Jenrick

If you YouTube some footage of the M3 mounted of various helo's it sounds reasonably accurate. It's got about an 1100 rpm cyclic rate, so it's quiet a bit different than the M2's we're used to hearing.

You can turn your NVG gain down significantly to where you can see the gunsight rather than a giant bloom of light. Also you can now shoot withouth the sight being flipped down, so you can just adjust by eye at night.

I'm more inclined to the idea that autohover with the new FM is going to take some new code. I imagine it will be back.

For me it's RShift+F10 to turn off labels in the Gaz rather then LShift+F10 like in everything else. For me it's RShift+F10 to turn off labels in the Gaz rather then LShift+F10 like in everything else.

Hmm, the KC-130J for me does a solid 139 knots. @YoYo you're getting 140 knots without redlining the engines?

Is it just me, or does the include KC-130J fly entirely too fast to be able to AAR? I can't seem to get the UH above 145 knots or so even with the collective to the stop.

Anyone have any luck getting the AH-6 to load in 2.8?

I haven't flown the Gaz in a while, IIRC rockets are zero'd for about 1km, and the cannon at 500m. Part of the issue is the DCS core not modeling frag or blast terribly well, which is primarly how rockets damage things. The effective zone of a DCS rocket impact for light vehicles and troops is pretty under modeled.

Anyone else having issues with the guns not firing in 2.8? The round counter counts down, but no rounds are fired, and no rounds are logged in DCS.

Range yes. Auto range, no unless you pull to the second detent and hold (ie believe, it's been a week or so since I flew the Apache and messed around in the CPG seat). If you have a target at A, and range with the first detent it will give you the range (say 2000m) and it will use that range regardless of if you fly towards the target, away, or ciricle it. If you hold the second detent down, it will continually adjust range regardless of opening or closing range and you will in general be much more on target.

I'm wondering if there is a scripting option to automate that upon mission start. I haven't had a chance to play with it, but seems like there should be a way to do that from the mission designer.

If you are in the CPG seat, you shouldn't be using auto range anyway except in a snap engagement where you don't have time to lase. The LRF is activated by the trigger on the right hand grip (I don't remember the name of the keybind off the top of my head), and there is a 1st detent for range only, and second detent for guidance for the hellfire (though it will generate a range just fine, so if you don't have a 2 stage trigger just bind the second stage only). Take that half second to lase before you fire and you'll be MUCH more accurate. It sounds like you are out of limits on the cannon, ie the elevation or azimuth is too large for the cannon to engage. That would explain the interment ability to shoot.

In FLT mode, long press up or down and it will change altitude up or down. You can hold it for large changes too.

Thats what I meant by recenter, I edited my post, I realized I had mistyped that.

Yep only thing that has caught me a few times is having to recenter and having no control authority until I did so. Just takes a little getting used to.

Rockets are area effect weapons to start with, not precision. Per FM 1-140 Helicopter Gunnery, 7.5.b "Crews can expect 7 to 12 mils of dispersion from rockets fired from helicopters." The gunnery table standard is 2 out of 6 rockets need to land in a 300mx400m area at <3000m. Per the manual, in combat the expectation was to fire 2 pair of rockets for sensing before firing for effect. We tend to use rockets as precision fire options, which they we never designed to be. With that said, I agree the I-beam seems like a less useful option than some sort of CCIP sight. However remember the Apache is a 2 person A/C in the real world. A COOP rocket engagement (George locking up a target for you), is as a simple as fly the I-beam onto the flight path line and if it's solid pull the trigger. A pilot initiated rocket attack you'd be shooting at targets you can see with the naked eye, like a building or a static terrain feature, so it wouldn't be near as hard to hold the IHADDS sight steady on target. From there simply fly the beam onto the reticle and fire. The articulating nature of the pods, allow you to maintain either a conventional hover, or diving attack from a much longer (ie safer) range.

Got it, thanks. I'll bide my time till it makes it to stable.

Umm when did we get NVG's in the Mirage? I'm on 2.5.5.33184 and not seeing any options/control bindings/etc regardings NVG's on the mirage. Is it an open beta thing?

One method I've used that's been reasonably successful for me on landing is to treat landing like a VERY low airshow pass. Is this realistic, probably not, but it works. I stabilize a meter or two off the ground, preferably right as I pass the runway threshold. Then I simply roll the throttle back, aiming to keep the nose level, or slightly (a degree or two) up. The mains will touch down, followed by the nose wheel, with little violence. Speed will still be high, but that's what the drag chute and brakes are for. This technique is not for short field landings, or for when you're coming in long. You will end up rolling out most of the runway.

