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!

I would like you a lot better if you became a Warthog woman! The thing you need to note about the Warthog is that a lot of it's switches are 3 position switches, where the middle position is a NULL. You can deal with this in FSX/P3D by taking advantage of FSUIPC's ability to cause an action both when the button is first pressed, and also when it is released. In other sims like DCS, some of the planes (obviously the Warthog) support everything by default, but for other aircraft, it takes a little more: You can download alternate control files, or you can do some scripting on your own to achieve the same. The Warthog comes with something called TARGET (or you download it maybe) to do some button programming. I'm not familiar with that, but I think it is some Thrustmaster propriety scripting method. I don't do things that way, I deal with the Warthog using FSUIPC or scripting things directly into the DCS files. 426 Euro? What is that in Dollars? I see the Warthog HOTAS combos in the range between $400 and $500 on a place like Amazon. So that 426 Euro is just for the stick, or does it also include the throttle unit? The Throttle unit is mega cool, and if you've now become a heli pilot, that is where that 16 bit precision is really going to come into it's own most of all, on the collective lever. The same advice to Jfri, upthread, applies. I don't think you need to have the hands of a quarterback to enjoy the Warthog, but you might be surprised by it's size and heft, so I still contend that the lower you can place it, the more leverage you have, and the happier you'll be with it. I have a little table placed strategically under the main desk so that it doesn't block my legs getting to the rudder pedals, but it juts out so I can put the joystick on that.

Flying copters on a pc is such a mental game. When I got the Huey a while back, I was trying to get better at hovering, and I just had reached a wall where I wasn't getting any better. Having used the Dodo before, in FSX, I wasn't completely horrible, but I wasn't doing great either. Then I figured out that if I stopped consciously thinking about it so much, and occupied my mind with some simple mental task, like some subtraction, or even singing myself a little song, that the death grip went away, and instead of thinking about doing it, I was just doing it. So then when I would finally remember that I was flying a copter, I would realize that I had been hovering over the same spot for a minute or two, so much better than before. It's strange how that worked, but it did. So many more aspects of helicopter flight that I need so much more practice at, and I continue to do so, but at least I feel like I have fundamental control down pretty well now. I still have some mixed feelings about whether I should try out X-plane if only for the sake of helicopters. I don't know. I kind of want to, but I also sort of feel that between the Huey, the Hokum, and the Hip in DCS, that I might have enough copters for now, and more than enough to learn as it is.

I doubt that. Two 780's probably kick the hell out of a single 980ti for most applications. If the program isn't optimized for SLI, then maybe not, but I think that in general yes, two of those would handily beat the 980ti.

Poppet, go over to the hovercontrol website, and you can download a set of higher definition cockpit textures for the Dodo. It really cleans things up and gets rid of the blurry labels. @Jose. Get the Warthog. Get the Warthog. Get the Warthog. Get the Warthog. You love flight simulation. You love helicopters. You love P-51's. Get the Warthog.

This is all good news to hear, because I've actually been doing the 'brisk walk' thing in my practice. Problem was, I started to read too much on certain web sites, and there are some real heli pilots talking about being at 40 knots at 15 feet during approaches as a matter of routine and stuff like that, so it made me think I might be flying the Huey like a wuss, doing things wrong, confused about what the standard practices really were, and I was getting kind of frustrated. I've probably spent too much time trying to fly the Huey like I see them flying helicopters on television too. But it sounds now though like I'm at least doing adaquately at this stage of my learning, and I really do appreciate getting some straight answers from some real Army pilots. "slow is smooth, and smooth is fast". I'm going to have to think about that a little...I'm not sure I'm at the point where I quite digest the meaning of that just yet! Or maybe I do? Maybe you mean, quit trying to fly the helicopter like a cowboy, and just concentrate on the fundamentals.

Thank you so much for answering these. It's cleared up a lot of confusion about the correct way to do things.

Ok, I posted them in the Huey thread. You're going to see how many questions I have and say "aw s**t why did I say yes to this guy", but believe me, I appreciate anything you can answer. I've never even been inside a real helicopter, so you can imagine the learning curve of trying to fly the Huey "realistically" without the benefit a flight instructor! I've done enough practice that my ability to control the copter is actually quite good, it's mainly the real world technique that is lacking.

Questions for Comanche: Sorry, I had more questions than I thought, so don't feel like you need to tackle them all, but thanks for taking the time to help me out with whatever answers you feel like providing! They talk about a 10 degree approach starting at 60 knots: Do you start at 300 ft? For a pilot of average height, where on the windscreen do you recognize 10 degrees to be? Do you begin the deceleration simulatanously with initiating your descent or do you wait until you are closer to the ground? What if you are going at 60 knots less than 100 feet agl. Do you decelerate to some speed before you actually reach your descent point? For even steeper approaches, what kind of speeds and altitudes to do you enter from? For "combat" type landings, like they talk about in books about Vietnam, what does a typical approach look like? J hook type descending turns: Do you keep your speed up downwind, and then only decelerate as you come out of the hook? Is it poor technique to let the helicopter go into a slip as you're doing this, or do you want to be completely coordinated all the way? H-V diagrams: There are some helicopter pilots who insist that the H-V diagram applies to landing approaches. I've been doing a lot of reading on the pprune rotoheads forum and there are some pilots who talk about maintaining hellacious speeds down to below 50 feet in order to stay out of the dead man's curve. First, does the H-V diagram have any relavence to landing approaches in the Huey at all? I mean, you don't scream down at 60 knots, at a 10 degree angle and 1000 fpm descent (unless you are autorotating) and then power out of it at the last second do you? You can't really adhere to the H-V curve when landing in a "normal" 10 degree helicopter descent in the Huey or any other copter, can you? How do you autorotate when you are in a hover oge? Do you always want to push the nose down and gain forward speed? What does the hat switch on the cyclic of a real Huey do? Do you ever use force trim on the real huey, or any helicopter, other than during cruise? A lot of sim guys seem to recommend using this to aid them in hovering or approaching, but I don't think this is appropriate use of trim.

---Brief thread diversion alert--Comanche, I'm trying to learn more advanced techniques to fly the UH-1 in DCS, and I've been meaning to ask a real UH-1 pilot. If I ask them over in the Huey thread in the DCS section of Avsim, will you answer them? I have a couple. Well, actually, I kind of have a lot...

LAdamson, I'm not sure that flying a yoke based aircraft with an X52 joystick is a great test. A joystick doesn't translate the motion required in the same way as a yoke does. As an example, flying the Cherokee with my joystick, I don't notice any tendency to overflare. Flying it with the Saitek yoke, on the other hand, which is closer to the actual aircraft configuration, I do notice that there is a greater pitch authority down under 55 mph than I would expect. Not a big deal, certainly not something that you don't adjust to very quickly, but it is something that I do notice, maybe because different muscles are involved in the movement. Seems like it ought to be a little more slushy. I have to be uncommonly careful when pulling back or else it results in a balloon even as your senses tell you it's on the verge of the stall. Part of that might just be because the yoke is not all that great, maybe too frictiony, especially when you are applying some aileron into the wind. So of course, a lot of this is subjective. The guys that have $1000 yokes by PFC that they can pull back all the way into their gut and turn 90 degrees to the side to spread that input range over, might have an entirely different experience when it comes to their perception of force required to complete a manuever. It's hard to tell what part is the actual flight modelling and what part is due to somebody's controller.