Waldo_II

ED is taking a gamble with TBS. They can sell it commercially and make a little dough from the small core of flight sim enthusiasts, or they can score a major military contract and roll around in vats of cash. Vats. Of. Cash. Giant, towering, deep vats of paper money. Diving board on the end, scuba gear at the ready. Imagine.

If transport and attack helicopters were to merge, the successor to the Mi-24 certainly wouldn't be the Mi-28. This is a situation where having two separate, but extremely effective machines is better than having two identical-but-mediocre ones. For most missions involving troop transport, an attack helicopter isn't needed. These are typically just insertions and extractions that are miles away from any action. For insertions/extractions that are hot, the side-mounted .50/GPMGs serve very well. Sure, you could go the Mi-24 route and give the helicopter full attack capability, but you would limit its range, and increase detectability (Size of course, but then larger engines are needed to carry the extra weight meaning less fuel efficiency, larger heat and radar signature, noise, you know). Pricing is also an issue. The radar and sensor equipment onboard a modern attack helicopter is very expensive because of its complexity. Militaries can't afford to spend that much on every single transport helicopter nowadays. The Mi-24 got away with it, but keep in mind the relative simplicity. There is a far greater demand for transport helicopters than for attack helicopters, and having one expensive, small, quick attack heli for every ten larger, slower, transport helis is much more efficient. I'm not hatin' on the Mi-24. I don't know a whole lot about it, and feel free to call me out on anything I say if you know confidently otherwise. The Mi-24 pulled off the combo very well, but it doesn't apply anymore these days. Modern equipment is much more expensive and elaborate even if you include inflation.

Ahh, my teachings put to use. Niiiice. You just made my night, man.

If you want to do small, impromptu videos, X-Fire works very nicely. If you're unfamiliar, X-Fire started out as an in-game instant-messaging program, but has expanded out to taking screenshots, doing voice-chat/conferencing, taking videos (also converts them and puts them online), doing live video broadcasts, and even has a in-game web browser. It basically does everything Steam does, but more, and with almost every game. Anyways, that is what I use a lot. All of my gaming friends use it, and if I see some business about to go down, I use a hotkey to turn on the video recorder. If you're going to start up DCS for the sole purpose of recording video, Fraps is best for you, but I like plugging X-Fire wherever I go. Fraps will use less of your CPU and requires a million times less setup than X-Fire. If you have seen my super-casual tutorials, X-Fire is what I used. Basically I was flying around one day and thought "I could teach people how to do this" and I started recording. Mega-easy.

As I understand it, yes, if you had the enemy's key. Communication is all encrypted, so you would have to have their "password" to be able to communicate that you're friendly.

I believe that the reason why landing was so easy/smooth at that altitude was because of the rotor-in-ground effect. In the video I entered a state very close to a hover right before touchdown.

I tried going for highest altitude just now. Starting from a ramp start, full realism, I made it to 6,517 meters before something happened and I started falling. Rotor collision I guess. I managed to take this screenshot before DCS crashed (the program, not the helicopter). I kept fuel at a minimum and tried to keep my airspeed as close to 130 as I could. Here I am flying just seconds before collision. I had a max IAS warning going on, and a rotor RPM warning (which I turned off). There was no wind on, I wonder why the groundspeed was 30kph greater than my airspeed. PhoenixBvo, I accepted your challenge and had no problems.

Real pilots did help in making the sim. Look in the credits at the bottom of the manual. Most have the title of "Sniper Pilot," which I hear is a very high rank in the Russian military. I don't know about on the forums.

Veers,

What do you mean you can't pan around? Do you mean you can't move the game camera left/right, up/down, in and out? Is it stuck looking straight forward?

Open up a new mission, place a Ka-50 near an airport, set the waypoint mode to "Take off from ramp" (the default is "Turning point" or something), and be sure to set the pilot difficulty to "player." Realistic/arcade mode is controlled in global options, as usual.

Do you mean my tutorial?

Definitely a good idea to use the most of your three modes, just like Ikefin has described. As for individual buttons, the best answer is your answer, not mine, not anybody else's. If you use somebody else's controls, then you have to learn those controls and conform to the way that they think and fly. The best way is to grind through all of the controls function-by-function. In the end, you will know all of them and they will all intuitively feel "right" to you. Some suggestions: - First stage of your trigger is cannon, second stage is rockets/bombs/gunpods/etc. - The covered "fire" button is for ejection (using it as release weapons I found to be not worth the effort, and you still get the epic feeling of flipping the switch and committing) - I have used the lefthand thumb slider and rotation-thing for zoom in the past. Slider worked best for me. - The black button that your thumb kind of rests on is my trim button. - In combat mode the lefthand index-finger HAT switch is for Shkval optical zoom, in general flight it controls various lights inside and outside. - I use one HAT switch for weapons selection. The smaller one on the joystick worked best for me. Down is for guns, Left is for inner weapons, right is for outer weapons, up is for HMS If a function doesn't feel right to you, don't use it. Place it exactly where you think it should be. If one of mine makes sense for you, great, but if it doesn't, the last thing you should do is use it.

