Bushmanni

When flying with single engine you can reduce rotor RPM too low by pulling too much collective and you will not get enough lift to fly. Reduce collective enough to gain normal RPM and then establish level flight. Other thing is that you can't hover with single engine unless very low on fuel. When you need to land at FARP you will need to first burn fuel to the minimum or learn to make a landing by establishing a very brief IGE hover only at the last moment over the pad.

You can also use fuelflow as an indicator of engine operation. With 1.2.3 it's possible to get the amount of fuel of any unit with a script and with that you can calculate fuel flow by taking two samples of fuel amount and calculating the difference and dividing it with the time interval between samples.

Kill the enemy before the missile reaches you or drive to cover.

AH-1Z has better avionics than AH-64D Block2. The main difference is that Apache is bigger and heavier, hence it can absorb more damage, fly farther and longer and carry more weapons, armor and equipment. Nowadays the weight of the electronics is way more less than back in the days so Cobra and Apache are pretty much even at that department nowadays but Apache still wins in the size.

Havok, Physx and such are geared for visual effects simulations, they aren't built for producing physically accurate results like you need with ballistic calculations. There's multiple "styles" or ways you can solve the math problems in physics numerically and they all have their pros and cons. While the laws are universal, the way that they are solved in different situations isn't.

Waggling the stick and seeing what happens is a good way to learn if you combine it with thinking about what you did and why things went like they did and look up information on the stuff you saw and experienced. There will still be stuff you don't know even exists until you read about it or someone tells you about it but doing it yourself is still going to be requirement for getting proficient. The best way would be of course to get someone to show you the ropes.

If you have lost hydraulic pressure you can pressurize the brake system by pulling the emergency brake handle and you will get pressure for about 5 (vague memory, might not be correct, but anyways you get brakes back but not for long) full depressions of brake pedals.

The updater should really be able to handle this instead of us re-doing the bindings.

If you manage to dodge all of his missiles you should be able to fire one of your own after him when he flies past you. You need to have him at your 3 or 9 o'clock and start turning immediately when he can't aim his gun at you anymore. You will need to be quick before he gets too far so away that the missile can't reach him anymore. But as a general rule you should run to your CAP fighters or SAM sites for safety as you are not expected to survive without help if being attacked by a fighter in the first place.

Is anyone else having really slowly rotating turrets? It's taking ages to turn the turret for even 90 degrees. When zoomed in the turret rotation speed gets even slower. The turret also accelerates and slows down really slowly like if it had lots more inertia than it should.

Hey Speed, maybe you can give some help with this: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=93217&highlight=cruise+charts

Make your chopper move with wind, ie. fly slowly forwards and sideways with wind so that the wind vane at the nose of the chopper isn't leaning to either side while pointing the nose exactly to the target. You most likely need to have manual mode turned on to get launch authorization. This way the Vikhr will stay in the beam and not be blow out of it by wind upon launch. The Vikhr pipper assumes zero wind and hence won't work in high winds.

Trying to escape air attack by driving away is useless as the plane will catch you easily (duh). When moving you won't be able to hide either. If you can't fight back your only other option is to quickly drive the vehicle under some cover or somehow make it harder to see from air and then abandon it and run far enough of it so that possible stray CBU bomblet won't catch you. All we are missing in DCS is the people running away from their vehicles.

I forgot to mention one important thing about getting good at multitasking. You need to be proficient with the individual tasks at first before practicing putting them together. If you try to practice too many things at the same time you are not focusing intently on any of the tasks and you will not learn them effectively. Focused attention is paramount for effective and quick learning.

If you want to be really effective at combat you need to be able to multitask. Multitasking is all about switching between tasks efficiently and quickly and focusing on the most relevant tasks for the situation. This will happen when you can use all the important weapon, flight and communications systems without thinking and are able to get the information from instruments with a quick glance. This will require lots of playing and also some training. At first it will make you stressed out and mentally tired quickly but after some time it will get easier. After a year or two you will be doing things in the chopper you thought impossible. Other thing very important with Ka-50 is to learn to spot enemy and especially missile launches. This requires training and a proper mind set. While you can learn to fly and use the chopper after some time without really focusing on it that won't happen with spotting. Set yourself a custom mission with some not so deadly targets and at first don't even try to make them hidden. Try to see how fast you can find them and then move them with mission editor a bit and search for them again. When this gets too easy try to put them farther away and in more cluttered environments and do it again. When you can always spot an enemy vehicle within 8-10km range when looking their way you can consider not needing practice anymore. Also experiment with different kinds of visual search patterns and how to use eyes and Shkval together to scan the environment.