Just in case anyone find this threads, here is what I found out. Currently there is no way to load a "dry" external tank. Most AC however will siphon the tank into the internals. For a mission I built with the F-5, you start with approximately 25% internal fuel. Over the course of the next 5 mins or so the externals are siphoned into the internals, filling them up. I'd recommend checking this occurs with the AC you have in mind for this. So if you don't need the player to roll into action the second the scenario starts, you can effectively cause the same results in a few minutes of flight time.

Yep they are the aperture setting. The lower the number the more light, the higher the number less light. No clue what film speed you'd run in a gun camera, but for most daylight work f/16 and forget about.

I have them on the keyboard, but I fly on a laptop without a HOSAT. Work just fine for me that way.

I find if you spend a lot of time over water, particularly moving fast, you'll be a bit off on your nav when you get back over land. Having a good radar fix or landmark for your nav fix on return is handy.

It's odd that the devs have conflicting default key binds. However doing something as simple as defining "M" as missile uncage, and assigning to via the Saitek utility will solve your problem while keeping all your binds in one place.

Radar bombing evolved over the years from WW2. It started out as a backup from when visual bombing wasn't an option, and you were aiming for factory complexes. Precision wasn't great, but it wasn't needed as much either. Then there was the transition to the bombing mission using weapons who's blast radius made a couple hundred meters of error a non-issue. After a period of time, it was realized that conventional bombing was still a thing, and needed to be much more precise than when using nukes. A cold war era bomber, usually used a combination of old school bombardier skills and knowledge combined with some high tech help. The F-4 for a lot of it's cold war career, used the radar for bombing as a real time moving map just like it was in WW2 and Korea. Use your altitude and air speed to figure out your release distance (or fly a planned delivery profile), find the target area based on the radar return, and using a combination of scope markings, calibrated eyeball, and maybe stopwatch, hit the pickle button. For dedicated bombers, radar bombing during that era, was based on using radar fixes to get a pretty good idea of where your own A/C was to be able to accurately figure your bombing solution. The radar was also used to figure out a best guess of where the target was. Dedicated bombers like the B-52 had a lot of automation and sophistication compared to lighter strike AC. With more sophisticated radar options and fixed targets, you'd fly your delivery profile, and use the radar to generate your position fixes to determine that when you're X degrees and NM away from point Y you drop. Even better was using 2 or three simultaneous nav fixes to be REALLY sure you were where you thought you were. We can all imagine what a target that's not where it's supposed to be does to this approach. A little later you could start to punch in where you where, and where you wanted to drop the bombs into the bombing computer and it would spit out a best guess bombing solution, that was then tweaked by the crew. Overall the radar basically served as a navigation instrument, and the bombing part was still on the crew to know when to pickle. The next big change was allowing the radar to talk to the INS to start automating a lot of the work of figuring out where your A/C was, and where the target was. Now we're moving into the A-6 and F-111. You would have specific radar offset points that you'd find and mark with the radar to update where it thought it was (does this start to sound familiar?), and you'd have a target area you're looking for that you'd mark the specific intended point of aim. The computer would do the work for you on calculating the bombing solution, now all you had to do was fly to the right point on the right flight path. Again radar resolution, cursor resolution, etc all contributed to inaccuracy, not even counting things like real bombs don't separate perfectly cleanly, aren't perfectly cylindrical, fins aren't mounted perfectly straight, wind gusts, etc. In the later days of the cold war radar bombing (in no vis conditions) by a dedicate strike AC, was in general about as accurate on a fixed target as visual level bombing was by the same AC. So 50-100m CEP was a good day. Later systems like the Angle Rate Bombing System, shrunk this figure down a lot for visual bombing, and improvements in radar imagery and automation kept pace on the radar bombing side as well. In the Viggen Nav mode bombing with an update to the target waypoint is closer to how most US radar bombing worked. The computer wants to know: where am I and where am I trying to drop bombs. Give it those to pieces and it works reasonably well. The RR mode is more like early Vietnam where the ground radar was used along with a stop watch, calibrated eyeball, and a chart to figure out when to drop. The RR mode automates a lot of the things the F-4 crew would be doing, but it's still going to have some fundamental inaccuracies, you just have to accept when you don't have anything better.