Waldo_II

Rikus decided that the extra time and effort to add the four letters in "mark" after the word "bench" would not be compensated by the added ease of understanding that would result from doing so.

It is very possible to play without a headtracking system. When you move the mouse, the camera follows. The camera isn't always centered on the curser, making things very fluid. It can be difficult to take peeks at various instruments while flying because you have to take your hands off your joystick/throttle, but it certainly is possible, and many do. If money is an issue, I strongly suggest Freetrack. It is pretty much exactly like TrackIR, but free and more customizable. You do have to come up with your own equipment, but that isn't hard at all. For the camera, get a cheap $20 webcam, unscrew everything, rip out the infra-red filter, screw it up, put some camera film over the lens, and you're done. For the headset, take a look at what I built for less than $10. I chopped up some pens, soldered a few things together, and I have the same capabilities of the $150 TrackIR system. If you don't have a soldering iron, you can get one for $10, or get one from a friend. You aren't putting together a computer motherboard. You don't even have to solder, you can use some metal clamps, just so long as there is an electrical connection. If you want simple, just use one LED and you can look around the cockpit on two axis. Three LEDs, you get all six axis. I slapped together my 3x LED system in like twenty minutes.

I'm curious, why is 130 kmh the best climb speed? I understand that forward flight allows the aircraft to take advantage of the airfoil-shaped "wings," but why is 140kph less efficient? Why is 130 the peak?

Shakiness is very likely due to disabled autopilot dampeners. Always, always have these on. Check before you take off, check after you take off, check five minutes after you take off, you get the idea. They like to turn off for a number of reasons (most commonly is when you try to hover at very low altitudes, less than 15 meters). The RPM warning was probably due to RPM being too low because you had the collective at maximum. When collective is maxed out, the engines cannot turn the rotors fast enough to overcome the air resistance, and the RPM warning freaks out. Also, having collective at maximum is a bad idea, especially at high speeds. At high speeds rotors like to get intimate with eachother. By "intimate," I mean they get all touchy-touchy while going at like ten million KPH, and they get divorced straight away. If you get my drift. What happens when you go fast is the advancing rotor blade (right side on the bottom, left side on top) is generating lots and lots of lift while the retreating rotor blade is generating very little lift. The result is that on the bottom, the right blade is angled high, and on top the right blade is at a low angle. This is when they collide. Under normal flight parameters, you won't experience collision, but if you bank right or use right-rudder while at high speeds, you encounter issues. The solid tone is probably the radar altimeter warning up. It turns on, then is all like "HOLY SHIT WE ARE AT ONE METER ABOVE THE GROUND!! AHHHHH" but then after a second it is all like "Oh wait, nevermind. My bad" and it turns off. If you would like to learn about flying routes, I suggest watching my video tutorial about it. It is the first video in this thread. I've got some other good tutorial vids in there too. If you only watch a few, be sure to include the last one. Definitely my favorite.

FortunatelyI read this as I was on my gaming computer. I looked it up and the functions were "Release Weapons" (Space+RAlt), "Throttle Up" and "Throttle Down" I remember I had issues with programming the release weapons function. I wanted the first trigger stage to be cannons with the second stage as secondary weapons, and I couldn't determine if I had to program the second stage as "Space + RAlt" or just "RAlt," and it never worked so I just did it in the game controls list. It works well enough for me. The throttle commands could probably be removed and programed in the Saitek software. I was probably lazy. And then, of course, there are the axis commands programmed in with the game.

The landing light and the spot light are one and the same. By default it is looking forward, and to move it you use the same keys you use to move the Shkval combined with RCtrl or something. I strongly suggest setting up your X52 yourself. It will be a hundred times easier to remember them versus if you used someone else's settings. I have a few suggestions for you. First, keep all of the keyboard shortcuts as default. Use your Saitek software to bind keyboard keys to individule buttons on the joystick (so HAT 1 right would have the same effect as pressing "/", assuming you want HAT 1 Right to move the Shkval to the right). A few buttons you will have to use the in-game controls settings, but 95% of them you can do with just binding keys to buttons on the stick. Second, take advantage of the multiple modes on the stick, selected with the three-stage rotary on the top right of the joystick. I use the first mode for combat employment, the second mode for regular navigation and landing and such. For example, the second HAT on the joystick, when in mode 1, lets me select the HMS, cannons, outer and inner hardpoints. In Mode 2, they are linked to the four autopilot panels. A few keys will remain the same (the black button on the joystick, for example, I use as trim. This is universal for all modes. The same with the pinky key for auto-hover).