That sounds promising. Thanks for your efforts.

Id like to have something that makes it easier to make AD units drive out of their hideout if enemy planes come near and after the target has been killed or has gone away they go back hiding. And when enemy plane comes back againg they will drive out again. Other nice thing would be simple way to make group retreat, ie. turn around and drive the assigned route back to where they came from.

Maybe it would work well enough if you check if you have got more damage like Grimes suggested and then check the direction to nearest enemy ground unit with LOS and use that as attack direction. It will not be perfect but I think it could be made to work if the mission designer considers the simplifications and tries to avoid situations where this simplification wouldn't work.

Use search, there's many topics of this. You need to manually activate 3D vision for DCS from registry if I remember correctly. It will be awesome except that HUD will be useless for aiming in 3D ie. you can't hit anything which makes 3D only useful for casual flying.

Thanks for the support. My post was written on a spur of the moment so it's kind of a sketch of the idea I'm after. Here's some more ideas about the topic I got after yesterday, some improving the base idea and some adding possible new features. Skill levels should modify the spotting speed but not spotting distance. The spotting delay algorithm I described is valid only for visual search, ie. naked eye and electro optics. Humans will find targets faster if they know where to search. Maybe this could be simulated with having "known enemy location" zones assigned in ME for groups. If the unit has had eyes on the zone long enough and not seen anything, the zone will be ignored afterwards. It could be nice to be able to assign or remove these zones also with triggers. AI could also create these according to radio traffic, explosions or smoke. RWR indications should also improve spotting ability to the direction of the RWR spike. All of the modifiers that improve spotting ability to one direction should also reduce the ability to other directions. This might be best simulated with turning the primary FOV towards certain directions of interest like target WP, enemy zone or RWR spikes in some kind of pattern, like if the pilot turns his head. This gets somewhat complicated and I'm not sure how doable this is. It's mainly useful for aircrafts and CAS aircrafts in particular but fighter AI could be improved with this also. Readiness level is something that could be simulated somewhat easily. Readiness is basically a time it takes for the unit or group to spring to action after idling for a long time. Readiness level would range from people sleeping to finger on the trigger (or launch button). Currently the AI is always finger on the trigger but does stow radar and launchers if no enemies are present. Base readiness would be the readiness time when the unit isn't alerted, ie. if imminent contact isn't expected and could be set in ME or with triggers. After alert the units readiness would start to rapidly improve and reach the maximum quickly and then start to decline. The readiness would drop gradually from max readiness to high readiness in about 10-20 minutes if there's no contact or after the last contact to the enemy. Any contact with enemy would again put readiness back to the maximum level. Readiness level would also affect the units spotting delay and ability. You could set times for max, high and base readiness and also the decline time from max to high readiness in ME or with triggers. Moving units would always be at least at high readiness but triggers, nearby explosions or nearby units making contact would put them on max.

