Toge

I have the Virpil ACE pedals, and also had old Saitek Pro Combat pedals before. The difference of course is like night and day, plastic imprecise toys vs the smooth precise professional experience you get with the Virpil pedals. Of course, I expect it to be similar with MFGs or TMs too, and can't compare to those as I've never tried them. But I'm very happy with the Virpil pedals, and can't find anything to improve or complain about. They indeed don't come with a damper, but you can remove the spring without touching any tools, and install any basic hydraulic damper simply by screwing it on. I did that with a damper I bought from Amazon a while ago. No drilling or anything like that needed, it fit nicely to the existing screw holes that you can see in the picture (just had to buy some longer screws and nuts from a local hardware store). Virpil stuff are so popular they rarely have anything directly in stock. When you order something, your order is placed in a queue and get your toys in the order they get them in stock. Sometimes this takes a couple of days, sometimes a few weeks, depending on what you order. You can get an idea of current lead times in their forums (https://forum.virpil.com/index.php?/topic/1946-new-ordering-process-live-community-discussion/), where people post what and when they've ordered something and when their order has been shipped.

If it's the dot crosshair you're referring to, that points to the selected acquisition source. To see where George is lasing (i.e. where he's pointing the TADS), the pilot needs to set the acquisition source as TADS. You can do that in TSD or WPN page on the MPDs, with the bottom button in the right side (see Acquisition Sources in https://chucksguides.com/aircraft/dcs/ah-64d/#pf123). On cold starts the acquisition source for the pilot defaults to "Fixed", meaning it points directly forward, and I'm not sure what happens when George takes over pilot duties, so it might get changed then too. If your acquisition source is set as TADS but you still can't see where it is, it might be outside your view and sometimes hard to find just by looking around. You can use the cueing dots around the line of sight reticle in the center of the IHADSS. The dots point to the acquisition source, so if you're seeing a dot in top and also to the right of the reticle, it means the acq source is somewhere to the right and up from where you're looking now. The field of view box in the bottom of the IHADSS will also show which direction the TADS is pointing at. See https://chucksguides.com/aircraft/dcs/ah-64d/#pf12f for details on the IHADSS symbology.

My experiences with the Warthog HOTAS were similar. The stick base is quite stiff, and the spring forces you to "push through" the center every time you try to do small movements (which is basically 90% of the cyclic movements you do when flying helicopters), so I also didn't enjoy it at all. And second, there's not that many buttons, hats and switches, and the ones that are there either don't work very reliably or are otherwise not really optimal for apache bindings. And the analog mini-stick in the throttle is simply a disaster. You can fix the stick base by replacing the spring and/or getting an extension, as said above. For me, the extension alone helped a bit, but I still wasn't happy. As an alternative stick/throttle combo I can 100% recommend Virpil stuff. I now have the Constellation Alpha stick with WarBRD base (with 10cm extension), the CM3 throttle, and the ace flight pedals, and couldn't be happier. There's quite enough buttons and hats for all necessary bindings, and they actually work the way you expect them to, and also the analog mini sticks are accurate enough for controlling the TADS and the MPD cursor. I'm still considering buying an actual collective, but I'll wait until the apache collective handle is published later this year. There are other high end stick/throttle/collective/pedal manufacturers too of course, but these are my experiences.

It's a bug, and has been reported.

Ah, didn't mean to complain, should have read what and how I wrote. I absolutely appreciate the attention to detail and realistically implemented modules. The boresighting process just happens to be the least favorite part of cold starts for me, and after a while starts to feel like a chore. I'm also skipping all tests etc and just turn on what I have to, so I'm not really the target audience of that particular feature, but it's great to have all that detail available.

My common sense (might have nothing to do with reality) would dictate that the head tracking (trackIR or similar) centering only affects what input trackIR is giving DCS. So let's say your centered head position in xyz coordinates is (0,0,0) and you're looking directly forward. Then you adjust to a more comfortable position in your chair and now your head rests naturally at (5,-3,0), and this is the input DCS is getting. Now you can either reset your trackIR to regard your current position as the center, again giving DCS the input of (0,0,0), or move back to the original position in your chair, resulting in same input. DCS wouldn't know which option you did, and doesn't care, it just sees the control input. So you can recenter as much as you want, and it has no effect on boresight (or anything else). I recenter often while flying, and still hit my targets with the cannon. So the boresighting really is just a (annoying) gimmick implemented for "realism", and only regards where the virtual pilot head is and where it's looking at - you can control the head by keyboard, trackir, or whatever else you bind to it. TrackIR internal parameters, such as centering, has no more effect, as e.g. joystick calibration would if the head position/direction was bound to a joystick axis. So it can be perfectly boresighted automatically during hotstart without knowing anything about your controls and inputs and their centers or calibrations.