Significant maybe if you are writing software for an Apple II, but not today. High-end software will almost always use floating-point variables, which are high-accuracy numbers. In writing software there are different types of numerical variables depending on what language you are using. Typically there are at least integer variables and floating-point variables. If you are writing software that calculates the effect of air pressure and tempurature on rotor lift and happen to come across a FOV setting, it is easy to type "float defaultfov" instead of "int defaultfov." DCS may also calculate the default FOV based on a variety of settings, such as resolution, screen aspect ratio, monitor setup, etc. You may have come across a combination that gave you a such a strange setting.

I hate scores. They are meaningless to me. They are never a reflection of usefulness, skill, ability, or knowledge. It disappoints me that certain scores have to be reached in order to progress in the campaign. Often I just modify the pilot profile file to give myself a different record so I can go on (I ended up on one mission where I used all of my ammunition wisely, all of my wingman's ammunition wisely, but I still didn't have enough, so I RTB, got more ammo, and it turns out my laser was burned out, and I couldn't finish the mission. At that point I gave up on the campaign).

Game mode lacks the complex flight dynamics featured in the realistic simulation mode. The functions of the helicopter aren't modeled in their full complexity, ballistics are more simple, stuff like that. On top, arcade mode is often affiliated with the labels, the magic radar, etc. Although I believe you can have these in simulation mode too. I know you can have labels+simulation, I'm not sure about the magic radar.

Cut him some slack. English isn't his native language.

We don't. I recall that in the bid for America's new stealth high-altitude bomber, there was debate as to make it unmanned or not. The tasks could easily be performed without a pilot, but people argued that humans should always be the ones to be in control of the most powerful ordnance on earth, not computers. Apocalypse theorists. Next generation fighter aircraft also may not have pilots. The current limitation on maneuverability, speed, altitude, etc. is the pilot and keeping him alive. Without a pilot, a jet could hold a 11-g turn for quite a long time, an obvious dogfighting advantage. Also argued was that having a pilot in a cockpit would give better situational awareness and intuition, however with modern sensor technologies, having onboard computers locate, ID, and identify threat level is not unlikely (The AH-64D locates, identifies, and lists threat level by itself already). Calculating the best maneuvering path to obtain a missile lock isn't too far ahead either. Check out the sensor technology on the F-35 if you haven't.

I think you are underestimating the power of modern computers, especially military-grade computers. People often think that civilian markets offer the newest and the best; they don't. Governments and militaries always have stuff that is long ahead of what you can get as a civilian. You know the junk on the Apollo craft that went to the moon and back? Those spacecraft had to do calculations far, far ahead of what civilian computers were able to do in those days. Even the civilian stuff you can find would be able to perform the complex calculations behind the effects of temperature, humidity, chemical makeup, etc. on rotor lift. Such advanced computing really took off when nVidia learned that their graphics cards could do so much more than graphics. This video card, which costs only $500 (compared to the millions that the entire helicopter costs), has 480 separate processing cores, each capable of doing their own independent calculation. The power consumption is forgettable compared to the amount of power needed to move rotors at speeds necessary to pull an aircraft as fast as they can. Size is no matter either, nor heat, since cooling can easily be tied in with hydrolics. The card I linked to can easily do all of the calculations that NASA did when they sent their Apollo space craft to and from the moon with far more precision a great many orders of magnitude faster than anything NASA could get their government hands on back in the day.

They are in the list along with the other land units. Look for "Infantry M4" or "Infantry M249" or "Infantry RPG"

I haven't noticed any slower playback rate, although you could certainly use Audacity to speed up the song to compensate.

If you are like me, you have probably heard the same old menu/editor music ten million times (give or take), so this here is going to teach you how to replace the old music with your own. Required Software DCS: Black Shark (duh) Audacity First Step: Slecting the part of the song you wish to hear 1. Start up Audacity and go to File > Open and select the song that you wish to be the new menu/editor music, and open it up. 2. Use the cursur and select the parts of the song you do not want to hear, leaving only the good part. You must leave only about 2:00 - 2:30 worth of music. If the song is too long or too large, DCS won't play it. The song will just loop after you reach the end. Second Step: Saving it as an .ogg file 1. Simple enough, go to File > Export as Ogg Vorbis, and save it as songnameshort.ogg or whatever. 2. Close Audacity when it has finished exporting Third Step: Copy that song to the respective DCS: Black Shark folder. 1. Find your song with Windows Explorer and copy it with right-click > Copy. 2. Go to C:\Program Files\Eagle Dynamics\Ka-50\Sounds\EditorMusic 3. Create a new folder, C\Program Files\....\EditorMusic\Backup 4. Move Babylon.ogg in the \Backup\ folder. Babylon.ogg is the original menu song, this will be our backup. 5. Paste your new song, songnameshort.ogg, into C:\Program Files\...\EditorMusic\ 6. Rename your new song Babylon.ogg, just like the song that was there before. When DCS starts up and looks for the menu music, it will find your new song disguised as the old song, and it will play the new song. A word of advice Don't choose a song that starts out with a bang, like Freedom. You will hear the first few seconds of the song another ten million times, so choose something that won't both you. Songs that I have used in the past "Hell's Bells" - AC DC TLD:DR Get a two minute long clip of audio, save it as .ogg, and replace Eagle Dynamics/Ka-50/Sounds/EditorMusic/Babylon.ogg with it.

