Damage playing with the switches

[topdog]

Assuming I didn't touch any of the weapon systems, cyclic was 'neutral', power never went higher than automatic, collective was always on the floor, gear is intact and lever never touched...

 

.. is it then known if damage is modelled to the point that if I sufficiently screw up startup/shutdown procedures, that the systems will be affected to the point they can no longer be used?

 

Like complete inability to restart engine 1 no matter how hard I try, yet engine 2 will still start/stop quite happily? (since this seemed to happen to me twice in succession, but only after I'd already landed so not sure if I did engine damage that way, I'm concerned by the coincidence).

 

Or is it just a matter of troubleshooting the cause each time and fixing that? Whilst I was playing around trying to figure it out, I did notice that oil pressure for left engine had dropped below the lower needle point and wondered if that was the cause and/or fixable.

 

If I know it can ultimately be fixed without needing a base replacement / ground crew repair, then I'll happily screw around with it a lot more :D Kind of like a rubiks cube.. I may not know what I'm doing, but I don't fear permanent damage whilst learning how to solve the puzzle.

 

On the other hand, if I can cause permanent damage, I am going to need to get an idea of what to watch for, otherwise I'll waste a lot of time getting nowhere with it.

 

Does that make sense? Insights appreciated, apologies in advance for not fully RTFM yet :P

[Frederf]

It's pretty easy to flub an engine start at the beginning of a mission. When I forget to engage the fuel cutoff level to open in time I have to go through the crank (false?) start cycle once with all the necessary wait times to let things spin down. Darn engine won't start up until I patiently go through the whole process.

 

A track file would be invaluable to sorting out what exactly is going on (lastMission.trk is automatically generated).

[topdog]

Thanks Frederf. As fortune would have it, a timely bump of the Leading Edge Training thread today revealed a video I'd not watched before, and covered the engine cranking need/process. Looks like 2+2=4 here for what I probably experienced before based on your description, (but I didn't know how to deal with it).

 

Good to see I could give it a try to clear the fault if it happens again, and this video is a good next step for me to cover.

 

Cheers!

[sweinhart3]

I had kind of an interesting situation happen the other day. I had just got shot up. My right engine was on fire and I was going down. I pushed the fire extinguisher and cutoff the fuel to both engines. I extended the gear and went in for an autorotation landing. I suck at this since I so rarely do it but I managed to land with damage to the nose gear and left main gear. After an external view, I could see the right engine destroyed but the main blades and left engine were intact. Im still in enemy territory but I thought what the heck. Lets see if I can start her back up and hobble to base on 1 engine. After going thru the startup sequence and opening the main fuel line, the engine started to spin up to around 6000RPM then shut down. I retried the startup 3 times with the same result. Ive never seen this before and not really sure what happened. It spun up well above electric rpms and the exhaust temp indicator showed it was burning fuel but it could not spin up to operating rpms. Needless to say I had to end the mission but this is a curious case for me unless someone can explain it.

[topdog]

Did you keep the track file? Would be awesome to be able to replay it, fast-forward to the auto-rotation landing, then see what's up and play around with it :) I didn't think of it myself at the time but will do from now on.

 

Can't be worse than me attempting to 'walk home' to base one time heh. I didn't realise until later that my ejected pilot and forest wanderings were all captured in TacView at the same time though... :doh: I got a laugh out of seeing one of my apparently shattered pieces of shark stay in the track replay, and then start to scurry around on the ground like a small bug/insect hoping not to get noticed.