Entitled much? Seems like an awful attitude, or then I misinterpreted your meaning. Please understand that it's an early access module in a very early stage, essentially open beta testing. It's not a finished module. The fact that we have access to it now is a privilege, not a basic human right, as you seem to assume. They could have chosen to finish it to the point where they could be sure it's ready for everyone to enjoy fully and bug free, but then we'd all be waiting for another 1-5 years for them to finish all the features and to do very extensive internal testing so that no one could be able to complain about bugs and such. But instead they chose to open it to the public in the beta stage, which means that now we can enjoy the features that are (almost) finished, and also provide them feedback to make it better. In either case, you wouldn't get that free trial access yet. If you wish to take part in the beta, you can buy it at a discounted price. If you wish to evaluate it for free, you have to wait until they decide it's ready enough. That said, it's a wonderful module and while it still has (minor) issues, the advertised features are there and it's an absolute joy to fly and play, especially with a human copilot. On purely my own opinion and speculation, I'd just give some time for the flight model/SCAS behavior to stabilize and mature (there were some quite big changes in the latest patch) and more intelligence to the George AI (to be more enjoyable in SP) before giving it out for free trial.

George needs constant attention, i.e. you as a pilot pointing specific spots where he should be looking at. To scan an area for enemies you'll point at one spot, ask george to slave there, then he tells you there's nothing. You'll repeat this for 20 times at different spots to cover the area and then go to next area. If he finds something, you'll scroll through the list of targets to see what's where. And even though he says "lased and stored" I haven't yet seen him actually store anything (not sure if I'm doing something wrong here) so if you move away from found targets, you'll have to search for them again. Definitely takes attention away from flying. Otherwise he works ok, at least with hellfires. Just give consent to fire and he'll make sure the missile gets delivered.

CPG has two triggers - one on the TEDAC left hand grip, and one on the cyclic. They are separate bindings too. Only the cyclic has a trigger guard.

I set mine up like in the picture. Not an exact replicate of course, as I'm using a QWERTY layout instead of ABC.. as using that simply didn't make any sense to me. I also added shortcuts to select the acquisition source, to have the most needed functionality of the MPDs available quickly. The numbers below the ACQ buttons allow you to pick one of 1-6 stored targets when you select the T?? ACQ option. I've attached a work-in-progress deck export file which is missing the key press events. I have the finished one on another computer and can upload that later if needed, but you'll anyway need to set up your own bindings in DCS so I guess the finished one won't really help you that much. In the finished one I've set the ACQ buttons to first select the WPN page on left MPD, then click on ACQ select (one of the right side buttons on the MPD), and then click on the correct right/bottom side MPD button to actually select the wanted ACQ source. AH-64DKU.deck

There's also Dressed to Kill by Charlotte Madison, also a British Apache pilot writing about some of the same events as Ed Macy and Damien Lewis (most notably the Jugroom Fort case). Nice point of view on what it was like to be the first female Apache pilot in British military.

I think the TEDAC is only exported when the player is in the CPG seat, so something apparently exists for this already...

Glad I could help! Yeah, not sure either what happened with the RTB message. Anyway the disappearing enemy forces were strange. I got village 3 as my objective, and I first shot the tower, trucks and the guys around them. Then I moved on to shoot the four other guys hanging out a bit close to the road, and got three of them, and couldn't anymore find the fourth one anywhere. I never saw the BMP that was supposed to be there either, only later saw in editor that it was supposed to be in the trees. But I basically drove through the road and never saw the BMP, so I figured it actually disappeared like the one guy on foot, and looking at the triggers, it actually did. So imho, getting the RTB after killing most of the enemy is fine, but the rest of the enemy should still stay there and not disappear miraculously Again, it's a fun mission, so thanks for that!

Dream come true. Not much else to say. To go into details, I've been flying in SP only, no VR. George is quite good enough (although he could be more active on finding targets), and it's nice to be flying and use George to do the shooting. Then I can sneak into a hover position, jump to CPG seat and let George handle hovering and small movements, and shoot some missiles and gun myself. Some minor issues with some missions, but otherwise everything is working smoothly. Would sure be nice to have a friend to play with...

