KingGhidorah

I recall somebody on Avsim had previously labelled it "Jcommitus", a disease in which the afflicted is compelled to change their simulation of choice several times per year!

Wobbie, what do you mean about immersive and realistic being something that one must choose between because you can't have them both? I completely disagree. I feel a lot of immersion in DCS/FSX and all the while flying study-level type aircraft which I think most would term "realistic" as far as desktop simulations go. In DCS much of that immersion/realism comes right out of the box, or relatively inexpensively, while in FSX, unfortunately many expensive addons had to be added to get there (and I don't like that). But realism and immersion are not mutually exclusive.

I've done the thing where you pull the saitek throttle apart to clean the potentiometers with rubbing alcohol. It worked, but it was a pain. For future reference, what kind of cleaner, that you can just spray in there, do you recommend, Glynn?

The Rotary section is a pretty lonely corner of Avsim, isn't it Gregg? I like helis and have looked into a number of them, but still only have the Dodosim in FSX. Every thread you'll find still calls the Dodosim the king of helicopter flight models for FSX. More than once I've read the Aerosoft Huey ranks #2. For all the rest I guess you really have to get that Helicopter Total Realism package to make them have comparable flight models. I was going to pick another helicopter and then go get the HTR for it, but then I decided I didn't feel like messing around with it. Except for Dodo, I'll just leave FSX for fixed wing aviation. Lately, after spending some substantial time flying helis in another sim, even the Dodo feels like it might be a little tame, but maybe that is accurate (I remember the time when I thought it was impossibly twitchy, but it doesn't feel like that at anymore).

You are correct, jfri, it IS available. Not sure where I was that led me to believe it was not, but sorry for conveying that incorrect info.

I was thinking about modifying my setup to the Wheel Stand Pro. What I have now works great, but if I were to get one of those extension tubes to extend the joystick handle a few inches, I would have to start thinking about a way to have the joystick ultimately mounted with something on the floor, not the desk. The Wheel Stand Pro appears to be the best solution to that. Unfortunately this TM Warthog Joystick Adaptor, that Jfri speaks of, that lets you do away with the "table" part of the Wheelstand, and mount the joystick directly to the upright shaft without the joystick base plate, appears to no longer be made, and I would need that too.

So jfri, you became a bit of a "cockpit builder" guy afterall! Glad to know that you enjoy the Warthog, and that some of the advice in this thread ended up helping you make some good purchase decisions. I knew you would like the Warthog! I've been thinking about the 100mm extension tube too in order to eeek out a little more precision from the stick (for helicopters), but I would then have to lower my setup even a couple of more inches. If you're into the A-10 now, is that little ball switch under your middle throttle finger, to slew the seeker heads around, not the coolest thing you've ever seen?

475 us dollars for the joystick + throttle is about the price you'd expect, give or take. The reason I was asking is that I even saw one on Amazon for like $1200 the other day, as if some chump would buy that, when the very next one listed was in the $400 dollar range. So that sounds like a reasonable price. I don't think you can take advantage of a 3 position switch just using FSX/P3D alone. But as an example of how to use the 3 position switch in combo with FSUIPC: Let's say you have a command for "High, Medium, and Low". So when you push the 3 pos switch up, you assign that to High. When you push the 3 pos switch to the far down position, you obviously set that to Low. But how do you set the middle position to Medium, if the middle position is Null? Well, in FSUIPC, for both the High and Low assignments, you just tell it to trigger the action to set it to Medium when "button released". So each time you move the switch from either on High or Low, to the middle position, you get Medium. It'll make more more sense when you get it, but that is the basic way. There will also be no problem using the 3 pos switches to deal with what is actually a 2 position switch. However there are more than enough 2 position switches anyway on the Warthog Throttle for just your standard On and Off type things. These are actually implemented as On and Null, so the bottom position behaves like the middle one on a 3 pos switch. A variation of the principle I outlined above applies there as well. Like I said, it'll make sense. And of course, as Ebs says, there is always TARGET, if you feel like learning that. ****since you mention the Dodosim 206 + FSUIPC specifically, there is a strange little thing on that one where if you want to assign an action through FSUIPC, you first have to assign the action to a keypress in FSX proper and then assign the keypress to a button in FSUIPC. Only aircraft I've ever seen that requires that, and has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Warthog HOTAS, but just thought I would mention it as something for you to keep in mind.****

Its easy enough to google graphs of these things SLI versus single. I don't particularly care enough to do the research, but if we are talking about gut feelings, I would be surprised if two relatively powerful cards like the 780ti in SLI don't easily beat a single 980ti. I wouldn't even be surprised either if even two 680's in SLI scored a better cumalative benchmark, depending on application.

I wonder if some of the complaints about pitch sensitivity on some A2A planes during landing might actually have something to do with the drag modelling as it pertains to the rate at which speed bleeds off when you're in a dirty configuration and you've cut, or reduced the power. I'm not claiming that their planes are too slick, I'm just putting the question out there for consideration as a possible reason. The longer somebody has to hold the plane up with their possibly crappy, sticky, controllers, the longer time they have to botch it, and balloon.

Do you carry any power with you to the ground in the Comanche (or for that matter in the Cherokee)?

In the A2A Cherokee, with say a load of only 2 people up front, it actually doesn't stall, power off, full flaps, until about 45 mph. All the numbers in the manual are for MGW, which says Vso is 57 mph. Even if you approach at 65 mph, it takes a relatively long time to bleed off that speed from the time you cross the threshold. The longer it takes somebody to bleed off that speed during the flare, the more likely they are to balloon it. I think it's a lot easier to get a nice, picture perfect landing when the plane is near MGW. The kind of landing where the stall light comes on just at the moment when the tires are chirping onto the runway. Yeah, I know this topic is about the Comanche.

The difficulty of 180 degree autorotations was mentioned above. When flying downwind, and the engines quits, is there some kind of decision height to determine whether we attempt to turn into the wind or not, or is just a best judgement? another question that's been making me wonder about proper technique. All across my reading, I keep coming across this rule of thumb that you shouldn't be descending more than 300 fpm below 30 knots during an approach to avoid VRS. But when you're decelerating, at the moment you come through 30 knots, if your r.o.d. were to be exactly 300 fpm, then you are only on a 6 degree approach, which is shallow. And they are saying keep it less. If normal approach angle is 10, and steep is 15 degrees, you aren't actually expected to flatten out the approach to comply with this rule of thumb, are you? Don't you definitely want to make a nice, straight, constant angle to the ground? While being cognizant of the dangers of VRS, and 30/300 is a good mental check, this is something that can otherwise be ignored, right? I HAVE been ignoring it, being at about -500 fpm as I'm passing below 30 kts, and have been getting good, smooth, constant angle approaches; but am I doing something wrong that a flight instructor would ding me for?

Fantastic! Never saw FS9 look so good.

True, true, flying over all those bland Russian style appartment buildings and chimneys gets old after a while, but there is nothing quite like sawing collumns of trucks in half with miniguns, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzoomp!, or seeing the plexiglass shatter all around you as you go head to head with a Hind!