Im a big rotor fan… but the carrier missions are just not good.
First of all, something needs to be done about the ‘‘taxi to helipad’’ stuff.
You basically hover taxing from a parking stand to a helipad whitch is just silly.
One thing is hover taxing to an active runway but this just doesnt work.
Also… What the hec is going on with the blue guidance bars? They want you to do a full traffic pattern on the way to a tiny helipad in new york city… its like no one bothered to actually check how these missions would be.
Furthermore, when landing, you land at a helipad whitch often is just a random part of some apron, then ahve to taxi to a parking stand… jeez…
Are they asking for right patterns for heli and left patterns for fixed wingers?
I’ve been trying to determine if MSFS2024 ATC understands default heli traffic patterns (when not explicitly stated on the charts).
At my local uncontrolled field, it is not unusual to see helis do a “left pattern to a taxiway landing” so I don’t really know what to want from MSFS2024 for rotorcraft.
It seems like the sim treats every helicopter like a fixed wing aircraft. The traffic patterns are basically the same ones for fixed wing aircraft, even for a helipad… It just amazes me that this is what they released it as.
It is a game to make money for Microsoft and their partners. Their game, their rules, and them that pays the dev’s salaries. The game is so complex, it may be safer to tack on functionality than twiddle down in the bowels of the beast to fix issues with marginal impact on the bottom line.
If I may opine - the rules and procedures in the sim are based on real-life, right? Real world ops are literally the best and only real guidance as to how it should work in the sim. It is the basis for how anybody trying to interact with anything approaching a modicum of standards (especially with a program that grades and rewards/punishes you on them) should behave and perform. We emulate what we can read, watch, and understand and there is plenty to go on in a general sense.
The problem is real-world procedures are not as standardized and evenly applied as many expect. The manuals and standards define some things and leave others open for variability and interpretation. This can be from a scale of country to country down to airport to airport. Sometimes these differences are readily apparent - like the NY helipad example. Sometimes it’s less so, but there’s a very valid underlying reason that might take some expertise to understand. And sometimes it’s completely random or nonsensical, but it’s just the way. Oh, and it can change fairly often.
This variability presents a challenge for the devs who are trying to simulate a global set of tens of thousands of airports while also holding us to the often incorrect sim-applied standards. The problem is that it’s incredibly resource-intensive to find where each of these discrepancies exists in the sim, compare and verify them to real-world, and fix them. It is something that could and probably should be passed to the community, but in my experience, the baseline coding of the SDK is too rigid, often obscure, and does not have a solid pathway for righting the wrongs.
So when the sim starts to apply the same cookie-cutter standards across the board, it can really start to interfere with itself. Sometimes it might work out fine, others, it’ll drive you into a mountain (or whatever). And sometimes, as you said regarding copter traffic patterns, there’s a disconnect from an entire set or subset of real-world ops, anyway - as if nobody with any expertise vetted these scenarios and said “hey, this isn’t how it works.”
In regard to airport and heliport operations in the sim, which are critical to career mode interactions, I don’t see how they right the ship without bringing more subject-matter experts on board to outline the changes and direction needed, and providing a deeper, more flexible set of tools with which the community can “suggest” the necessary adjustments. This is probably also true of aircraft, to be honest.
So far I haven’t seen evidence that AI alone will get us out of the mess. It has historically been used to generate the airports themselves and we see how that creates problems when it’s applied globally without human intervention. There is probably more it can do if it’s better-trained, but that depends on the ability and understanding of the folks who program it. As I said, it starts with understanding and application of baseline standards - like the geometry of the standard traffic patterns. Applying that would knock down a bunch of unrealistic behavior.
From there, you still have to vet the differences from place to place and AI could probably be used for some of it, as long as it’s well-trained and quality checked.
I’m a helicopter fan, a big player on DCS with the huey, I’m really happy to finally see a civilian career in this simulation, but why the hell do they hate us so much? I arrived on the agriculture mission, first flight it’s with an H125 that has to land on a van, really? we couldn’t land next to it! and why the H125 on the first mission? why not the much simpler R66?
So there’s no difficulty curve at all?
I started out with the Robinson R66 Turbine, that was a huge mistake…
-Auto Start Engine doesn’t work, instead you have to follow the checklist.
-Oil pressure is high at just 40% collective, is this realistic? Can someone who flys one confirm?
-No matter how much fuel you add it always goes back to 50% when the mission starts, it keeps robbing my money whenever I buy more fuel.
I got it because it was supposed to be 40kn faster than the Cabri G2 but the high oil pressure wont let me reach that speed. It’s another career mode trap, don’t buy it.
I gave up on that one, everytime I got near the platform I experienced the platform bug where you get thrown up in the air. Until that’s fixed, I’m not gonna bother again. Also, had some strange behaviour with the S-65 on the first mission for that, just couldn’t get the thing to hover with the underslung pylon.