There seems to be a few problems in the Reservoir Fight mission. I took a look at it in mission editor and found the following issues: The trigger that checks when the FARP support group has reached its goal checks the wrong zone, so the FARP never appears. Should be "Jump FARP Supp Zone" instead of "FARP Marker Zone". The triggers that activate the village INS groups have one flag incorrect: the 4. activation trigger sets the 3. flag, when it should be 4, so the win condition is not activated if you happen to get 4. village as the main goal. The "win" trigger deactivates all INS groups from the villages after you've killed 50% of them, so e.g. when you've killed enough of the soldiers, the BMP disappears also. Something else might be wrong with the trigger too as the radio message for RTB is never triggered. I fixed the above, except I'm not sure about the last RTB radio message (might work after removing the unit deactivations, or might not. Don't have the will to test this for 5th time...). I also added victory conditions so you'll get 100 result once you've destroyed the radar, the AAAs and the final village insurgents. I could upload the fixed mission file to DCS user file repo, but I'm not sure if I'm allowed to make it publicly available as the original is basically ED property...?

For the CPG it's even less than for the pilot. You only need one of the lighting brightness knobs on 8 o'clock, as Rabies mentioned. And you'll only need to turn that on for the boresight procedure during startup (same knob at the same place as the pilot), so during flight you'll only need what's in front of you. I don't do VR, but with track IR I'm just looking slightly left and down to see the knob, barely moving my head due to how I've set the track IR sensitivity. With VR it might be a bit different, but basically if you can see your left elbow while your arms are to your side, you can see the knob. You can see it in the cockpit this video https://youtu.be/9B2fhX4MfOE?t=65 (pilot's view, but it's the same for the cpg. The one that says "Primary".) You can of course bind it to HOTAS or just keyboard, as it is needed for the startup only.

So did I interpret the posts here correctly that the SCUD mission doesn't let you know when it's done? I just finished destroying the 8 SCUDs and even managed to fly home and land safely. I got a score of 286, but "Results" are 0. I also never received any messages about mission success or anything like that. I didn't wait for the clearance at the first position, but instead flew straight (through WPs) to BP53 and waited there while scouting the area, though, but otherwise I think I did everything "correct". Did I do something wrong or miss something? (This is the first time I actually complete a mission in DCS, so I don't know what's supposed to happen...) Cool mission, btw

You should not touch the throttle (power levers) at all once you've done the startup procedures - they should stay at the "Fly" position. This means that the throttle and rotor speed are managed automatically. You just use the collective to manage the pitch angle of the rotor, so essentially the amount of lift produced. The rotor speed is supposed to stay roughly the same. You might get high/low rotor RPM warnings if you make too large and quick changes to the collective. Or if you try to pull too much collective (>100% torque, i.e. more than the engines can provide), the rotor speed will drop. The amount of engine power needed to keep the bird up depends on the conditions (weight/load, temperature, altitude) too. Heavy bird in hot climate well above sea level will have difficulties even taking off. Simple "what to do": Leave the power levers to "Fly" and handle the collective with care.

You can assign an axis for it. In CPG Axis commands list you'll find x and y axes for RHG MAN TRK Controller.

Simply amazing work. Playing single player for now, and I've yet to find a bug that would in any way take anything from the experience. Just flying the Apache feels so rewarding, and really fulfills those childhood dreams that were born with Jane's Longbow 2. Thank you.

This wasn't really my plan, but let's call it an after action report. During the first hour of flying the Apache, I really remembered the main reason why I never got very deeply into Ka50: the Warthog stick. So I just ordered a full set from Virpil. Let's see in ~6 weeks if I can hover this bird.

Nice work! Initial scan seems to take ~30 seconds before values are found, you might want to skip some memory regions to find the values faster... Care to share the source for the dll also?

Hi, As it still seems to be the case that PVI-800, UV-26 etc values can't be exported from lua scripts, I hacked together a tool to read the values straight from Black Shark memory and export via UDP. Check out https://bitbucket.org/tommi_hirvonen/black-shark-scanner This is just a quick proof of concept, but it seems to be working for PVI-800 at the moment. I'll continue with UV-26 etc other stuff, but I'd really like someone else to test this and tell me if this works for you too. There are some ugly assumptions and shortcuts in the code and I'd like this to work generally, not just on my setup. Feel free to use/modify the app/code in any way you like.

Wow, that's just great, saves me so many hours of work! Ok, so one problem is solved. Now I can focus on the electronics. Maybe if I wait long enough, someone will have all that ready too in some downloadable package...

Excellent! You guys saved me a LOT of trouble with this and it looks so much better than what I could ever have achieved. Thank you!