yea me too. i find the C-hog and the eagle just boring, but the rest of the stable are all interesting rides. Viggen afterburner feels powerfull as fuck. big ol roar and you just accelerate like a stuck pig. F-5 on the other hand is a tiny little hot rod. it flies like the lightwheight it is. seeing that sidewinder on the wingtip nose up and down as you load up the alpha and let it go is freakish.
i tried a bit of the ka-50 this afternoon, but the cold start training had me stumped. i dont mind not figuring out all the avionics right away, but not being able to crank the bloody engine galls me. I do intend to learn it though, not only is it built by soviet engineers, it looks cool as all heck.
i cant wait for the harrier. it has all the toys to drop and according to the preview vids it takes some ace stick and rudder skills to land properly. i dont have those, but i do like to aspire to em š
Well in VR the things designating what button to push are not very accurate. Some guesswork is involved. At least the tooltip popups are in english :D I read cyrillic but the dude in the training mish does not refer to those when he tells you where a knob should go.
Anyway, I did manage to get the engines going, flew a bit and managed to land her more or less back in the spot where I started without pranging the kite not even a little bit! yay me! (and my phantastically accurate warthog HOTAS for supersmoovity)
So on to the next mish, navigation. Oh my. A simulated 486DX4 that does not talk to the rest of the aircraft systems. Sweet. And then he casually told me to trim after taking off. And trim button did fuck-all. So I went back to menu, fiddled with control setting. Still dick. So back to main menu, set it in options/special/ka50 to ācentering stickā which i would think be the proper setting for the spring-loaded hog, right? still fucking dick. I did not enjoy the workout of holding the hog forward almost to its max extension for the duration of the flight. The mission script also did not move forward because the trimming never happened.
The fun thing is the Ka-50 is the most stable helicopter in DCS once you understand the autopilot and stability systems. I donāt fly it much for a piloting challenge anymore because itās so easyāit goes where you point it and has power to spare.
In other news, Strait of Hormuz teaser. Iām always willing to throw shade at the DCS developers, because they work very slowly and by all appearances have a poorly-organized and hard-to-maintain codebase, but I will give them credit for the DCS 2.x engine. It looks fantastic and runs well.
which makes startin up 1.5 for training that more painful.
And speaking of starting things up, having sort of memorized how to boot up the Ka-50 and the F-5E I am starting to see the joy in pure switchology. It just feels so coolto go flick, click twist push and punch and hear the beast come alive. Feels even more real that way.
I made a little exercise run in the nevada terrain (dem graphix! holy hell!) but then found out I have zero knowledge of the Kamovs weapon and targetting systems and my mastery of its flight systems isnt nowhere near anything that could bear the name tactical. so I flew it back to the barn, landed it on a sloping hangar roof and promptly slid off that to end in a flaming wreck. Fun times.
Next up tiger. Started her up. twist this, turn that flickety flick and zoom goes the engine. Took off. That wing flex is eerie realistic. Dropped my load and missed by only half a country mile. zipped around and around trying to sidewinder the target helos. Things just wouldnae come off the rails! so i gunned the fuck out of em and flew back to the barn. epically flubbed the landing by coming in way too hot, bounced, porpoised, ended flaming in the weeds within walking distance of the airfield.
Any landing you can walk away from, amirite? Turns out I needex to dial the stores armi g switch back to safe after dropping the eggs.
Viggen is sitting there growling ādu tror att du kan ta mig, punkā at me.
Part deux, in which our intrepid hero manages to wastefully lay waste to some motherfuckers and makes the mother of all fuckups. No screenies because i was too busy at the time. suck it.
So I studied and exercised and studied some more on Kamovās hellbeast. Read all of the articles on SimHQ about the Hokums aerodynamics, trimmer and autopilot. Memorized through repetition how to boot it up. Learned how to get it moving and stop it moving at a place more or less of my choosing. Even learned how to activate the Shkval targetting system and fire Vikhr totalhelldeath at the thing below the pipper.
I loaded up 2.1 again, and my area51 training scenario. You start off cold and dark in the deathmachine of your choice at groom lake just before sunset. Just north of the airfield is a small range of hills and beyond those I put a shilka radar guided bundle of ratata, a Sa-9 missile thrower and a bunch of tanks that drive along the valley to park next to the air defence units. Also two choppers because those need killinā too.
