Helicopters in AA

[dm 9]

Since 1998 if my sources are correct (this time )

[Pierrot 0]

omg Pierrot you don't understand me m8

I was complaining about locking missiles on your targets, not on flying objects, even those missiles that aren't lockable irl. You then said that there's this hellfire L, a lockable version, that's true, but my point was that in ofp every missile seems to be lockable, no matter what version of which misile you're using. That's the reason I called ofp's tows a "longbow tows".

Despite that, we're both agree that missile tracking should be reworked  

sorry, english is my 2nd language

Sorry funnyguy1. English is not my mother tongue, too.

Yes, a tow in OFP is quite differernt from an actual tow. The actual tow is not lockable. I guess it is similar to AT4 in veteran mode in ofp. So the basic system of tow already exists in OFP. One more step, that is to say controlling tow missiles through monitors, is needed.

[Hillslam 0]

Can one of the lucky folks who now own AA confirm for us if the Apache made it in the final release?

I read thru this thread and other forums and didn't see if its confirmed in or out.

thx

[Heatseeker 0]

Can one of the lucky folks who now own AA confirm for us if the Apache made it in the final release?

I read thru this thread and other forums and didn't see if its confirmed in or out.

thx

Apache is not present, if you search hard enough you might find a link for pics of all Arma vehicles and soldiers .

[Fox808 0]

Can one of the lucky folks who now own AA confirm for us if the Apache made it in the final release?

I read thru this thread and other forums and didn't see if its confirmed in or out.

thx

Apache is not present, if you search hard enough you might find a link for pics of all Arma vehicles and soldiers .

http://armedassault.pl/downloa....ack.rar

[*actionhank* 1]

aww fox, you ruin all the fun of searching!

[smiley nick 51]

Those of you who have Arm A, could you possibly answer this question.

Do the helicopters feel like they have any "weight" when the land? What i mean by this is, do the wheels rotate upon ground contact?

Can one taxi whilst maintaining on the ground.

BF2 did a good job of the chopper physics and for land contact, as it felt you had the weight when you powered down, or dropped the engine to idle.

If not please fix this BIS, as it would allow for better chopper landings and "rolling"

Thanks

Nick

[Universel 0]

Could any of you tell me how the heck to move the V80/Ka50 gunner camera, on its Z axis (vertical).

In OFP you could aim and fire at the ground while hovering in your Ka50, so far in Arma I don't know how to aim anything but the horizont while I hover.

[Dekul 0]

Yes, the wheels on the blackhawk will roll upon ground contact and if you keep putting little power in you can simulate ground taxi though you are really just flying at ground level. If you are on the ground you cant get the thing rolling without taking off, so no real ground taxi.

The one thing that seems different is that the helicopter is a chore to make it hover (though they still have that noobish auto-hover option) its like trying to balance a top. And now you dont hold your agl when flying over varied terrain, if you dont put in more power you plow right into the side of a mountain and die, whereas it was very hard to hit the side of a hill unless you were going way too fast in ofp. Also it seems much easier to "lose" the chopper and end up upside down and screwed if you try to pull off fancy manuevers.

Just my observations so far, also the cobra seems alot more responsive (as it should be) and easier to lose control of, I've also found it very hard to regulate speed in flight.

So overall seems like a more realistic and more difficult flight model, the helicopters seem to have some mass to them but that may just be a performance setting for the aircraft rather than real physics, who knows.

[frederf 0]

I'm overall pleased with the reports of a difficult and agile flight model. A few comments about the peculiars:

1. Rolling wheels. Some game have free spinning wheels, others have static wheels. Both can be annoying and good at different times. Sadly to get the "best of both worlds" you need free rolling wheels + wheel brakes. Personally I'd rather not have my CH47 go running down a 1% slope while I'm just stopped off at the local 7-11 rather than not be able to roll-taxi and roll-takeoff.

2. Maintaining AGL vs maintaining MSL at constant lift. Some people think you should cruise around at a constant MSL (absolute height) and have to power up and down to conform to the terrain. Others consider the AGL maintaining way better.