You are very correct in that 8.2m/s should be multiplied by 35, a typo on my part. You are also correct in that 9.81 m/s^2 is probably inaccurate. The fin stabilization would definitely flatten the flight path. I haven't the knowledge to calculate an accurate trajectory, nor the proper input in terms of dimensions of the fins, so I decided to leave it at 9.81. The motor burning has nothing to do with the rate of fall in the quoted scenario, only the air resistance/lift generated. Lift is virtually zero because the missile loaders have no control over the orientation of the rocket when fired, so lift/drag forces are equal on all axis. Since the motor is only pushing the rocket forward, not affecting the vertical axis, it does not change the rate of fall. If the rocket were fired upward at an angle, such as in scenarios in which my second equation would be useful, then that certainly can have an effect, although the difference in real life versus my model would be minute. My model accounts for linear, constant velocity ( [ (90-x)/90 ][ speedofS-8 ], but not for nonlinear effects of acceleration and nonlinear flow of fuel into the engine.

There is an option that you have to set before flying the missions. Look for a checkbox like "Rcvr on." (Recover on). When you crash, you hit the escape key, and hit the "RCVR" button, and it gives you a new aircraft at the exact place where you started the mission.

I remember experimenting with them. They were horrible. They go an incredible distance before illuminating, they don't work for very long, they didn't illuminate a large enough area, they were difficult to aim, and I always had to yank the nose up before firing. They don't fit the role of attack helicopters because in order to use the effectively you have to be high up. Assuming the missile drops, during flight, at a rate of 9.81m/s^2, and drops at the rate of 8.2m/s, flies for 17 seconds and illuminates for 35 seconds, the minimum height for maximum employment of a single missile is 8.2(17)+9.81(17*17)=3,122, meaning you have to be 3,122 meters high to get the full effect of illumination, if you shoot straight at zero degrees. The formula for calculating at what angle you should shoot, when given the speed of the rockets and the desired distance, use this, where X is the angle of launch, and the function of X is the distance. f(x)=[(x/90)(speedofS-8]8)8) * ( {[ (90-x)/90 ][ speedofS-8 ] + current altitude} / 9.81) It helps to have a fancy graphing calculator.

X-Fire works fine for me. I've even broadcasted a few times. Make sure that X-Fire is watching the right executable, DCS.exe. If it isn't, you may have to point xfire to it manually. If it is just looking for Launcher.exe, it will notice you playing it all the time, but the functions will only work for the menu/editor system, not the engine.

I strongly urge you to avoid using the automated startup. Familiarizing yourself with the startup procedure will make flying in simulation mode much easier, and it makes learning how to use other functions of the helicopter much easier. You will also know better where to look for whatever function you desire (Instead of thinking "Hey, where is the laser standby switch?" or "Where is that HMS toggle switch," you will think "Lets see, the HMS will likely be next to the switches that control which input the targeting computer uses, so that means lefthand panel.") I suggest learning it . Much more fun.

Start high, at least 3000 meters, with lots of fuel, shells, and four fuel tanks. You will need the momentum during a fall. Decrease collective to minimum, and push the cyclic forward. Once at 60 degrees below the horizon, trim. Push the cyclic further and do your best to maintain a 70-80 degree negative pitch. Watch the airspeed indicator on the HUD, and once it maxes out at 500, drop the fuel tanks and slowly start bringing the nose of the aircraft up. If you pull up too hard, the artificial gravity will tear your rotors from the helicopter. Don't be afraid of being at ten or twenty degrees below the horizon and still falling at 40-70 meters per second. Give it time. Apply collective when descending at a rate lower than 25 meters/second. Wait until your airspeed is down at 200 before giving it significant amounts of collective. Never use max collective until you are lower than 160 kph in the air.