Thatās what I was up again in my Kamov. I crept up the hills all sneaky like and tactical. Controlled too. Then I spotted the SAM at like two clicks, panicked in a controlled fashion and managed to turn tail and head off back behind a hill before the things could turn on me and make roasted shark fin soup. Letās try that shit again. I very carefully put the thing in a hover a mite farther away just behind a ridge. Came up. Came up some more. Paused the simulation to soothe a crying kid who should have been sleeping an hour ago.
Unpaused the sim. Fixed controls so slewing, resetting and zooming the Shkval are on the HOTAS. Slewed to the Shilka and tried to lock target. It refused to even acknowledge my button press. Well fuck it, the laser is on and on-target so I gently pressed the trigger. WHOOSH! huh? Two missiles? I didnt ask for two?! one should be enough right? I guided them onto the Shilka which blew up in a spectacular fireball. His SAM buddy started scurrying around in a panic, but the next missile was on the way. Another hit.
The tanks got slaughtered one after another by my slowly but steadily climbing helicopter. I must have been about 900 meters up when I ran out of Vikhr guided punches. Next up chopper on chopper murder. I tried targetting the two Gazelles with Shkval but again it refused to lock. No amount of fiddling with the targetting gate thing would do. So I put the gun in fixed mode and made gun runs at the buggers until both got rekt. Shooting is so much easier in VR than on a flat screen.
Satisfied I laid in a course home. Climbing the hill went nice and easy. Cresting it I made a mistake. My tail clipped something and the nose went wildly up. I panicked and ejected. My steed shed its rotorblades and fired me like I was its last and best bit of firework. What an ignoble end to my first live fire Ka-50 hop.
@Fishbreath you were right, it is a remarkably stable and easy to fly machine, once you get the hang of it. Have you any idea why the Shkval refused to lock up the targets?
Nope, thatās a new one for me. Granted, I havenāt flown the Shark in a while. Maybe itās broken. DCS has a long list of problems currently left unfixed. If I have some cockpit time Iāll look into it; as far as I know, though, it should just be point and click.
One of the nice things about the Ka-50 is that the stability and autopilot make rocket attacks almost trivial. Use turn on target mode in forward flight to point at the Shkvalās point of aim, use altitude, attitude, and speed to control the impact pipper. Set it up so that the impact pipper crosses the waypoint mark at about 2km, and the only thing you have to do is pull the trigger.
As far as memorizing startup goes, I usually go with checklists, and moreover I always write down little hints on where switches are. My flight sim papers folder is littered with little notations like āMain battery - ŠŠŠŠ ŠŠŠŠ£Š - POH LLTTTā for a switch on the pilot overhead panel, roughly two switches left and three switches toward the top. I surmise thatās harder to do with VR, though, which is one thing Iād miss making the switch. I donāt actually know how to do very much by memory. I need my cheat sheets.
Well, the rift at least has a feature I like to call PIR (Peek Into Reality) Where you can look down your nose thru the gap at the things on your desk, such as cheat sheets, keyboards or wayward pets. So no, thats not really a big roadblock.
VR makes memorizing where the switches are actaully easier, because your head movement is part of the pattern, so it becomes a bit like muscle memory. I use VR zoom a lot to read the tooltips and or labels of buttons and switches. I can read cyrillic, but do not understand enough Russian to really read the cockpit in its native language :sadface:
The simbroās at Mudspike thought it might have had something to do with the lighting conditions. Shkval is not IR then? guess Iāll have to make it an afternoon mission then lol.
Nope, the Shkvalās a plain old TV camera. You can cheese it into an LLTV unit by cranking the brightness and contrast knobs, since DCS doesnāt simulate analog noise, but you canāt lock on at night unless thereās an illumination flare.
Thanks to your inspiration, I spent an hour or two flying the Shark last night. Iād almost forgotten how dead easy it is to make it do what you want. The drift line on the HUD below 50 km/h is one of my favorite helicopter features anywhere, I can still land it on a dime, and the Vikhrs remain a fearsome piece of armament.
I fired up my shooting range mission and dropped 40 rockets on the soft targets, then returned home and reloaded with Vikhrs and rockets for the hard targets. The Vikhring went fine, but I always forget how fearsome modern IFVs are. I got a little too close on my rocket run, about 1.6 or 1.8 kilometers, and thatās in range for Bradleys. The laser warning system went off, and a few seconds later I heard the Bushmasters hitting home. That pretty much ended the mission.