I have tried using pop-up, bob-up and ambush tactics (using Ka-50 or A-10) against AI but these never work as the AI will spot you the moment you unmask and starts shooting right away nullifying the surprise factor these tactics depend on. This is a problem with both ground and air units. The biggest point of figuring out tactics is to gain surprise as without it you always end up with 50/50 attrition battle that is won mostly by "numbers". With "numbers" I mean number of troops and their level of training and quality and capability of equipment. When you surprise someone it means they can't react to you as fast as they would otherwise because of confusion or not being prepared. Surprising someone means you do something they don't expect. So in order to getting surprised you need to expect something ie. in order to have a surprisable AI it needs to have expectations. In Steel Beasts for example this is done by assigning the AI a primary field of view which is a sector in front of the AI where units get spotted faster. The mission maker, commander or AI routine tries to align the unit so as to have the primary FOV pointing towards the enemy. The primary FOV width can also be adjusted, with narrower one improving spotting ability inside the primary FOV and reducing spotting ability outside it. For the ground AIs part the surprisability is mainly a matter of spotting time and spotting time is a matter of direction of attention, level of readiness and environmental factors. Environmental factors are already simulated in maximum spotting distance quite well. We now need a function that uses those same attributes that gives a number which tells how quickly a certain sized object can be spotted at certain range. Something like this: "function spottingtime(backgroundtype, range, size, FOVfactor)". FOVfactor is a number which depends of the spotters direction of attention ie. unit behind a spotter gets smaller FOVfactor and unit in front a bigger one. When the AI has LOS for the first time to a unit it will start a counter adding fractions of spottingtime to the counter. When the counter has reached a certain value the AI becomes aware of the unit. If LOS to the unit is lost a certain number is reduced from the counter until LOS is gained again or counter reaches zero. It could be made so that when the counter has higher value it gets reduced slower than if it has lower value. This way units that have been spotted will be re-spotted faster but unit visible only intermittently will not get spotted easily over time. If there can be some randomization in the required counter value it would be better but not required. All what I proposed for ground units I propose also for air units with some added stuff. With air units it gets more complicated as they need to make more of their own decisions and hence have more possible expectations that affect spotting ability. Humans derive expectations by drawing conclusions from known information based on experience and reasoning. Fighter pilot would do this by obtaining intelligence of war situation, getting briefed of the mission and orders and creating a plan. All of this is done before the mission is flown so there's nothing to stop us giving us expectations to the AI in ME, ie. creating some kind of briefing for the AI. We can already do some things like this like tell the AI how to react to threat or how to use radar, etc. All we need is to have more of these "mission orders". One of the biggest annoyances with air units in DCS is that they never lose awareness of their target after spotting them. You can't hide or evade from an interceptor behind a wall of mountains after he has had a first glimpse of you. Deciding what to do after losing contact is a though problem for AI as it can't be solved precisely and it likely doesn't even have a correct answer. For a human it's a matter of mission orders, combat situation, enemy behavior and experience. The enemy behavior might give away that he's trying to bait you into a trap or he might be hiding near a know or likely SAM site. Taking these kinds of information into account isn't easy to do and will hog lot's of CPU power. So we need some cognitive shortcut for the AI that produces plausible and less unrealistic behavior while using few resources. My proposition is to solve this issue with ME switches and some simple AI logic. First you need to tell the AI if it will pursue lost contacts at all, only over friendly territory or always. You wouldn't pursue an enemy into a SAM trap which is done by not flying inside airspace determined risky in intelligence brief. -> We need to assign zones in ME(with triggers) where the AI doesn't pursue enemies or go look for them in case contact is lost. The AI could also add zones to the list on its own based on RWR indications and radio traffic. In addition to danger zones there should be safe zones where you can expect to not have enemy ground troops or SAMs present. If the AI loses contact during dogfight he will simply follow the last known trajectory of the enemy while gradually expanding the primary FOV. If a BWR contact is lost it's determined first if it was due to notching or terrain masking. If it's notching you go lower and search the enemy from its last known trajectory (AI simulates where the aircraft will fly if keeps doing what it's doing, keeping direction and speed constant and avoiding terrain). If it was due to terrain masking you get higher and search the enemy from its last known trajectory. If the unit should unmask due to it's trajectory but it doesn't it will be searched from it's last known position. If the unit can shoot back at close range the AI will not fly directly to the position but flank it with enough range. If the unit isn't in its last known position a SSE event is raised and the AI will resume it's previous task. The event will provide the type of unit (exact or rough (A-10, slow&low radar contact) depending on AIs knowledge of the contact), time and last known location of the contact so mission designer can make the AI do what the mission requires. I hope the devs would be considering the AI behavior more as it's one of the biggest things that makes the environment feel real or fake (in DCS case fake). AI also affects a lot what kind of tactics can and should be used ie. how to use the equipment you are trying to simulate. For example if you can't use typical helicopter tactics due to AI limitations the simulation isn't very good representation of helicopter combat regardless of how well the weapons and hydraulics have been modeled. Not that I'm not enjoying the sim (except the can't hide from AI feature) but besides game (or just graphics?) engine the AI is one of the biggest trouble areas needing update.

Currently the AI has super fast spotting ability so you can't surprise them by popping up behind treeline anyway. They will spot you the moment you unmask and they will start shooting as soon as their guns point at you, which leaves no time to shoot at them. The only way is to stay back at stand-off range.

During OIF there were several Apaches shot up so badly that they couldn't be repaired anymore (or it would have cost more than buying a new one) but they could still fly some ~20min trip back to base with the damage. Only armor Apache has is some composite armor around cockpit (inside the fuselage) to protect pilots and bulletproof windshield (the 2 lower sections). Ka-50 has bullet proof windows all around and titanium cockpit but no armor elsewhere.

One trick that at least used to work is to put the missile in the beam and pull max G split-S while keeping the missile at beam. This is easier to do than the turn towards the missile as you don't need as precise timing and you don't make yourself easier target for follow up shots but could instead end up getting behind some hill or something. After avoiding the first missile you could have enough speed and time to outrun the following missiles by turning away from the launcher immediately after evading the first missile.

Yes, it's possible. First get the position(3D) of the unit and then get the AGL altitude of that position with the functions described in SSE wiki.