britgliderpilot

. . . . an intriguing suggestion! The modified Ka29 operating in Chechnya is an interim solution and from what I understand should be superceded by the Ka52 in operational service. The ability to add an AI Ka52 operating as a mini-AWACS for helicopters, using line of sight that we know AWACS now has, and target prioritisation logic to send targets over the datalink, would be both realistic and a HUGE help in targeting stuff. As has been said elsewhere, the Ka50 seems to have been designed for the open country of central Europe and struggles with targeting systems in mountainous terrain. It goes without saying that people who buy Black Shark are inevitably going to want to fly in mountainous terrain - perhaps more so than flat terrain due to the increased challenge and, well, fun value . . . 'Tis a good idea. Don't know if ED will agree, but hey . . . it's worth asking, right?

Some random Stalker just ripped me off!! Wandering through the wilderness I happen across a Stalker camp, and engage one of the chaps outside a building in conversation. He volunteers the information that he's found some snazzy rifle or other, and offers to sell it to me for a low, low price. Now while this smacks slightly of unscrupulous drug dealer, I'm in the virtual world and most people have been friendly so far . . . . so I give him his money and he runs off into his hut to go fetch it. . . . . or not. The bugger turns around at the end of the building, and suggests that he takes the place of Robin Hood and I take the place of a rich man! The cheek! He then goes on to suggest that I not be seen around here again or I will receive a bloody nose. Soooo . . . . I can either turn around and run away with my tail between my legs . . . or I can give this a moment's thought, choose to decline his kind offer (can't have people thinking I'm a pushover), whip out my nice little scoped rifle, drop to one knee, and put a couple of aimed shots through his thieving skull before him and his goons can react. Half-Life never offered this kind of satisfaction :D

Sure - when you paint it black it looks mean and terrifying instead of just ugly. It's a very important consideration for special forces :P Other than that . . . . yeah, suppose it's as much about keeping the chaps at Kamov going as anything else. Letting your defense contractors go bankrupt is hardly a sound tactic for maintaining a decent military future . . .

With Boot Camp and Windows XP there is no reason why it shouldn't work - and indeed the Core 2 Duo seems to perform very well with Lomac. You might experience graphics card issues, though . . . . Macs aren't gaming machines, so don't usually come with powerful graphics cards. Where they do come with conventional graphics cards, they're often underclocked as regards the PC version. So yes, you could do it, but it would have to be a real labour of love . . . .

. . . says the man who was muttering about Zelda?!? They make a big deal of weapons that wear out over their lifetime, radiation poisoning, having to buy food and eat . . . . In some ways, then, it is realistic. Of course, the whole "let's patrol the area around a nuclear catastrophe in search of weird stuff" premise is a bit off . . . . but I don't care :D

I just stopped playing for the evening. I'm sitting at home . . . . in the dark . . . . and in STALKER I'm underground somewhere, with all kinds of weird stuff going on . . . . and there was a very loud, very angry-sounding growl. Any game that scares you out of playing it except in daylight has to be good :D

. . . . that game is seriously addictive ;) Part FPS, part RPG, intelligent AI, dangerous landscape, night/day cycles, weird creatures, strange occurrences, mysteries, evil villains . . . it's got everything! The website claims anywhere between 40 and 100 hours of gameplay in single-player depending on how into the world you get, and I can believe it. It's fantastic. It's also got spectacular graphics, the best lighting model I've ever seen, and an incredibly immersive world . . . . it's both huge and massively detailed. Unlike FC, it DOES have a WAFM for your bullets, which is brilliant. I can draw some parallels to Lock On though, . . . . it's Russian, set in the Ukraine, was well worth the six-year wait, looks brilliant . . . . A word of warning, though . . . . I'm running it on a Core 2 Duo, 2Gb RAM, and a 512Mb 7950GT . . . and it's struggling. Ouch. 'Tis a little bit buggy, but believe me it's well worth buying . . .

Precisely. Although you could say the same of pretty much any helicopter in the event of battle damage.