Create a google sheet with the HOTAS button references (I use a template with pictures of my HOTAS) and all of the commands for the particular game
Save this google sheet as a favorite in the Steam browser
Open up the browser in Steam and run the game. One click on the Vive menu button brings up the google doc to refresh my memory (which button for &%$#! speed breaks?!)
Profit? (Not really, but it does work pretty great)
There are also picture-in-picture apps for Vive (not sure about Rift) that let you bring up a separate app window. Havenāt tried any of those.
Or make a pdf out of the cheat sheet and compile it into DCS as a kneeboard page. No external app syphoning precious CPU cycles from DCS.
I have changed my 2.1 exercise scenario to a daytime one. Somehow the shilka seems a whole lot deadlier now that it can see me. I thought them things were radar guided. It blasted the fuck outa me tho. Kamovs die funny. Lots of bits going all over the landscape and a wreck you can walk away from.
I spent some time yesterday messing around with Il-2 Battle of Stalingrad, and came away with a renewed appreciation for Il-2 1946. It probably isnāt fair to say that thereās so much more to do and so many more places in which to do it, given the relative fidelities of the two games, but Iām honestly not sure what 1C/777 are doing to have so few flyables this deep into nu-Il-2ās lifespan.
Iām also waiting for the first modern flight sim with some kind of guided procedural generationāprovide a heightmap and some overlay maps for terrain types, say, and let the engine build a map off of that. Rise of Flight, nu-Il-2, and DCS all have this problem where, because mapmaking is such an enormous chore, there are no (or very few) community maps, and weāre stuck flying in the same places for years and even decades.
Speaking of DCS, though, some interesting news from the latest newsletter:
DCS P-51D made twice the profit DCS: A-10C did. Thatās part of the reason why theyāve been big on DCS: WW2 stuff; thereās a dedicated internal team for it.
DCS Harrier early access releases tomorrow.
DCS 2.5 (the unified, multi-map version) is releasing āin the coming weeksā.
Iāll believe the latter when it finishes downloading.
DCS Harrier is pretty brilliant so far, though unfinished (as expected).
Itās a marvelously peppy little plane, which makes sense when you consider that a requirement for vertical takeoff/landing is a thrust-to-weight ratio of greater than 1:1. Low down, it accelerates from 180 knots after takeoff to about 400 in a handful of seconds.
A lot of the weaponry isnāt finished, and there are some issues with the targeting pod, but the old Angle Rate Bombing System is plenty useful, and well-implemented to boot. When you lose the target out the nose camera, it hands off to the INS and automatically points the camera when the targetās back in the field of view.
Hovering is difficult, harder in my opinion than with helicopters. Still havenāt mastered the vertical landing.
I got the module, but flew only a single flight in it, one that did not end in a landing lol XD
That take-off tho! whoa^3!
Currently Iām studying the Mirage. They have updated her FM in the same patch that dropped the AV-8. Sheās now proper fast and doesnāt pig out after a half turn anymore.
I have finally figured out her radar and A2A missile systems. Last up is the nav/attack system and I am a proficient mirage pilot. Thatās when Iāll start on the Harrier Potter.
2.5 is the version that will bring the 2.0 version of the caucasus (free) map. It will end the bloody fork, or at least make it less of a break. They are currently squashing bugs and porting the content (missions, training etc) from the 1.5 caucasus to the 2.5 one.
I have been flying 2.2 (nevada) some. Itās so sweet. Looks good, sounds good, runs good with nice smooth frames in VR. And then I tried the Ka-50, found I had forgotten how to Shkval and needed to rerun the training. Fuck! back to choppy ugly-ass 1.5 it is :(
Did you guys catch the news that DCS is going to do away with starforce DRM? so good! They are going with the same style of DRM Il-2 has, where you log in to their servers to get access to your content. Too bad for people without interwebs access. Welcome to the 21st century.
honhonhon! who needs an instructor when you have a pad with chucks guide and a toilet break! I Vikhrāed the crap out of my targets after a little bathroom study! I <3 the Ka-50. VR and helicopters are a match made in heaven. Heard a rumor Belsimtek (them that built the Mi-8, the sabre and the F-5E) are working on a Mi-24 Hind :D~~~ <drool smily that)