Methinks you should change your avatar to something like this.

Oh man, I KNOW, right? I understood everything there ever was to know about the autopilot before I knew of the route mode toggle button. That was the last thing I learned and it took me FOREVER. That is why I stressed it so in my autopilot tutorial.

Answer: Glorious. Seriously though, DCS:BS, like (almost) every other game thesedays, has widescreen settings. It will increase the FOV horizontally so you see more than you normally would. No black bars. No cons when you go widescreen. You never go back.

You definitely should see a performance increase. For one, all of the CPUs in the GeForce 9 series use a more recent 55nm process, so an increase in performance is inherent. Second, nVidia's x800 cards are their official "high performance" cards, whereas x600 cards are considered medium range (x500 and lower are budget/typical laptop cards). If you want to take a look at some charts, Tom's Hardware usually is up to date. According to the 3DMark score I linked you to, the 9800 you plan to purchase will be at least twice as powerful as the 8600 you have now. It will be better than what is listed, mind you, because the card you saw had 1024MB of GDDR, whereas the one Tom's reviewed had 512BM of GDDR. However, the limiting factor in your build probably isn't the graphics card. An upgrade will certainly help, but not so much in DCS: Black Shark. In most games it will help considerably, but a CPU upgrade should be higher priority, in my opinion, in DCS especially. That 3800+ of yours is definitely the bottleneck in your system. DCS relies much more on mathematics in physics and internal systems simulation, and the graphics engine is pretty crummy by today's standards, and is thus more CPU intensive and less GPU intensive. Other games, such as Call of Duty, or even ArmA 2, are the opposite.

Yes, you can. There is a drop-down list under statistics such as fuel load, gun load, wieght, etc. You must go to the weapons setup page for the selected aircraft.

I think he is asking for a method in which the camera can be placed at a pre-specified, user-placed location in space, and the yaw/pitch/magnification of the camera can be controlled with the mouse. He is not asking for a flyby view, since the camera location is generated by the computer and the user has no authority over where it is positioned.

If you keep the resolution at your TV's native resolution, you won't notice a change from windowed to full screen. If the resolution is smaller than the TV's, then you will see windowed.

If you are having troubles, seems to help a lot of people.

When you go really fast, there is an effect on the rotor blades caused by uneven lift that makes the blades really close together on one side and far apart on the other. When you add cyclic movement to this, then the blades will collide on the short side. If you want to do sweet maneuvers, do them below 250 airspeed. (Airspeed != groundspeed. Airspeed is the dial and the TV speed, groundspeed is the HUD speed)

I have the slider on my X52 throttle set to control the zoom. The default zoom control is the scroll wheel, I believe. I don't use TrackIR, I use FreeTrack. In FreeTrack there are smoothness sliders which removes a lot of the shakiness at the expense of response time. This helps to keep the camera steady enough to select switches with my mouse. If you want to try FreeTrack instead of the NaturalPoint software, you'll have to find an older version of the program. In the latest version or two they had to remove support for the TrackIR camera because NatrualPoint got all angry about it. I'm sure you won't have to, though. I can't imagine why the TrackIR software wouldn't include such an option as Freetrack's smoothness.

If you leave the waypoint type as the default, with you in the air, and you set the altitude to 3000 or whatever, you can learn the start-up procedure my way, which is definitely more hardcore. j99-kO1N_3A

There are six or so little sensors on the Ka-50. The most visible of which is on the very back, it is a small square plate. When these little plates detect laser energy, such as the type that is used to get a range or to guide a missile, it sends a signal to the LWR that says "holy shit, laser energy detected." The LWR takes that signal and, if it came from the rearward sensor, it will light up the bottom light, indicating that it came from behind you. There isn't anything that it can do but sense. It knows if there is laser energy or not. It probably also can judge the strength of the laser energy too. The sensor can't tell where the energy is coming from, it just knows if there is contact with the laser or not. In theory, a helicopter could be just barely behind you and off two miles away on your right, lase you, and if the laser only hits the rearward sensor, the LWR will think the source is just behind you because there isn't contact with the right-side sensor. A super-sophisticated sensor might be able to detect the precise wavelength of the laser, and then compare that to a database of known laser wavelengths and judge what kind of vehicle is lasing it, but that is not a capability of the Ka-50. I can imagine that if a new helicopter was designed today with an infinite budget, it would have that kind of sensor.