Again, reality is somewhere in between. Where "far away from the ground" the absolute-MSL-altitude logic is best. And very near the ground the reletive-AGL-altitude logic is best. That's because near the ground you have "ground effect." Obviously OFP way overdid this, but a strictly MSL flight model would be silly too.

Hovering 10 ft above the ocean and 10 ft above a 3000' mountain top should require about the same power setting.

[Gimpster 0]

Personally I am not very impressed with the current implementation of the helicopter physics in ArmA. They appear to be little more then a modified fixed wing physics package. I can't even say they are as good as BF2 with was vastly inaccurate. A helicopter is not nearly as unstable as many people believe, with proper trimming and balancing an RC helo can be made to hover without any input just fine and will auto correct for small cyclic inputs because of its design. Most games and some so called Sims mess up the basic principal of what a helicopter is.

At its most basic level a helicopter is a weight suspended from a rotating disk that is the source of a diverging cone of air. The spreading of the downwash acts to stabilize the rotor in level flight and hover and the fuselage acts as a counter weight to resist input to the rotors and acts as a damper against the inputs. This is why the heaver the helo the slower and smoother its motions are.

In a helicopter you fly the rotors not the fuselage. Applying left stick causes the cyclic to increase the pitch of the right side of the rotor path and lower the pitch of the left side of the rotor path. This increases the lift on the right and decreases the lift on the left causing the helo to fall to the left as the divergent cone of lift shifts to the right and off center of the center of gravity. At this point if you center the stick and restore the cone of lift under the center of mass relative axis of lift, the helo will stop increasing the angle banking and slowly start to right itself as the weight of the fuselage seeks to find its balance point under the center of the source of lift, so long as you have banked so far as to move the center of mass outside the divergent cone of lift.

You will continue to loose altitude and accelerate in the direction of slip but given enough altitude the helo will finds its center of balance and level out at which point the helo will enter in to transitional lift and gain altitude at the cost of speed. Helicopters are relatively stable in a simulated environment so long as you keep the center of mass under and within the divergent cone of lift, or are in directional flight where the rotor can act some what like a wing.

Helicopters are difficult to fly in the real world not because they are unstable platforms but because in the real world it’s impossible to balance a helicopter and air is a chaotic media which is constantly changing in density, and flow thus necessitating the need to constantly provide input to find the new balance point. In a Sim we remove the chaos that is the air because with out the use of our own scene of balance this would be a nearly impossible task.

The final version of OFP was better then ArmA is now in this regard and the BAS add-on helicopters for OFP were far superior to either the OFP or ArmA models. A proper helicopter flight model with a heading hold gyro would be flyable with a mouse and keyboard, but you would need a proper 4 axis control to extract a decent amount of performance from it and a 5 axis if you eliminate throttle/collective mixing.

In ArmA the helo physics are wrong or missing key elements on a fundamental level which is affecting the things that they may have right. If rotor craft were as unstable as most people thing they are, then the gyroplane would not be such and easy craft to fly.

[smiley nick 51]

Thanks for your reply, i really do hope BIS take into account the "weight" factor, and improve the physics.

Obviously this isn't fs2004, but we would at least expect with the new engine to modify the flight model physics to serve a more semi realistic feeling.

Despite placebo quoting that it is "semi realistic" i would say its less " semi realistic" than bf2....

Nick

[Journeyman 0]

Gimpster have you been flying in ArmA yet or are you basing your views on videos etc.? I would like to know because you sound like someone who understands heli dynamics like myself but I am not in the possession of ArmA to test this!

I'm confused now because there are those that have already flown choppers in ArmA like IceBreakr and think that ArmA choppers behave more realistically than in OFP! Then there is the various chopper flying videos floating around making the new mechanics look pretty crap!  

[4 IN 1 0]

Gimpster have you been flying in ArmA yet or are you basing your views on videos etc.? I would like to know because you sound like someone who understands heli dynamics like myself but I am not in the possession of ArmA to test this!