. . . . and if you go to the right co-ordinates on Google Earth, you can actually see them :) http://forum.lockon.ru/showthread.php?t=21944

Has nobody yet suggested having a couple of beefy men in facepaint with knives gripped between their teeth supplying the initial explosion? It's how Iraq's integrated defence network was dealt with in GW1, remember . . . .

Well the full version of Vegas is something like five hundred bucks - if that's what you paid and you got Vegas 6, then you can be indignant. If, however, you got it for significantly less, or from eBay . . .

Oh, you CAN fight it at night. If you're brave :D

http://www.amazon.com/Armed-Action-Lieutenant-Commander-Newton/dp/0755316010/ref=sr_1_1/104-5678730-7216701?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176053542&sr=8-1 It's the story of a Lynx AH7 pilot flying in support of the Royal Marines during the Iraq war. It's a good read, for a start - but for those who are interested in Black Shark, it provides a cracking insight into modern helicopter air combat. The author discusses his experiences during the conflict, from sailing from the UK aboard HMS Ocean, to deploying to FOBs in Kuwait and Iraq, to the stress of constant combat flying, to the strain of locating and destroying targets while under fire, the works. The Lynx is in many ways a very different aircraft to the Ka50 - but reading through the book I'm struck by some similarities. Most importantly, both aircraft employ line-of-sight missiles (Vikhr for Ka50, TOW for Lynx) aimed through telescopic sights, and despite the differences in the aircraft themselves, the way you inevitably end up fighting them must be pretty similar. If you want a book about helicopters in combat, or you're interested in boning up a bit for Black Shark . . . . go have a look at it, just might be something to keep you occupied :)

Have had a look at the track and don't see anything immediately wrong. Perhaps a better indication of what's happening is given by looking at the vertical velocity indicator . . . as you roll to the vertical and lift is lost, the aircraft slowly begins to accelerate downwards. Once lift is removed, it takes a while for vertical velocity to build, in accordance with Newton etcetera. In a couple of your maneuvres you're not rolled fully over - perhaps 70 or 80 degrees. In this case, the wing is still generating a lift component in the upwards direction, AND you're getting some lift from the tail surface as well. This could be why the aircraft isn't dropping as fast as you think it should. In order to judge the effect better, it might be better to set up a flight alongside an AI aircraft at fixed altitude and repeat the exercise in F5 view from that aircraft - I bet you'll see the drop in altitude better that way.

Well let's go through these one by one with a bit of discussion . . . . Is this the same as Vortex Ring State? You can still settle into a region of flight where the vertical speed of air through the rotors as the helicopter descends is faster than the rotors can push the air downwards. With two rotors I imagine it is slightly reduced over a single rotor, but it can still happen. It's going to be something for rookie Black Shark pilots to watch out for, certainly. Not eliminated so much as partially cancelled out. Both rotor disks will suffer retreating blade stall in opposite lateral directions, so no roll effects occur . . . . however, if you think about it logically there should still be a pitching moment due to the loss of lift towards the rear edge of both rotor disks. I don't fully understand this one, so can't comment too much . . . . the sources I've read so far say it can't happen to two-BLADED helicopters, but don't mention twin-ROTOR helicopters. Each of the Ka50's rotor disks are three-bladed, so I'd expect it to still be a problem. . . . . not sure what it's talking about here. I don't understand exactly what this means. There are some interesting effects with autorotation in a coaxial helicopter, especially if you've suffered blade damage, but I doubt I'd be able to reveal exactly what they are here . . . Well there's no tail rotor to fail, but if you lose part of either rotor disk then your helicopter will still suffer yaw stability problems. You won't suffer losses due to tail rotor failure, but then I've seen footage of survivable tail rotor failure losses. The Black Hawk crashes in Somalia were tail rotor failures, and crew members survived. If you lose your rotor system in a Ka50, you're just going down. Puts all your eggs in one basket, as it were. For those who haven't seen one, the height velocity curve illustrates regions of helicopter flight (in terms of height and speed) where the aircraft is unsafe in the event of an engine failure because: 1. There's not enough time to safely autorotate. Primarily because by the time you realise you need to autorotate, the rotor speed (and therefore rotor energy) is decaying. In order to safely flare you need to build rotor energy through autorotation. In this area of the Height/Velocity curve you're not travelling fast enough for the rotors to build rotational kinetic energy from the air passing over them, before draining that kinetic energy in the flare. 2. There's not enough time to cope with a mechanical failure because you're too low to allow reaction time. I don't see why a coaxial system would eliminate either of these possibilities - you can still get decaying rotor RPM in the event of a double engine failure in the Ka50, and you still need time to deal with it. Low altitude failures are always a problem. There is a spare engine on the Ka50 to pick up load, but IIRC you can't hover on it at high take-off weights.

