btaft

Maybe landing and taxi-ing to the target is and option.....lol

Actually, this tactic was used by Ed Macy's group in the Apache book.....of course they had complete air superiority and the threat of SAMS was extremely low

The easiest way I have found is to do the following -Ingress with route following and turn to target on -Use helmet mounted sight to pickout target (get it roughly where your target is)....this also has the effect of turning you towards the target -Fine tune the Shval over the target and lock use the cursor keys -Engage when in range -After target is destroyed use HMS to turn towards next target or egress -To egress (or take evasive maneuvers) turn off route following and fly the helicopter. I find I don't have to touch the flight controls at all (except a little rudder to get the vikhr lined up for the shot sometimes) except for evasive maneuvers. I use this approach for ATGM, guns and rockets. If you find your self getting too close then peel off and set up another run

I just ordered mine the other day and expect to get in the middle of next week. I am not sure if this has been asked, but would it be possible to get a PDF version of the manual if we can show proof of purchasing the hard copy. I actually prefer to use a PDF in many instances. Thanks, BT

Martillo, THis is actually the way I fly around as well. I am probably not as good a pilot as some of the others and I don't do the on-line thing, but the AP definitely frees up quite a bit to do some fighting. The main difference is that I rarely use auto hover except when landing at a FARP. I usually find myself on the move....not as easy of a target (that and I am not great at trimming to a hover state). Sometimes I will use auto hover if I need to regroup and am hiding behind a ridge. I just recently ready Apache by Ed Macys and from what I can tell in the book, they spent very little time in a hover.

I fretted with this a bit too, what worked best for me was just switching to Vista and being able to use DCS Max and the affinity tool. It has really made a world of difference...absolutley no stuttering on my end. My system specs are not as good as yours but then I am using a smaller monitor as well (23"). Might be worth switching to Vista and you may even get better results

The things I liked about the book were the technical/operational discussions....in particular when things would get to the tactical level and the author would discuss how the helicopters to would interact/support one another and interact with the ground troops. Also talking about physically piloting (i.e. what he was doing....pushing the cyclic forwards...etc) the helicopter were good and helped immerse you into the cockpit. Then the story itself in reference to the rescue effort at Jugroom Fort. His explanation on how the apache pilots make a rocket run actually helped me be better at making them myself.

I have always pretty much avoided using rockets when piloting the BS (and most other sims for that matter). The main reason is that I am not very good with them.....I lay down a lot of fire power but get very little return. I recently read the Apache book by Ed Macys and decided to put that method to use.....basically finding the target with the optical senser then piloting the piper to overlay the optical designation. I just finished trying that and managed several hits and stil lhad plenty of rockets left over. I still prefer the cannon and vikhr but at least I know I can do some damage when I run out of those options. Now if I could just have that off-aspect cannon and the co-pilot to pick the target sout for me.

Everything I saw about it looks like the additional content really adds to the experience by focusing more on the practicalities of flying and fighting the black shark and not just the full capabilities (i.e. it can really help a newby find the information they need to get started). I would actually prefer a downloadable pdf that I would be willing to pay a small fee for.

I might be missing something here but are you being complimentary as in this is how most people do it or sarcastic. I am really looking for some advice from those more experienced. I actually don't find myself using the abris very much aside from a visual cue and since it is not linked to the INS it does not have any affect on the AP. Most of the 170 pages had to do with advanced options within the abris and I found it to not be very practical to use in a standard mission. If I missing something then I would like some advice on how a typically expert would use the abris on a routine basis, not necessarily what its complete capability is. Any help is appreciated

I was just curious as to what methods people use to navigate in blackshark. In general I find myself flying with "turn to target engaged" and then flying in autopilot until entering a target area. After that I will use the helmet mounted sight and and "target" the area I would like to fly to or to engage targets (i.e. flying to where I am looking) sometimes assisting the AP controls. I typically stay like this until I need to make evasive maneuvers and then I will disenage the AP and evade. Once under cover again I re-enage AP and fly by HMS again planning a path from a different direction. Just looking to see what others were doing. I should note that I consider myself an average to below average pilot but I use the advanced flight model and avionics (the easy flight model is too arcadish)

Maybe I missed it in a post above, but you also need to make sure that the target is in the small recticle of the Vikhr viewing cone.

I understand that people in the US have started to recieve their printed manuals yet gogamer and amazon still show it as out of stock. Is there going to be a second printing or is the PDF (with the expanded material) going to be released......please excuse me if the web site already has the updated manual. I would probably be fine with just the pdf version but I am very interested in reading the expanded material

I'm not worried about having the capability of hitting trees, there are plenty of other things out there I can hit :)

Thanks Darklighter. I think I might start with the extra ram (since that woul dhave been part of the plan for going 64 bit), it is very cheap right now. I orginally bought 800 MHz DDR2 I might go for the 1333 MHz and get 4GB of that and just swap it out completely. I wasn't aware of the application RAM limitation that you mentioned

Well overclocking didn't seem to work too well for me, had some major crashes (I guess it is something I am just not good at.....I have an nvidia based MB which was supposed to make it easy....lol). I am leaning more towards changing operating systems. I know there are drivers for my MB and video card. a couple questions i have 1) Is there any difficulty getting Track IR4 to work with win7 2) Is there any problem with getting a TM cougar working as well. 3) Same thing for DCS max and the affinity tool. Any exerience is appreciated

Thank you everyone for your input. I think I am going to first try to overclock (I was wrong about my processor, I actually have a 6750) A quick question to Lobisomem, is Vista 64 necessary or would the 32 bit version give similar results. The RAM is super cheap now. The same set I bought over a year ago for $99 is now only $39.

Hello, I have Core 2 Duo 6850 (2.66 GHz) system with 2 GB of Ram and a 8800 GT - 512 MB video card currently running XP. Could someone please give me some idea as to what sort of improvement (in Blackshark) I could expect by switching to vista and using the affinity tool. I run the sim at 1680x1050 at med-high details with decent smoothness though I do get some stuttering during rapid heading changes. Any insight is appreciated. Thanks, Brett

Hi, I am running an earlier version of the lockon (i.e. not flamming cliffs). Actually it is the one that was packaged with IL-2 and Pacific Fighters a couple years ago (lol). I have a TM Cougar set up in DirectX mode and have been trying to program the buttons. I seemed to remember from Flanker 2 that you could have the buttons do a different function depending upon which mode the plane was in (i..e Nav, A-G, CRC..etc). It was my understanding that I could program Button 3 to toggle the gear in Nav mode and toggle the cannon in A-G mode all in the games interface. I have not been able to get this to work. Perhaps I am just doing it wrong or perhaps I need a patch or perhaps I am just mistaken. If someone could let me know I would appreciate it. Also I am thinking about purchasing flamming cliffs. Is this compatible with the version of lockon that came bundled with IL-2 and Pacific fighters. Thanks