I'm confused now because there are those that have already flown choppers in ArmA like IceBreakr and think that ArmA choppers behave more realistically than in OFP! Then there is the various chopper flying videos floating around making the new mechanics look pretty crap!  

but is there anyone knows how to fly a chopper IRL tested it, thats the point, i dont know how to fly one but have been on the co pilot seat b4(a small one with 2 seat) and i can tell you that even on a small chopper with the mass like the little bird the chopper wont act like a RC chopper, but then i havent fly with a littlebird, its hard to tell how the engine-power/mass ratio kick in

[Gimpster 0]

I have spent a few hours trying to find the right settings to get the helicopters in ArmA to act somthing close to a real helicopter. I had a friend that was a Helo instructor and have talked at length with people who fly both real, RC and Virtual RC helicopters and they all tell me the same things. Its more diffacult to fly a RC helo then a real one, and more diffacult still to fly the RC simulator then the real RC helo.

Personaly I have many hours in learning to fly on the RC Simulator and can hover in all but head on perspective and can fly around passably but am not nearly ready for 3D flight. What i do understand is the basic concepts that allow a helicopter to opperate and how to control them. Some things are universal some are magnified or dimished based on relitive size and power.

RC helos have a masive power to weight ration, much higher then any real helo. But they do follow the same laws of physics and use the same controls, Cyclic (Pitch and Roll), Tail Rotor (Yaw), Throttle/Collective (Lifting Force).

I am however absolutly positive I understand the concepts and some of the physics at work. Even an RC helicopter with its masive avalable power to weight ratio is not super twitchy. At this point i can not say what is wrong or missing in the helo physics model in ArmA. It is that different form everything I know to be true, but the basics are there.

Giving the stick a cyclic input will roll or pitch the helo which will inturn cause the helo to loose altitude and slide off in that direction. Re-centering the stick will stop adding to the pitch or roll but I am not sure yet if the now offcenter weight of the fuse will drag the helo back to a flat and level plane. The tail rotor stops being usable above about 50mph, it should be reduced but never loose all function. The lighter the helo the less this effect should be. About about 150mph using the rotor will induce roll, which is not physicaly possable in reality, in addition at these speeds pitch and roll togeather also do not seem to ba able to turn the helo as it should.

The helos can achieve speeds far greater then they can in real life. All this leads me to believe that the physics model is not based on reality at all. Its somthing completely different trying to mimic the look and feel of helicopter flight but failing badly.

I can not claim to be an expert but I feel I know what I am talking about and can explain the priniples or tell you what should happen and why for a given situation.

[Gimpster 0]

Thanks for your reply, i really do hope BIS take into account the "weight" factor, and improve the physics.

...

Despite placebo quoting that it is "semi realistic" i would say its less " semi realistic" than bf2....

Nick

Smiley_Nick,

There was only one area I felt was wrong with the BF2 model.  It felt like the helo was trying to ballance on a tip of a pin.  The downwash of a helos rotor moves down and spreads out like a cone.  The weight of the helo is not ballanced on this spreading cone of air though, its suspended from the top of this cone in the downwash.  So its weight acts as a damper on any input give to the vector of the cone and at the same time tries to move towards the nearest edge of the cone if that makes sence.

By pushing the control stick forwards you are shifting the vector of the downwash cone backwards and moving the center of mass closer to the front of the cone.  This then makes the helo move forward as its center of mass is now forwars of the center of lift and since the center of lift is not pointed at the center of gravity acting on the vehicle it starts to drop as well.  This is the basic concept of a helicopters ability to more in forward, lateral or backward flight.

BF2 messed up this basic princible and as a result the whole model felt close of overly sensitive to input as it lacked the input damping effect of the weight and lacked the small self centering effect that is also there. In BF2 you have to manualy cancel every little input to maintain a stable hover when in reality the counter weight of the helo supended under the top of the lift cone and your narutal sence of ballance allow a real helo pilot to more easily sence and cancle movment.

[meyamoti 0]

How would you be able to get the helicopter to have the right weight ratio's in certain points? Isn't weight/mass not only workable in O2? If so then I don't think there is a way until we have the second O2 as doing it with the first would probably screw stuff up,not to mention errors and the possibility of just not working properly.

[franze 196]

Personally, I dislike FP's helicopter flight model. It feels like you have training wheels on at all times - no loops, no sideslip, no rolls, nothing. I haven't yet had the chance to try ArmA's flight model, but I don't expect it to be incredibly different from FP.

