Had to cancel two missions yesterday due to unlandable locations. Reinstalled 2020. Image 2020 with a good helicopter mission addon.
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Absolutely agreed. SAR operations require very sharp control of the helicopter, especially when landing on a difficult spot. Itâs totally unacceptable to have situations like this when you accurately land on a needle tip and then helplessly watch how your helicopter slides down the hill into the trees and you cannot do anything with thatâŠ
Sometimes problems are being caused not only by locations. Yesterday I tried SAR mission with a winch where you need to save someone from liferaft at sea.
So I lowered down the rescuer on the liferaft but it still continued to unwind the winch until there was a mess of the endless wire and my stupid rescuer was just rolling like a sausage around the liferaft. Alt+F4âŠ
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Hype H145 + action pack + HEMS everywhere/heli logging missions.
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H145 missions:
-
You are forced to use external camera because you get no hoover help whatsoever.
That takes the realism away. -
Any hoist mission goods on the ship helipads are placed âstupidlyâ close to the ship.
I doubt you can place a real helicopter that close, but magically the rotor doesnât hit anything. -
Need of a marshaller and/or a visible measurement indicating center/distance to the goods is really missing here.
I know⊠the âcrewâ is helping you a tiny bit, but itâs far to sparse.
I really hope the Sim1 update will bring a change of the âa bit overlookedâ helicopter stuff.
(And I havenât even mensioned the worst of all:
The ground lift turbolensâŠ)
How are we meant to land in there! The entire Asobo Microsoft MSFS team should be fired for selling us this pile of âŠ
Why do these cargo H125 AI liveries look so terrible. I have never seen paint jobs like these IRL⊠Some Mardi Gras looking scheme, the awful gold and green and red thing, the brown ones. And the search and rescue ones are not much better.
Why canât we use the 407 or H225 for missions? The H225 (canât fly on Xbox anyway) has all the requirements for hoist and sling operations ready to go..
Let us use the hoists for SAR missions on land. Whereâs the car wrecks and mountain hoists like in the trailer? Where are the hoists from burning ships at sea? Where is the skycrane slinging HVAC units to skyscrapers?
Why canât we drop off personnel to wind farms or to oil rigs? All of this could be done.
Sadly it seems that except the ground lift turbulens, a bit more forgiving hover over the goods and a very few other minor things, the helicopter side of career hasnât been touched at all either in SU1 beta 1 or 2.
I guess we need more votes:
helicopter stuff needs as many votes as fixed wing aircraft stuff to get prioritized 
Here is another one! Why canât the developers just fix this. If i remember from my days of scenery a flatten command would do the trick.
I found the rotor brake was on⊠after release the issue was resolved for me
This was the only thing on the bug list I was looking forward to hear about in yesterdayâs Q&A.
I am not totally surprised this subject was âquicklyâ changed from âin progressâ to âunder investigationâ.
Career for helicopters is becoming a sad story the further you dig into it.
Now Jummivana was put into sorting this already long thread.
I am looking forward to see how this can be done, and if this means higher priority?
Or does it mean that each problem needs its own thread, making it even lower priority?
Ohh.. sorry, I totally misheard that yesterday 
.
TOP BUGS:
Well I donât find this thread complicated, as the most outstanding bugs can be divided into 2 categories with 3 solutions:
- Missions where helicopters canât land proper (because of trees etc).
- Missions where helicopter pilots lack information of the whereabouts of the rope end.
Suggestions:
- Only allow SAR missions (where you need to land) at places where there are no trees. ?!
It sounds like an easy solution to remove places with any trees in a circle around the actual places (letâs say 10 meters or something) for the SAR missions?
Then let the rest of the SAR missions (with trees) be only hoist missions !?
Even I just know little about databases I would think this would be an easy task to make those random missions far more useful.
- âThe end of the ropeâ:
There are suggestions for marshaller functions, telling you âwhere to goâ.
This could be done by the crew, as the game already know about where the end of the rope is -
and when delivering it also knows how far the âboxâ (goods) are from the center of the delivery spot.
Even small hints like âUp, down, left, right, forward, backwardsâ every 5 second (or similar) would help a lot.
(Edited) If we could see the distance pointer for the âgoods centerâ from inside the helicopter it would also help a lot.
