Bushmanni

Is there proper analog controls for cyclic stick and pedals as mapping joystick to the keyboard commands has horrible lag. I could find analog control only for collective.

New FDM is definite improvement over the previous one, especially when using HOTAS. There's still some issues though that make the chopper unnecessarily hard to fly. Controls feel like they are heavily dampened but oversensitive. Chopper reacts very slowly to control inputs but you only need small input to get big response. While this is generally true for choppers, it seems like this characteristic is overdone. At high speed rolling doesn't like to stop itself but you need to stop it with opposite roll input. It's also very hard to make break turns at high speed as choppers with new FDM have overly pronounced tendency to dig in ie. if you turn too hard the chopper starts pulling more g's on its own. You need to be very careful with the tightness of the turn and it's very hard to keep constant g during the turn. I can't tell if all of this is due to some kind of dampening of flight control inputs or if there's some kind of imbalance of inertia and aerodynamic forces. Lack of windsocking is probably one factor with high speed turning problems.

My main grief with vanilla ARMA AH-64 FM was too slow turning, especially in pitch and bank. ACE 2 AH-64 fixed that while it didn't/couldn't fix the high speed stiffness or any other problems but that alone made a big difference. Now the AH-64D went crazy with maneuverability which is just as bad (IMHO) as not enough maneuverability. I don't expect any fancy FM features from ARMA chopper, but that the basic performance figures are sensible.

I mainly play DCS and I wouldn't consider any other titles FMs as an example of realistic FM. Most people don't have enough education to realize how accurate the DCS Ka-50 flight model is. I have tried modded EECH which was plain crap compared to even the original EECH FM. ACE 2 Apache FM is the best and most real feeling FM so far in ARMA and also performs closest to realistic performance parameters. As I'm aware there's some inherent limitations in ARMA FM but I don't know exactly what they are I proposed it as an example of good balance with different performance parameters. If you read my previous post about some maneuver tests I made with the AH-64D FM and compared those values to ones measured from Apache videos, you can see a huge difference. You should note also that Ka-50 is considered more maneuverable than AH-64 according to US Army flight tests and it's performance values measured from DCS are about what I described as desired target values. We can argue to the end of the world about subjective feel of the FM but with numbers you are talking about something concrete and measurable. You should also read more carefully what I wrote as I didn't say choppers are easy to fly but that they don't have oversensitive controls like this FM has. Could you explain how too much pedal use at high altitude can cause a retreating blade stall as helicopter aerodynamics books don't know the phenomena?

Thanks for the explanation. ACE 2 Apache FM had a pretty nice feeling to it so I suggest you tweak the FM towards that. The time it takes to point your nose to a target is very crucial performance figure for a combat chopper and the current FM is way off. I would suggest trying to tweak the flight model so as to prevent too quick turns. Especially the pedals turn the chopper way too fast.

This is something I have been waiting for ARMA for a long time. Unfortunately it seems to me there's some serious issues with the flight model. I don't know if it's because I'm using joystick and pedals or because of something else. Some of the issues are probably because of the underlying FM code in ARMA that can't be changed by modders. As I don't know what can be changed I just pour out all the main issues the FM has and maybe there's something that can be done to it. The flight model is way too maneuverable or twitchy. I could roll the chopper 360 in 2 seconds while it should take about 3-4seconds for the real one in airshow confiquration. With full weapons load you shouldn't be able to make a full roll in the Apache as it would look more like a spiral dive. Yaw rate is completely off the charts. I could make a 180 degree pedal turn (0kts, from zero yaw rate to zero yaw rate) in 2 seconds while it should take about 8-9 seconds for the real chopper. Max sideways speed for Apache is somewhere between 50-70 knots (you can barely turn your nose 90 degrees off the flight direction using pedals) but I could achieve only 38. If you start from hover and fly sideways you can go all the way to the 120kts or so as long as you don't let the nose turn towards the flight path at which point it violently snaps to forward. You should be able to turn the nose off the flight direction about 10-20 degrees using pedals even at 120kts like you can with the current FM at 60kts. At slow speed you need to tilt the chopper excessively to achieve lateral acceleration. You should only need small amounts of pitch and roll to make the chopper accelerate or decelerate. Currently it takes about twice the amount of what it should. In general the chopper has way too little angular inertia and especially in yaw axis. Real choppers have to deal with all kinds of physics and aerodynamics phenomena that makes the choppers hard to fly but the controls responses are tuned by the designers to be as easy as possible for the pilot for obvious reasons. Real choppers are twitchy because you need and should make only relatively small maneuvers for normal flying and because the chopper reacts with some delay. They don't have overly sensitive controls. What I like in the flight model is pull out from dive and high speed maneuvering in general that is actually possible now. The BIS Apache turns ridiculously slow if your speed gets too high. The roll rate is about the same as with airshow Apache at 100kts which is still too much but not ridiculously too much. I suspect this high speed stiffness of all ARMA choppers is a hard coded feature as surely not all ARMA modders would have made their choppers behave the same if they had a choice? ---------- Post added at 17:33 ---------- Previous post was at 17:32 ---------- The system didn't let me include links in my first post so here's some videos of Apaches doing rolls and yaw turns. Note how long it takes to perform these maneuvers, especially yaw turns.