Bushmanni
-
Posts
1310 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
1
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Posts posted by Bushmanni
-
-
Glad to know you are making progress.
It's not enough to get the choppers speed under 10km/h but you need to also trim it for that state or the autopilots authority won't be enough to keep the chopper in hover. If the chopper is trimmed for forward flight it will try to push nose down in hover. You also must have FD disengaged for the autohover to work.
The trick about hovering is to know the neutral attitude where the chopper won't accelerate in any direction and understand that tilting the chopper causes acceleration in the direction of the tilt. If you engage autohover successfully it will bring the chopper to the current neutral state.
Ka-50 is in neutral state at hover with nose up about 5(+-2) degrees and pylons level. The actual required pitch and roll for neutral state depend on your loadout as fuel and weapons will change the CG. If there's wind you naturally need to lean to the wind a bit. When the chopper is in neutral state it will stay put or keep going to the direction it was going. For example if you need to slide right you don't keep the chopper tilted right all the time but you tilt right for maybe one second and then level it and the chopper will keep going slowly and steadily to the right until you make similar tilt to the left that will "neutralize" the velocity component to the right and stop the chopper. These kind of small and short tilts will be enough for precise maneuvering but if you need to move faster than about 15km/h you will start to keep the chopper tilted to overcome drag.
You can make hovering flight very easy for yourself by trimming the chopper for hover and disengaging FD. Now the chopper will automatically always return to the neural state when you let go of the stick so now the cyclic controls your lateral acceleration instead of pitch and roll.
-
Your flying looked pretty much the same as last time except it was even more random looking this time and you pitched nose up soon after taking off and crashed the chopper tail first to ground and exploded in a glorious fireball. I'm pretty sure both of your tracks were more or less broken. Have you checked them yourself before uploading that they actually show what really happened and you have the latest version of DCS World?
Best way to learn hovering is practicing hover landings. Take off from FARP, fly a little circle so as to pick up some speed (about 100km/h should be enough) and then land. Try to land exactly at the center of the FARP pad (rotor hub is smack in the middle when viewed from above). Repeat this for 10-20 times and then do it again next day. Keep doing this routine about twice a week until it feels too easy. Then do it again after a week or two.
Descent is easy as long as you don't do it while hovering. You should keep at least about 70-100km/h forward speed while descending fast to avoid VRS. Don't try to land like the AI does by stopping above the pad at 15m and then slowly hovering down to the pad. You can't see down at all and you could very easily drift over other pad and hit other choppers when coming down. Even if you are careful it takes lots of time and extra effort to land this way. Better way is to come down in 10-30 degree slope 30-10km/h so that you fly towards the landing spot and see where you are going. Gradually slow down the forward and descent speed while coming closer to ground.
The following link shows the idea of an easy landing style.
-
About quick target acquisition:...
Basic principle of tactics is to engage the enemy in a manner that prevents him engaging you or at least his chance of winning is lot less than yours (30/70 at most). When you are unable to achieve this you try escape and if that's not possible you try to prolong the engagement in hopes of enemy making a mistake that allows you to escape or turn the tables. If the enemy is about 2km away and shooting at you with machine guns there's a very good chance of running away from them successfully and then engaging them at stand-off range.
If you happened to stumble upon an enemy AAA that's less than 500m away your best bet would be to try to shoot him with a quick HMS aimed burst from cannon. I have run in to a well hidden ZU-23s few times (basically almost overflying them) and survived by making a quick turn and killing it with HMS and gun before it got a shot off at me.
Taking a successfull quick shot with rockets (or gun in fixed mode) takes some skill to pull off and a very close target right in front of you. Hitting something with rockets has always required a well flown run in for me.
-
The new atmospheric lighting looks very nice.
-
Another issue might be that I expected modern attack helis to simply pop up behind a tree line, instantly lock on to anything metal/vehicle and the pilot just fires off an ATGM. Is that a movie cliche I am falling for?
And how does one quickly attack several targets with the machine cannon? Assuming I want to fly over the area, destroy 4 trucks without hovering around. Manually moving the shkval and locking on targets is near impossible because of the small angle of the cannon and or targets simply being out of range of the camera. I could use the gun forward fixed, but then what is the poing of having the automatic tracking?
(Is there a way to lock the gun in a specific angle without tracking a ground target? For example lock it slightly to the right and down so that it can be used like a fixed door gun of sorts).
Choppers with a radar can quickly scan the visible area and find targets, lock the targets the radar has found and quickly fire off ATGMs on them. There's very little info about Russian chopper radars and their capabilities and it doesn't seem like Russians are trying to achieve this kind of capability in the first place so this capability is most likely proprietary to Apache Longbow. Rest of the choppers have to rely on a fast gunner.