That's a bold statement ;) Back to topic . . . . I went and had a look in Flaming Cliffs - I roll to 90 degrees, try to hold the aircraft at constant altitude . . . . . couldn't do it, the aircraft yawed towards the ground. I can't hold the aircraft at level altitude at 90 degrees bank. With increased pitch angle it might be possible to get enough lift from engines and tail, but I dunno . . . . like the others said, provide a track and let's see. This is a new and interesting way of flying that I haven't heard of before . . . . where'd you learn it from?

Mmmn. An upgraded Mi25?

I love the interweb. Found a show report from Zhukovskiy 1995 which lists "09 blue" as a Sukhoi-owned Su27UB. Another site lists the first couple of two-seat Su27 prototypes as T10PU-5 and -6, which had tail numbers 05 and 06 . . . . So it seems fairly conclusive that it's a Sukhoi test aircraft :) And integrating the R-77 onto the Su27 isn't such a big deal - I can't remember the exact details, but it's much the same mod as was done to the MiG-29S, it is after all the same radar. However (as with the MiG-29S), upgrading the radar to talk to the missile still doesn't give you multiple target engagement capability.

I can remember at least two occasions of USN pilots returning to base without a canopy. The first was a Tomcat - the rearseater was a high-ranking officer on a joyride who accidentally fired the ejection seat. The second was a Hornet in a mid-air collision - both aircraft returned to base safely with varying degrees of damage. The one with no canopy also lost the radome and a significant portion of the outer wing . . . .

Hmmn - a modified suggestion. How about downloadable insignia textures? Say just the tailfin graphics, or a little nose art panel?

Been suggested before - the main problem is the size of the skin files. Think the last time it was brought up, someone had the size of the files at 15Mb - which is just too much to be transferring over online play, unfortunately :( On the positive side, I can at least report that your English is just fine - better than a lot of native English speakers!

Oooh! NINETEEN Su-27SM upgrades! Such wealth!! :P I may exaggerate the point slightly, but I don't believe Russia on it's own has the funding to properly develop a 5th-Gen fighter. Russia and India is a different matter, and one I overlooked to start with.

Mmmn. At the moment, my whole flight sim setup consists of a desktop PC, and a Logitech 3D twist-stick. . . . . which is currently living in the wardrobe while I try and troubleshoot an entirely different sort of flight sim, this time for work :s So while I COULD post a pic . . . . it'd be rather pointless :P

Could be longer - the Eurofighter requirement was born somewhere in the 70's . . . . . But yeah, I think you're right on that one. The Indians certainly have the cash, the Russians have the know-how . . . . good partnership :) In line with the thread topic, you've got to hope the politicians wielding the weapons are of sound mind - that's always the deciding factor. As regards the R-27EP and "un-stealthing" to attack - see previous comments regarding LPI/frequency agile radar. If you're really clever, you could probably build a missile seeker that can engage LPI radars. However . . . you can't exactly test it without direct access to the LPI logic in question, and should the F-22 turn it's radar off then of course nothing happens. It's not something to rely on to negate the F-22's general capability - as with most other fighter aircraft, I'm not expecting the engineers to rest on their laurels. I know I've seen articles on the Hornet's maneuvrability being significantly increased purely by upgrading the FBW software - given the number of systems on the F-22 that rely on computer code, a new firmware version for that aircraft could REALLY change things . . . . Sidenote - did you know they left a spare bay for another onboard computer "just in case" they needed one in the future? Now that's forward thinking ;)

Spotted the other day that if you zoom in on Severomorsk-3 you can spot and identify the Su33's sitting in the parking area, canards glinting and one with wings folded :) Go to 68.52.00N, 33.43.23E to have a look.