Mind you, a full-size, mil-spec eggbeater will hold little in common with a little RC heli or a lightweight piston engined bird. 7 tons and 3700shp later, there's quite a difference between a little plastic whirlybird and a combat helicopter.

[GaX 0]

I think Arma chopper flight model is missing something or it's bugged or just sucks...

It seems to fly with a plane...

To all those thinks flight model is good, please do a movie (with fraps) showing AH1 single player mission and your manual kill with FFAR...

[Hillslam 0]

To clear up some misinformation that seem to be growing legs:

To describe helicopter physics correctly you need to think of it as a weight suspended under a lift disk and not a weight riding embedded in some inverted thrust cone.

Helicopters fly because of the lift generated at the surface of their rotor blades. Downwash is a side effect of helicopter lift, not the cause of it.

[4 IN 1 0]

Thanks for your reply, i really do hope BIS take into account the "weight" factor, and improve the physics.

...

Despite placebo quoting that it is "semi realistic" i would say its less " semi realistic" than bf2....

Nick

Smiley_Nick,

There was only one area I felt was wrong with the BF2 model.  It felt like the helo was trying to ballance on a tip of a pin.  The downwash of a helos rotor moves down and spreads out like a cone.  The weight of the helo is not ballanced on this spreading cone of air though, its suspended from the top of this cone in the downwash.  So its weight acts as a damper on any input give to the vector of the cone and at the same time tries to move towards the nearest edge of the cone if that makes sence.

By pushing the control stick forwards you are shifting the vector of the downwash cone backwards and moving the center of mass closer to the front of the cone.  This then makes the helo move forward as its center of mass is now forwars of the center of lift and since the center of lift is not pointed at the center of gravity acting on the vehicle it starts to drop as well.  This is the basic concept of a helicopters ability to more in forward, lateral or backward flight.

BF2 messed up this basic princible and as a result the whole model felt close of overly sensitive to input as it lacked the input damping effect of the weight and lacked the small self centering effect that is also there.  In BF2 you have to manualy cancel every little input to maintain a stable hover when in reality the counter weight of the helo supended under the top of the lift cone and your narutal sence of ballance allow a real helo pilot to more easily sence and cancle movment.

so BF2 is completely wrong on chopper

and ArmA flight model are........... taken from outer space?

[4 IN 1 0]

Personally, I dislike FP's helicopter flight model. It feels like you have training wheels on at all times - no loops, no sideslip, no rolls, nothing. I haven't yet had the chance to try ArmA's flight model, but I don't expect it to be incredibly different from FP.

Mind you, a full-size, mil-spec eggbeater will hold little in common with a little RC heli or a lightweight piston engined bird. 7 tons and 3700shp later, there's quite a difference between a little plastic whirlybird and a combat helicopter.

but combat helicopter IRL wont screw up basic princible, nor they are built with alien tech

[colligpip 0]

I just hope you can reverse the throttle cyclic as you couldnt in ofp and i like it the other way round - please BIS put in the option to reverse the cyclic!! Thankyou

[Journeyman 0]

Personally, I dislike FP's helicopter flight model. It feels like you have training wheels on at all times - no loops, no sideslip, no rolls, nothing. I haven't yet had the chance to try ArmA's flight model, but I don't expect it to be incredibly different from FP.

I agree OFP heli flight model was not perfect as you say no side slipping, no increased collective when pulling back etc., but it was a fairly good compromise between real and gameplay and there was a noticeable feel of mass and inertia when turning especially the heavy ones like the MI-17.

I will be happy if BIS keep these dynamics even happier if they make them more realistic! I'll be sad though if they make the heli dynamics anything less than in OFP for whatever reason!  

[3dom 0]

i just took this vid of the cobra ah-1z,the controls just take getting used to  , the choppers are still amazing but turning at high speed needs to be tweaked.

it's still easy to take out bmp's with ffars, like in this vid..

AH-1Z Video (13Mb rar)

p.s dont watch it full screen cos i reduced the resolution to cut down on file size..and have the sound turned on