As for now the pointer is disappearing when you get closer.
2 (well 3) âhot fixesâ that would change the experience of helicopter career a lot, until we can get a more thought-out and full solution done.
- Career mode handles helicopters like planes. Makes you taxi to the runway, where you see your ground crew waiting with the cargo for you, but no, you have to taxi to the opposite end of the runway, take off, climb to like 300AGL, and then come back to pick up the cargo. Uggh.
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I canât even find any helicopter missions. Not one.
Although I am with you that the mission mechanics are sub-par, all missions that have no soft-locks (like the R66 asking for a parking brake) can be completed. Generally, it is either a matter of a workaround you have to know (like flying under FL180 in the PC24 to prevent the oxygen bug) or practice.
For the rescue hoist the main problem is that the hoisted crew member does not correct your placement. It is just a dummy until he reaches the target. If you have him laying on the ground outside of the circle, to my knowledge dragging him into the zone may not or does not work.
Say you are also a cockpit view only kinda simmer, since Asobo also didnât include any dialog between hoisted crewman, hoist operator and pilot (as it happens in real life), and even in VR the target cannot be seen, you either really practice a blind drop off or you swallow your pride and bind a button to switch to outside view you can push while hovering to even have a reference where you and the hoisted crewman are in relation to the circle.
What in my experience the script wants to see is a dead stop hover above the circle at a certain height. If you reach the spot the mission step dialog changes to green. Then you need to stay there exactly. The hoist is lowered and if the guy lands in the circle he will start to pick up the target.
If the outside view shows him laying around, go around and try again. At a certain distance and height away from the target, the hoist is raised to retrieve the guy to reset everything.
Once the target is captured and the hoist is raised, you can already leave.
Not trying to make it sound easy, it is difficult.
Especially when the flare smoke is blocking your view on top of everything.
What I think should change is:
- Smoke to cease when inside a ~20m circle
- Crew should guide you in verbally (âone meter forward slowly⊠two meters to the rightâ something like that)
- The Medic should feedback when on the ground, saying you need to lift him again, or just walk the last few meters if the rope allows it.
- Some feedback device should be implemented that either mimics the hover view on helicopters such as the H145, indicating that you are moving in what direction at what speed or hovering⊠or just a homing view that shows the target in relation to you.
Sadly, Asobo seems very stubborn to implement good gameplay. On the one hand they try to stick to reality and reject the idea of âmagicâ displays, on the other hand they take away any help that is there in real life, like crews working together. Personally I think it is their management both limiting resources and cutting corners everywhere.
To be on par in terms of gameplay to industry standards the whole mission system would need to be revised. Most of it is less sophisticated then some freeware done by only a handful of people or even just one. Basically it is a more or less strict script that wants to see start-up, taxi to hold-short, enter runway, takeoff, go some place, land (or hover) for x amount of seconds, then fly to the destination, land and shutdown. I am a horrible programmer, but putting these scripts together sounds completely linear and straightforward. Everything is barebones, so it must have been very low in the priority list in development.
Just take it as one of these challenges that turned out unfair and discouraging because nobody in development thought about it much.
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So far it have only done oil rig cargo missions and I can get more or less 90 - 100% success, as long as the drop zone isnât too close to the rigâs steel beams or somtimes outside the platform, which luckily doesnât happen that often.
But today I tried a few landbased cargo mission with the H125 (I have only found those in Europe so far, why?) and boy are those a mess.
Dropzones are usually in the middle of forests, dropping the cargo in the zone will often go along with touching trees, which results in huge penalty or even ending the mission because the cargo got destroyed.
If I managed to drop the cargo without penalty, I almost always got the âATC - Speed Violationâ message immediatly after dropping the cargo and slowly climbing back. Why? Sometimes even two or three times in a row.
One mission had the pickup zone next to the airstrip in the center of a hangar. Pickup was impossible.
And also adding to the frustration is the usual hover to hold short, then hover to runway, then hover along the runway make a u-turn, then start along the runway climb 1000 feet, then come back to the pickup zone which is actually right next to runway that you previously had to hover along to make a u-turn.
Davide Dedeine is conspicuous by his absence to explain why this has gone so far, and furthermore why nothing is (at least in public) is round the corner for resolving this.
Not even a talk about hotfixes in the dev stream