With most people, issues with performance and framerate are caused by graphical limitations. Their computers, specifically their CPU, can handle the complex calculations going on, which isn't often too difficult, but their graphics cards and amount of RAM are the limiting factors. They cannot render images fast enough to keep up with the computations going on offscreen. This causes low framerates. This is easily solved by lowering graphical demands, such as using lower-quality texture settings, less detailed 3D models, less complex shading algorithms, and lowering the rendering distance (view distance). Your computer has the opposite going on. Your computer can handle the graphical component fairly well. Instead of the graphical area being the chokepoint, your CPU is limiting you. Your CPU cannot perform the calculations fast enough to keep up with real time. It is simply too slow, too old. This is a much worse situation than a graphical chokepoint for two reasons: You cannot reduce computational requirements like you can graphical ones. The computations are the center of the game. Eliminate some calculations, and the game can be drastically different, unlike graphics, where you can change settings and still have the same game. Number two, it is much more difficult to upgrade a CPU than a graphics card, especially in a pre-built computer. Dell often bolts the heatsink/fan system down to the motherboard, making CPU changes impossible. If you wish to upgrade your CPU, there is a chance it will be more difficult than if you custom-built your computer yourself. Plus, CPUs tend to run more expensive than graphics cards, and warranties aren't up to par either. That isn't to say it is impossible, it certainly can be done in most cases. It just isn't like swapping one component out for another, like RAM or graphics cards. There is a procedure to doing it (fail to adjust your heatsink/fan properly or forget thermal paste, and your 60-nanometer wide transistors will turn into the worst tasting mashed potatoes in history). Solutions to improve fluidity of gameplay are these: turn off full-realism mode, and turn down some graphical options. Many parts of graphics processing require the CPU to be involved. Turning down shadows, view distance, and any sort of light-bloom or HDR effects will undoubtedly bring performance up. Also, try turning on simple avionics; this option uses simplified calculations instead of the full simulation ones that take up more CPU time. Another very, very large method of performance enhancement is turning off background processes. Not only should you turn off stuff like iTunes and internet browsers and MSN/AIM/Skype clients, but also the unused system processes that run unnoticed. All of these take up CPU power, and turning them off will free up space for DCS.exe. I recommend Game Booster. Simply run this before starting up DCS, and it will turn off a lot of system processes for you. When you are done, you can turn them all back on again.

I'm pretty sure you don't have to hold down R-ALT to slew the Shkval, unless you custom set those commands. If you didn't, you could be accidentally triggering some other function. When you say that the Shkval starts "spinning over the area," do you mean that it is slewing left and right by itself, or is there vertical movement aswell? You may have accidentally triggered the auto-scan function. I am unsure exactly how to start this function, but I have done it in the past accidentally. I have been unable to purposely initiate the auto-scanning.

Just because they have a twitter account doesn't mean they will update more often. If they do, it doesn't mean that we will get any more content out of the updates than with the monthly-ish ones going on now. I much prefer quality over quantity.

Start with rolling landings on runways. Approach, like Hunt3r said, with speed like a fixed-wing aircraft. Once you touch down, remove all remaining collective, turn the throttle down to "idle" and hit the wheel brakes until you stop. Edit: Align yourself in the editor with the runway. Put a waypoint at the opposite end of the runway, and put the helicopter in a position so the line from the end of the runway runs on top of the pavement. Next, do the same thing, but when you approach the runway, flare up to stop yourself instead of touching down and relying on the wheel brakes. Once you are on the ground, do as you did above with the throttle, collective, and wheel brakes. After that, do it on an aircraft carrier. Go into the editor, put an Admiral Knutsenov (definitely misspelled there) in the water, and give it a waypoint and set it to move at 35kph. Then do the same rolling landings that you did above until you are comfortable landing on a moving aircraft carrier. (An alternate idea is to put yourself on the US team and use the Carl Vinson or whatever Nimitz class is they have in the game. The symbol looks somewhat like a carrier, an upside-down triangle with a control tower on one side) Once you have mastered landing on a moving carrier, land on a non-moving carrier. Start with rolling landings with flaring at the end (As done in the second paragraph), and work yourway towards touchdown speeds of ten or less KPH groundspeed. When you are done with that, practice a few times on land. When you have finished that, find some ships in the game that have helicopter decks on them. At this point, have some fun. Shake things up a little. Start the mission at night, turn on the rain, and do some carrier landings in the dark. Hell, try landing on a submarine. At this point, the best way to improve is to create some challenging scenarios for yourself. Also, experiment with the mission editer. Find a nice-looking cloud level, find a good sunset time. Throw in a few oil rigs. Make some F-14s do some low-level fly-bys. Enjoy yourself. The last thing I did to improve myself was autorotation landings. There are options in the editor for stuff like autopilot failures, engine failures, etc. at autorotation landings. (Watch the whole way through, you'll enjoy it) After that, you are pro. And DCS: A-10C will be out.