You don't have to stay below tree tops, especially as you are starting out. Give yourself a little cushion, and then slowly chip away at that cushion. I think sometimes it being a sim makes it harder in that one tries to just "do" because there is no real risk. I find just rolling to kill ascent to be quite effective in every plane. Note that you don't have to roll 360 or 180 degrees. You can give some dip to either or each side to get the same effect in smaller increments. In fact, if you keep doing little rolling motions you won't ascend at all. To me, it feels like slaloming down (but also up) ski slopes. The narrator said to take acute angles up slopes. Think of it as taking the hiking trail or the cow path up a hill. It goes at an angle rather than straight up or down, and there can be switchbacks. If you have crashed 10 times, you are inverting and lingering inverted. Just my guess. If you are rolling to 180, just keep rolling in that direction past it. You can always roll 720 if you needed more ascent killed. But usually if you are on top of your altimeter, you don't need to roll 180, just a little bank to either side to bring the nose down a hair will be sufficient. Your user name is float, so stay off the damn ground.
It's usually after a ridge, and pulling back to keep from floating up, and then by the time I roll over I'm coming up on the new ridge really fast. So boom. I think it is rolling to 180 and pausing inverted too much, and then can't get back over and up fast enough. I moved my altitude up to 1500 to practice, switched to Nevada due to lack of trees... and am going to cut my angles down to just over 90 degrees, so I can recover faster. But, eventually, I have to get back down to below 500, otherwise, no real point in practicing it.
It's a feel thing, so you will get there. 1500 is kinda high to practice. Keep it under 1,000, then under 750, then under 500 (IMO, obviously, do what you want). I am confident that if you try rolling more like 90 for awhile, you'll get a feel for the timing of things. If you look at that video closely, I don't think he ever lingers inverted unless he just crested a hill. And not for long then either.
You can and will get to the point where you are flying under tree tops at times, once you get a feel for the handling and how to cut angles along the terrain. I think I used to try and fly valley floors too much, better to pick a bench on the side of a valley or a line on a slope, because then your altitude above ground can be held steady but you can get some forgiveness through gaining elevation when needed. If you are at the valley floor or at the ridge you are at the mercy of geography. It's easier paralleling a slope while moving through mountains and hills than it is flying over flat space, to me. I doubt a real fighter pilot spends much time inverted at 1 (-1?) G. Seems like that would be especially disorienting, and obviously you can not push the stick forward for even minor altitude gain without risking a red out at low altitude while your lift vector is inverted...
Yea, I don't want to stay inverted long, I want to do it to come over a hill, and down the backside of it, but I need to just not be fully inverted, and not pause. Yesterday evening, I had about an hour to kill, and so that was what I practiced. It was my first time trying, but it looks fun, and a necessary skill to evade lots of things that want to harm my straight and level flying, so I'll keep working at it.
It seems like in combat theaters, all flying is done at 25,000 ft or more, or less than 500 ft. Everything in between is a shit show you don't want to linger in and is where most combat and most shoot downs occur. It can seem like you'd be safe, but everyone and every AI ground piece knows where you are and are just waiting for the range to be right. Human redfor in DCS like to come in very low and come up underneath adversaries, so even if you pop up on radar every now and then, the lower you are the harder it is for them to get a true bearing and do that effectively. Or be so high that you get plenty of time for AWACS to spot them on the way up to you.
I'm no where near ready for multiplayer. Which means I'm probably going to be disappointed, when I do play, and nobody else has put in all the time and work and just flies around doing whatever. Because, regardless, this is still me: Nailed it.
ya, I'd say you are already average for multiplayer. Servers like hoggit are intended to be somewhat friendly to newer players while still having "realistic" communication and flight rules. and that is cooperative, all humans are blue
I was looking at this guy's video for his throttle for the spitfire (that he just gives the downloads away for free...), but I thought his rig for everything was brilliant, so here it is:
that is nice. I use attachments to my office chair that provide rests coming off the armrests. I then put velcro on the stick and throttle. One of the rests can easily fold back and the other one I just keep on all the time. I think at some point I'd like to see about getting a sort of tv tray rigged up, so I can easily move it in and out of the way. I also have contemplated building a custom button box to go with both DCS and a space sim. But Virpil makes a nice one now, too. I don't really want to go down that rabbit hole of building custom button boxes yet, as I just took on molding concrete splash blocks for the gutters and starting a 40 gallon tropical fish tank. I am beginning to realize I am a man of 50 hobbies, all of which I do shittily. Which pretty much suits me, I guess.
I hate fishing for buttons, and the like, and all the wires. So I have grand goals with regards to button boxes, and throttles... and sticks. And eventually a collective for helo. And I need a dedicated push to talk button, because mic'ing up in chat is annoying when it is tied to the mouse button that does page back when in a browser. So that will be a dedicated controller button, soon enough, able to be keyed via foot or hand, depending on game. (Foot for arma, as there are no pedals in arma).
Hmm, well if you aren't flying a warbird, you could make one of the toe brakes be "push to talk." Map the other toe brake to both. And even in a warbird, it would only be an issue on the ground. Another option I have thought about was just using VoiceAttack to activate/deactivate VOIP. E.g., give a command to depress the key, and make "over" or something the release command. I don't mess with VoiceAttack as much as I used to, but you can integrate it in really interesting ways that become completely seamless. Would work for Arma too.
I thought about voice attack too, but I think that might slow me down a hair in Arma when I need to say something really fast cause me and my teammate are about to get fragged.
Also, I may be doing it wrong, but sometimes I apply one sided braking on the runway to keep me on it, without having to use rudder.
Nah, that makes sense. Do you hold your breaks while throttling up and then release? Might you be pulling on the stick before being at speed? Or it could be wind. I usually only have the issue that you describe with warbirds. Not with jets.
I hold brakes when spooling up before takeoff. Usually it's landing where I put a brake on one side or the other, just real quick, to stay left or right side of center line. Usually when aerobraking on the F-16. Right, wrong or otherwise, it keeps me on the runway. I just tooled around Nevada a bit, playing above 500 feet, though I went down below 500 feet for a bit, but was able to stay alive by not going completely inverted, then shot up around Vegas and tried to land at the North Vegas airport, with its 0.93nm runway. And I did, but I had to use some left brake to keep on the runway. I think it was the runway, no idea, because they aren't labeled, because I don't think the jets are supposed to land there. Was fun though, took off, took it down the strip, then rocket shipped back over and landed at McCarron for the night. Going to be my new practice mission, right at dusk so I can get some night landings in.
You might check to see if you are on speed when you are landing. That being said, I too struggle to stay on the on the runway when landing sometimes, though I find the rudder to be more effective than the brake, because I can overcorrect with the brake