You can easily engage multiple targets in one attack run with the gun. Don't bother locking the targets but just slew the reticle on target, shoot and slew to next target. There's a bug that causes the laser range to jump suddenly to a wrong reading so you need to monitor the range and re-lase when needed. With practice (assuming you have HOTAS) you can fly the chopper and slew the camera at the same time. If your speed is less than 130km/h all you need to do is turn the chopper with pedals to get the gun inside constraints. In general it's much faster and accurate to engage ground targets by slewing Shkval on target and then flying the gun inside constraints than trying to point the gun on target by flying.
Here's a video showing what I'm talking about.
-
It seems strange that anyone would be using a mouse with the Rift if the Rift can be used instead to easily put the cursor over a switch.
I put a "reticle" on a cap and tried how easy it would be to aim it to keys on my keyboard and found it to be very easy and fast. With sub 30ms latency it shouldn't be much harder to aim at cockpit buttons with Rift. You would still need some way of moving the cursor around so you don't have to use the center of the screen even for the aft panel buttons (and twist your neck excessively) but it doesn't need to be anything precise as you would just need to get the cursor somewhere around the corner of the display where the switch is. I suppose anyone with more recent version of Rift can't comment on this just yet how realistic this would be with actual hardware?
Doing away with keyboard would require some kind of alternate interface using this method that could be used for radio and game menus, etc. and some aircraft non-HOTAS controls currently not clickable (like Ka-50 throttles).
-
Hip has lot more mass and therefore it's lot more easier to over control it than the Huey. Basically you need to make all the maneuvers much slower (in regards to stick and collective movement) than you would in Huey. This also means accelerating and decelerating will taker longer time and distance in Hip compared to Huey.
The biggest difference between Hip and Huey is in response to collective though. Vertical acceleration feels like it lags quite a bit the collective setting in Hip as compared to Huey. If you descend while hovering and then increase collective to stop the chopper it will start climbing after a few seconds and you need to reduce the collective to prevent that from happening. Collective actually controls vertical acceleration and in this sense the behavior of the Hip is completely understandable. In smaller and lighter choppers drag will make it seem more like collective controls vertical speed but that is only how it seems. In Hip due to it's mass the real nature of the collective is more pronounced.
Hip also hovers slightly tilted to the right. All single rotor choppers hover leaned to the side of the tail rotor thrust unless the rotor mast is tilted to compensate for this.
-
1
-
-
How come the max connection speed is client setting instead of server choosing the max speed for the client as the value is highly dependent on the mission and connection of the server and client should just pick the max allowed.
-
This would be good, with the option of selectively making some areas desolated or at least less populated to simulate a battlefield or war ravaged area. You could set a default setting that affects the whole map and then define zones with special settings. There would be different amount of decorative units spawned in the zone and the ones moving outside the zone would turn around at the border of the zone with certain probability reflective of the zones settings.
-
PVI800 really is a very simple system and manual does cover all of it's functionality. There's no depth to it.
-
I think "IAW Theater Identification Criteria" is deliberately ambiguous phrase to signify that the criteria is situation dependent. Depending on what kind of hardware is available, who your enemy is and what is going on in the battle space there are different ways telling friend, civilians and enemies apart. For example if it's certain that there's no civilian or neutral planes around and you can verify the bogey is not friendly it can't be anything else than a bandit.
-
B-52 is one of the most cost effective bomb trucks the USAF has for delivering smart bombs in Afghanistan and similar places.
-
I wonder when Saitek will realize that in a HOTAS a mini-trackball would be a lot more useful than a mini-stick.
Aircrafts controls tend to have mini-sticks instead of mini-trackballs. Imagine slewing TGP from the front to the side with trackball.
-
Positive feedback would be very much appreciated, thanks
I'm suspecting the track playback was corrupted as you were flying uncoordinated pretty much the whole time even when flying straight, engaged auto-hover when flying about 80km/h and ended up leaning on the right wing after landing at the far end of the runway.
In any case controls indicator showed that you weren't using rudder when turning which results in uncoordinated turns. Flying coordinated means that the nose is pointing straight towards the airflow which minimizes drag and also helps to make the chopper behave much more gentler. The proper way to turn a chopper in forward flight is to roll to the direction you are turning and use rudders to keep the nose pointed towards the airflow. Helicopters tend to need much more babysitting in this regard than fixed wings. Ka-50 has wind vanes at the nose that can be used as reference. The vertical vanes should be almost invisible during flight.
When rolling fast the nose tends to yaw at the opposite direction in proportion to roll speed (ie. faster the roll, the more nose yaws). If you counter this by pressing the pedal to the same direction you roll, the chopper will stay coordinated even during roll and it's easier and faster to establish a proper coordinated turn.
Your control inputs were mostly very smooth which was nice.
