to have to have anywhere between 25 and 75% deflection on the forward cyclic and some right rudder. Rather than having to keep your hands in this posistion, you "trim" your stick, so that when the joystick is centered, i.e. you are not touching it at all, it retains that cyclic and rudder posistion. One very, very handy thing that is done, is to adjust your joystick "input curve" settings, so that the sticks movement near its center posistion is damped, i.e., it takes more stick movement to do the control input, this makes your stick movements more accurate. By keeping your joystick in the center position, you can maintain a much more sensitive stick input. As your stick deflects away from center, the movement is "accelerated" until the full throw of the stick is enabled, this allows more rapid movements, but can be less accurate. This way, when you are flying the DCS:BS and say you need to do a little correction, your stick is in the center position and you can apply a tiny correction, where your joysticks movement is more sensitive, rather than having your stick at a very large throw, where movements can be very coarse and not very "fine", then, you simply re-trim, move your stick back to center, and keep flying. Trim often. I trim every few seconds now. When I first started, I was fighting the trim, not trimming very much. Once I started trimming, the movement of the helo was very "smooth", I wasn't oscillating, bouncing, jawying around wildly and I was no longer fighting to fly the bird, it feels like I can place it wherever I want it now. Trim is your friend, use it lots. Stingray

Unless you want to critique my remarkable ability to consistently crash this bird or make the blades intersect, I won't submit any tracks just yet :) I will keep an eye out, hopefully someone puts a little demo up. Can you see the "stick" input, i.e. the cntrl+enter screen when you view a track? That would be a very good learning tool, to see what the cyclic, rudder and collective inputs are for the maneuvers, Stingray

Yo, I am in the same boat. No problem flying FSX, LOMAC, or IL-2 on full realism, but was sure having a hard time flying the Ka-50 in this sim. I took about a month off in frustration, but just came back to it yesterday. Now that I have the AP modes off when I am trying to do a free-flight, and got it in my mind to trim every 5 seconds, I am now also flying fairly proficiently (and landing too!) Now on to the avionics, weapons and campaign for me! Stingray

I would love to see a document or site outlining some of these "maneuvers", maybe with some tracks, be a great resource for becoming better pilot Stingray

Wow. After reading how important trimming was, I was still refusing to do it, like, I would trim, but only every now and again. After taking a break from DCS:BS over the holidays, reading the manual a bit and reading the forums, I went and played for an hour yesterday and simply had a great break through. I turned all the AP modes off and no flight director, and finally got it in my mind to trim all the time, and guess what! I could actually fly the helo, control it, and put it where I want to without it shacking. I finally felt like I wasn't "fighting" the chopper. Stingray

That's an awesome site design!! Stingray

wow, this thread had a huge impact on my flying ability in the game, even after only playing for 30 minutes today after reading this thread. Thanks everyone Stingray

It's 2009. Using your credit card online is secure. There are a bazillion credit card transactions online everyday. There is more risk of getting your credit card number stolen by someone rooting through your trash, or using your card at a shady store/gas station somewhere in the middle of nowhere. If you have ever given your credit card number over the phone, there is someone on the other end of the phone typing your credit card number into a website where it sits on a server exactly like using the internet, infact, it is less secure because of the middle-man typing in your card number. By federal law you are only liable to a maximum of $50 of fraudulent purchases. The download is 2.8 gigs in two files, you can burn these files to disk and install as many times as you want. See the answer to #3 for a discussion on the activation issues. You have 8 "activations". You can "deactivate" an installation and re-install without using an activation up. The caveat is that if you uninstall without deactivating it you use up that activation. There is no warning when you uninstall saying "you should de-activate", you have to remember and do it yourself prior to uninstalling. When you activate your computer Star Force generates a unique "hard ware identifier" number based on the make up of your computer (MOBO, CPU, GPU, etc). If your hardware changes significantly it will use another activation. However, I think that if you were to upgrade your computer by first deactivating, uninstalling DCS:BS, then upgrading your computer, and then re-installed, then it would not use up an activation. If your computer crashes and you have to replace hardware then it is likely it would use up an activaiton. I am no pro with Star Force so I could be wrong on some of these details, but that is my understanding. You login to the DCS website and you can download the files as many times as you need. You will get a serial number when you download the files. I would save the serial in safe place (I gmailed it to myself). If you want to play it, I wouldn't wait. I don't foresee a significant difference between the hard copy and the download version. Maybe there will be some differences in the activation/star force protection, I can only speculate as I don't know anything about the DVD version. With the deactivation ability with star force you can really stretch that 8 activations a long way. If you speculate that you will deactivate every time you uninstal the game, then that theoretically gives you 7 critical hardware failures requiring major parts replacements. That's quite a few, but who knows. Will the DVD version have a limitation on the number of activations? I'd like to know the answer to that question Stingray edit: Ahhh, I didn't see your post saying you bought the game. Too bad you are having problems, I bought both Russian and English versions via download, had zero problems. I will leave this long post because it took a while to type it out :)

