Ability to store munitions in the Cargo / Troop section

[diveplane]

love to see animation of soldiers deploy in and out the mi24 and see them in back...

 

 

[Jazz]

IIRC I heard that the Mi24 often had weapons stored in the back section of the helicopter to be able to rearm away from base and FARPS. I would love to see this in DCS as it could create an interesting dynamic for players.

Edited January 17, 2021 by Jazz

[SmukY]

Yeah sure +1 but afaik that's a thing of DCS's core and not devs making Mi-24

[upyr1]

If it is standard practice in real life it should be in the game. I guess this could be done by giving you a limited ground crew menu when you land outside of an airbase or farp. You would just need some check to make sure you don't end up with infinite ammo

[upyr1]

Same for the other helicopters as well. 

[Northstar98]

+1 even if they just teleport in, having them represented in the cabin would be great (same can also be said for the UH-1H).

 

With cargo I'd also like to see, though unsure how it can be made to work (AFAIK they carried reloads).

[Northstar98]

1 hour ago, upyr1 said:

If it is standard practice in real life it should be in the game. I guess this could be done by giving you a limited ground crew menu when you land outside of an airbase or farp. You would just need some check to make sure you don't end up with infinite ammo

 

Maybe there could be a cargo manager (ideally), that would allow you to configure what's in the back or alternatively something in the loadout editor.

 

Only thing is requiring you to land before reloading.

[Lucas_From_Hell]

It's was never standard procedure, and outside of Wikipedia I'm struggling to find sources to confirm this actually happened.

 

From a logical standpoint, it made no sense: the vast majority of flights in Afghanistan happened with a crew of two, as the crew chief provided very little use, increased risk to human life and added weight in a situation where the helicopters already struggled due to the local weather and terrain. It was also heavily mined and, as typical with guerrilla warfare, front lines were abstract and the enemy could appear anywhere. I find it somewhere between unlikely and impossible that they would take a third crewmember, a full weapons load plus enough at the back to make a reload worth it, then land somewhere in bandit country hoping they wouldn't sit on top of a mine or get ambushed by the mujahideen, and service the helicopter as if it's no big deal.

 

Running some quick numbers here, the take-off weight for the Mi-24 at sea level in standard conditions leaves you about 3200kg for fuel, crew and weapons, once the IR exhaust suppressors are fitted. Let's be generous and say three fully-suited people would get you 100kg each, so that's 300kg. A single B-8V20A pod weights 100kg empty, so times four that's 400kg. Twenty S-8KO rockets, or a single pod's load, get you 226kg, times six (four pods plus a reload for two) that's 1356kg. The GSh-30-2K carries 750 rounds usually, which means 300kg. Four Shturm missiles weight 186kg in total. Our tally is at 2542kg so far, meaning there's only 658kg left for fuel, or 31.3% of the internal fuel capacity (2100kg max). That's to make this thing fly at at sea level.

 

I don't have the available data for the Mi-24, but we can extrapolate from the Mi-8MTV2 documentation as they have the same engine, with the caveat that the Mi-24P performs worse at higher altitudes due to its smaller rotor disk. The difference between maximum weight for sea level and 1000m in the IGE hover graph is around 1500kg. I can't see how it was done.

[lmp]

Another consideration is if the crew chief plus two pilots (all having very limited tools and equipment) would be physically able to put the weapons on the pylons. I can't imagine three people pulling a FAB-250 out of the cargo compartment and safely suspending it under the wing. All on uneven ground somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

[unknown]

17 hours ago, lmp said:

Another consideration is if the crew chief plus two pilots (all having very limited tools and equipment) would be physically able to put the weapons on the pylons. I can't imagine three people pulling a FAB-250 out of the cargo compartment and safely suspending it under the wing. All on uneven ground somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

If i think about ammunition transported in the cargo section for rearming i think about shturm atgm(tube with quick connector) or the unguided rockets which one pushes into the back of the launcher/container but never about bombs. 

[lmp]

8 minutes ago, unknown said:

If i think about ammunition transported in the cargo section for rearming i think about shturm atgm(tube with quick connector) or the unguided rockets which one pushes into the back of the launcher/container but never about bombs. 

 

What I meant is, assuming this is at all realistic and practical to implement, there would need to be some serious limits on what can and what can't be done, taking into account both what the helicopter can carry and what the crew can accomplish.

 

It is my hunch that it wasn't really done "often", as OP wrote, but at most occasionally if at all in combat. If anybody has any good info on this, I would be grateful if he provided it here. It just seems too impractical and the negatives (mostly weighing the helicopter down) defeat the positives. If the helicopter was able to carry more weapons and ammo, wouldn't they design it to carry more under the wings, ready to go? 

 

A much better way to accomplish rearming and refueling near the front line is to use a FARP. CasmoTV in his great video on the topic explains how it is done at least in a NATO army.

[Jazz]

Yeah I cant remember for the life of me where I heard or saw it that they do store weapons in the back of the chopper. I wish I could find it, part of me feels it was from the Interview the Russian developer did with another streamer and it came up in converstaion, although I may be wrong. Could've been from another video etc. 

 

I did find this https://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/row/mi-24.htm, It may not be the most credible site to source the information from but it hints that It was an actual thing.

[Rabies]

If you look at the cobra in Vietnam, the crew would rearm the helicopters at FARPS, but rockets only. The mini guns were too time consuming. I do personally think that reaming times should take a little longer in DCS, and repair times extended too. 

[Avimimus]

On 1/18/2021 at 12:14 PM, Lucas_From_Hell said:

Running some quick numbers here, the take-off weight for the Mi-24 at sea level in standard conditions leaves you about 3200kg for fuel, crew and weapons, once the IR exhaust suppressors are fitted. Let's be generous and say three fully-suited people would get you 100kg each, so that's 300kg. A single B-8V20A pod weights 100kg empty, so times four that's 400kg. Twenty S-8KO rockets, or a single pod's load, get you 226kg, times six (four pods plus a reload for two) that's 1356kg. The GSh-30-2K carries 750 rounds usually, which means 300kg. Four Shturm missiles weight 186kg in total. Our tally is at 2542kg so far, meaning there's only 658kg left for fuel, or 31.3% of the internal fuel capacity (2100kg max). That's to make this thing fly at at sea level.

 

Well... wouldn't it be more like flying with a crew of two (200kg) and no Shturm.... so the tally is 1956kg with 1244kg left for fuel (about 2/3rds capacity)... so twice as much fuel as you estimated... much more feasible.

 

If they are UB32 pods... then the rocket weight is more like 161kg per pod so the tally drops further to 1566kg, so 1634kg of fuel...

 

As for the idea of a helicopter landing without any allied troops to protect it and then having crew dismount to self-reload... well... that is pretty 'gutsy'... I can't ever see it being a standard operating procedure (officially at least)... even if some pilots felt they could pick landing sites where they'd be relatively safe.