-
You only need to track the position of the hand to put the cursor over the switch. Finger tracking is required only for finger gestures but I think it could be possible to operate switches without. If the position tracking is precise enough you could flick switches with the motion of the hand, ie. swipe the cursor down while in very close proximity to the switch and it will move down one notch and similarly for upward flick. Other option would be to have some kind of "button" in your gloves so that if you press your thumb and index finger together it sends a mouse left click or some other key press to the computer and right mouse button with middle finger and thumb.
-
Thermal camera adverts always use ideal conditions with cool environment. Apache guncam vids also often happen at night but when it's day the targets are not awfully lot easier to see than with regular cameras. Vehicles also are mostly at ambient temperature unless being driven a lot very recently. Steel beasts has pretty good implementation but then again it has separate set of textures and shaders for thermal imagers. A tank in defensive positions is basically at ambient temperature and if it's also camouflaged it's very hard to see with thermals whereas with optics you might spot some of the bare steel showing through.
-
Thermal cameras don't magically make people and vehicles to stand out from the background in typical conditions. If the environment is cold that would be mostly true, but often that's not the case and even then there's lots of false targets like animals and other man made stuff that makes it hard to find the right target. The current thermal image is a kind of compromise between the bad and good conditions. While I would also like to see more realistic implementation of thermal imagers, it's wrong to think it would make finding targets easier overall. Arma 3 thermals are not realistic. Even in sunlight rocks and small metal objects are lot more cooler than human bodies which is plain wrong.
-
The for-loop is ok, there's probably something before the for loop that crashes the code and stops execution. Add some debug messages before the for loop and find where it stops and then figure out why it stops.
-
Check your typenames as I can see at least one error in them at glance. Typename for Mi-8MTV2 is "Mi-8MT".
-
I liked how much it freed up to have headtracking. I'm getting a TrackIR 5. How mush more precise and responsive will that be? Does the real TrackIR work better with 6DOF? I found it very difficult to i.e smootly look down and "in" on the autopilot buttons. Look down on them is fine, but actually getting closer to them was almost impossible due to input "inprecisiveness".
On a last note, alas it was really cool with headtracking, but I felt it was actually harder to really fly with it. When your look view isnt dead center and always swaying a little bit to the left or right and up and down, it's hard to get a feel for the helicopters pitch and bank angles. Supposedly the TrackIR does a better job with precision?
Here's few examples of what you can do with TIR5:
I use only enough filtering to prevent the HMS from randomly twitching from image noise in sensor. It will be very twitchy to use and requires some practice to keep it steady so that you can click buttons but with time and practice it's doable and then you can do what you see in the video.
It took me few weeks to learn to reference aircrafts attitude and angular motion using its nose instead of screen. Now it doesn't matter if my screen is centered or not or if I move my head, I can sense the aircraft just as well if the view was static.
-
I made a function that assigns a route to group but makes it start from along the route instead of its starting point. The function finds groups position along the route and assigns only the route from that point onwards. If the group is some distance away from the route it will find the point along the route with smallest distance to the group and assign that as first waypoint. So far I have tested this only in "lab" conditions and it works nicely.
I have attached a demo mission which demonstrates how it works and how to use it and also the script file. There's also lot's of other stuff in the file but it's all uncommented so far.
-
Skim the manual first to see what it can do and learn the interesting and useful stuff first. I think maybe half of the apparent functionality is non-functional or useless in DCS like detailed information pages, advanced systems settings, self tests and stuff like that. Then again half of the stuff that can be used is mostly not really needed or you can easily do without.
-
Flying and operating A-10C and Ka-50 actually requires using lot less different key commands than FC3 aircraft as they have clickable cockpits. I find it much more easier to remember what switch does what than to remember keyboard commands. Most of the switches in A-10C and Ka-50 are related to starting the aircraft and after that you don't need to bother with them. What I love with DCS aircrafts is the amount of control they give over the aircraft and its systems. In FC3 you are stuck with basic features but in DCS you can do all kinds of neat things to make things more effectively but the cost is the increased complexity.
Methodological approach will save you some time while learning to fly and operate DCS aircrafts but most important thing is to have fun and advance step by step. Learn to fly well enough that you can employ weapons and then start to blow up trucks and other helpless enemies. Then switch to enemies that can shoot back. Get back to flying practice when it seems your weapons employment is suffering from poor control of the aircraft. Finding someone to teach or even ask questions from will help immensely in the beginning. These forums will also have lot's of information about things you will inevitably end up wondering about so learn to use the search.
-
DCS World 2.0 and New Maps Discussion Thread
in Chit-Chat
Posted
It seems to me the old overcast cloud is a rectangular sheet that's not large enough for the rendering distance of the new engine. You can see it getting cut prematurely also over ground on the right. With the old engine ground rendering stopped at the same distance as the cloud sheet so it seems we might be getting much more view distance in addition of better visual effects.