Recent air combat sim recommendations?

Pffft, the ground crew can handle that.

What are you doing that’s causing the rotor to come off?

It’s a good question, I think it might be because the cyclic is pressed strongly in a random direction when I am landing, and so the angled rotor somehow collides with the ground. I come in with some speed too which never helps.

Why not stabilize a bit before landing, try to get out of that PIO(1) (stop “stirring the pot”) and then gently let it down? Short measured movements of the cyclic, and try arresting your motions by going left, right a short slight bit before center.

(1) PIO : Pilot Induced Oscilation. The machine banks left, the pilot corrects by feeding in right cyclic, but overdoes it, leading the machine to bank right. Now he feeds in cyclic left to arrest the movement and correct it. This leads to a swaying motion that can, if not checked increase in amplituted until the situation becomes untenable and bits start coming off.

Yeah that’s true… The trouble is that I always feel like I am battling against that state in the helicopter where you drop like a rock suddenly, I forget what it’s called, is that vortex ring state? I need to fix the way I approach the landing point, and I think then when I flare at the end it won’t cause so much commotion.

My best landing so far was actually when I approached a runway like a plane and let the skids live up to their name.

There’s two ways to flub your landing with too much vertical velocity (IE coming down too hard)

One is settling with power. You are coming down and you pull collective to arrest you descent rate but there just is not enough powerrrrr and the machine goes crunch.

The other is a vortex ring. You are coming down without much horizontal (forward, sideways or backwards) velocity and they blades are having to deal with their own downwash. This makes them far less effective at carrying you, and to add insult to injury, pulling more power will only exacerbate the situation! When that happens, a little sideslip (stick and rudder, coordinated and immediately arrested!) will get you out of the vortex ring. Or just push forward, get some speed on the bird. Go around and try again.

The trick to landing a huey is to take it slow and careful. Be gentle. You do not have a huge power reserve and no magical russian flight computer to take care of the wobbles. Take it easy. Gentle. Easy… easy… there.

Once you have five hundred landings and a thousand hours on the bird you get to throw it around and slide it in like in the movies.

The Huey is very sensitive to zero or negative G because of a phenomenon called mast bumping, where the rotor smacks into the rotor mast and pops the jesus nut off.

Rolling landings are perfectly acceptable. That’s why the Russian helicopters have wheels.

Vortex ring state is the one. The important thing to remember is that you’re particularly vulnerable to it when slowing down. Above a certain speed, you’re in what’s called the effective translational lift regime, where the airflow from the helicopter’s forward motion is sufficient to provide extra lift over the blades. As you slow down, you lose translational lift, so you have to add a big whack of power all at once, or else you start descending fast just as you’re getting into the state where VRS can happen. Watch your variometer as you’re slowing down and concentrate on maintaining a steady descent (or steady altitude, depending).

I just took a short hop in the huey and i am rusty Broke three helicopters in quick succession, one flight even ending in a flaming crater! So hey, you aint doin so bad! :P

Been spendin’ far too much of my simming time in the MiG-15. Such a joyous little thing that.

Sky Knights on Steam!

…well okay, it’s really more of a jet based MOBA, but it’s the Top Gun MOBA you never knew you needed!

You lost me at MOBA.

So, F-18/Persian Gulf Map/Su-33 bundle coming to the DCS shop on Oct 1st, and my rtx 2080 shipped this morning. 'tis a good weekend.

Shame about the tacked-on FC3 module, but I’ll probably still grab the bundle as I’ve been waiting for discounts on the 18 and the Gulf map, and it still works out fairly cheap.

Nothing wrong with the su33. It’s interesting. Very different. Even if you never touch it that pack is a good deal tho.

Yeah, basically buy the F-18 and get the Persian Gulf map and the Su-33 for $10.

Yeah I already own FC3.

So by ‘tacked on’ I mean it’s an old plane split out from another ‘bundle’, included with the newer content.

You are in for simming nirvana my bro. You VR?

Yes. Looking forward to the 2080 pushing things even harder. The 1070 is good, but the 2080 will be a nice jump.

My 1070 will have to make do for at least a year more. Do tell of the glory that is a fully operational 2080 :)

I have been messing with a thingie calledVoice Attack and a plugin for that called VAICOM. Both are payware, in that the functionality needed to really get them to work is behind a paywall. The good thing is that those paywalls are very low indeed, a tenner for voiceattack and like six bucks for the VAICOM DCS scripts.

What it does is use windows speech recognition to take over from the DCS comms menu. So instead of pressing \ then F2, then F1 in order to get your flight to attack bandits, you can just push your red radio talk button and say “Attack Bandits” and the flight responds with a hail of missiles. It. is. Awesome.

It also does take a liberal dose of 1337 PC masterrace hackery. Not only do you need to read at least three paragraphs of boring text to your computer to get it accustomed to your voice and diction, you also need to read all 480+ of VAICOM’s “words” (things like Bandit and Request Landing) to it. The installer did not work as described in the manual so I had to revert to manual installation of the scripts into DCS. This meant copy-pasting reams of code into certain files in the DCS folders.

And now I tell my ground crew “ground power on” and all the blinky things in the cockpit go on. Then I say “ATC request engine start” and the tower tells me sure go ahead and crank 'em. And so on.

Of course I also added some extra bits. For example I added a command “Recenter goggles” that tells voiceattack to press CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-V for a tenth of a second. Then I told DCS that those keys in that chord means VR re-center. Same for pressing G, as I don’t often bind that to my HOTAS, but it almost always works. That one has two voice commands, “wheels up” and “wheels down” and that works too. So sweet.

Sorry to rehash this if you already mentioned it up thread, but what VR setup do you guys use?

Not sure exactly what you mean… but I use Oculus Rift, and a Logitech G940 HOTAS. No special seat or mounting, I just stick stuff on my desk.