Yo, I am a n00b as well, would be great to try some multiplayer. I am in the pacific time, but will probably be available tomorrow and Sunday for some BS. You can email/msn me at RCAF.Stingray@gmail.com. Be great if you could get a more experienced player involved as well to teach us green horns a few things (hint, hint), Stingray

Yo, seems like a pretty reasonable choice for a combat attack helicopter, as most of the alternatives have two pilots.. that would make some trouble in deciding how to model the controls realistically, Stingray

Thanks for the link, going to try out these proper turns, Stingray

Yo, I was going to post exactly the same question! When I try to turn, I bank into the turn, use the rudder, and pull back on the collective, but eventually the turn rate seems to stop, and the pulling back on the collective seems to bring the speed down a fair bit. So I too was just wondering how best to turn the bird. Also interested in doing other maneuvers like defensive jinks, stall turns, etc. The manual is great if you want 150 pages on ABRIS functionality, or EKRAN codes, but there is no information at all on actually how to fly a helicopter, basic flight maneuvers or things like that. Thanks, Stingray

Thats good, because there is nothing, and I do mean absolutely nothing, realistic in the haphazard, suicidal and mostly incompetent way in which I try to fly this bird. It doesn't help that the "8 hours bottle-to-throttle" rule isn't enforced (or recommended) when I get behind the controls :) Stingray

Yo, if it takes 3 minutes to warm up the INU, what is the earliest stage that you can start it up in the startup procedure? I am working on getting my full start procedure down as fast as possible, so would it be possible to start it right away, as soon as the batteries are on? Stingray

I remember reading somewhere that the hardcopy manual ED is releasing will have more info/detail than the current downloadable manual, is this true? Also, does anyone know an ETA for the ED-released hardcopy manual? Thanks, Stingray

OMG!!! Wow, that blows my mind... absolutely blows it, wow. Thanks for the link.

Can anyone perform moves like these in the sim? I sure can't http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DGiQYLvvMQ always seem to have the helicopter disintegrate in mid air Stingray

Howdy, I have an X-52 pro under Windows XP 32. I was having a little bit of trouble with my controller in DCS black shark, the MFD only displayed "Saitek Rullez!!" or something like that, and it seemed that the keys had a hard time "repeating", for example, mapping the ,./; keys to skew the Shkval didn't seem to work (I mapped them in the Saitek SST Programming Software). I searched for that string, and removed the code from a .lua file where it seemed to just print that message on the MFD. The MFD displayed properly, but still, the joystick didn't seem to response properly to the commands I had programmed with the SST software. I went in and un-mapped all the X-52 controls from the collective and cyclict control options in the input options, but still, it didn't seem that the X-52 was responding the inputs like it should. I now just program the X-52 directly in game rather than using the SST software, and thus not making use of Modes, which is unfortunate. Anyone else having a similar experience with the X-52pro? Stingray

Disabling it fixed the font problem

Yo, I tried to get IL-2:1946 running on a macbook pro running boot camp. It was so unstable that I eventually gave up all together. For a while it did appear to be running smoothly, but I never really got a chance to really try it out. Somewhere between TrackIR, X-52 pro drivers and running an external monitor, bootcamp became very, very unstable and was never able to recover, even just to run excel or to surf the net it would crash. So, I gave up and haven't been back. Maybe not the advice you were looking for, but that is my experience with gaming on macs with boot camp.... Stingray

ha, I think the game is awesome so far as well, and I haven't fired a round yet, or even set the arm switch to "on". Been wasting a lot of tax payer rubles digging holes in the Earth with helicopters however. Great game and achievement, a step forward in flight simulators. Stingray ps. However, I can't say for certain Black Shark is the "most" fun I have had with flight simulators: I sure had a blast with Chuck Yeager's air combat when I was 10 :)

Thanks! The alternate pixel setting fixed it, Now to crash the helicopter, er, I mean try to fly it. Stingray

Hello everyone Just installed Black Shark, and have changed the HUD language to English. When I hover the mouse over something in the cockpit, the font on the tool tip that pops up is extremely hard to read for me. I've also noticed that the fonts on the "Press Pause/Break to Start" dialog box when the mission launches is also kind of blurry. The fonts that are displayed in the game menu (Campaign, Mission Editor, etc) appear to be fine. Anyone know what it could be? I am running: E8400 CPU, ATI 4870 GPU, 4gb memory, Track IR 4 pro. All graphics settings at around Medium, 1920x1200 resolution. In my ATI Catalyst settings: - Mip Map set to "Quality" (This setting really helped make the HUD gauges easier to read) - 4xAA - 16xAF Here are some screenshots Thanks! Stingray