Chaps

Hoping you can help me fight the Wildcat. The weapons are a bit of a mystery to me, as well as the ability to lock targets. I have a bloke sitting next to me, I assume he's my gunner, but when I hit the joystick trigger to order him to fire, I fire off the ordnance. So what's he do and how can I get him to take over the weapons while i concentrate on firing?

Also, is there a way to use the laser designator in the nose? I can't seem to lock a target with Tab key and I don't know how to move the aiming point - is it just boresight for everything?

Assistance appreciated - it's a lovely aircraft to fly, but I'm stumped if I can fly it and fight it at the same time.

smith

Can't answer your question, but same was happing to me... usually you have to take over the controls manually to do that, but not this time.

The gunner position has day/night optics and a laser designator, but unfortunately how it all works is screwed up. If you play as gunner, pilot can magically self-designate and engage on his own, so the gunner/optics/laser designator are pointless and you are just along for the ride. If you play as gunner with commander abilities and try to control him with "hold fire" while you designate a target, he will fire rockets continuously after you order open fire until the laser is turned off (but if you turn off the laser, the first rocket will lose guidance). And when he acquires your laser target, he will immediately start flying towards the target and you will not be able to hold the LD steady, which in turn causes him to start flying even crazier as he chases the shifting LD while rockets are flying about everywhere.

If you try to play as pilot and have the gunner designate a target, the lock box shows up totally off target and the rockets don't guide. You are stuck with using the rockets unguided or using the cannon. The core problems seem to be:

1. The pilot rather than gunner is in control of firing the guided rockets. If the gunner were in control of designating the target and launching the rocket, there would be no problem. Manual fire would suffice for pilot control of the cannon or firing the rockets unguided.

2. The gunner's optics cannot lock view on a point on the ground.

But the LD and guided rockets do work in combination, so it should be great for multiplayer as long as the pilot flies steady.

I did some testing with the Wildcat this morning. A more appropriate name for the gunner would be 'observer.' Like the observer slot in the UH-1Y, he has zero control over the weapons, but does have his forward-looking optics, with added FLIR. The LD+Rockets combo is a bit diminished as well, since, at least at the difficulty I was testing, rockets will guide towards any target selected, not just a laser.

I thought all the Wildcat had on it was the machine gun and rockets... no need for the gunner to designate, as the rockets are unguided, perhaps the laser desegnator is there for designating LGB's etc ?

The "PG" in CRV7-PG stands for precision guided. UH-1Y, however, has no guided weapons so there really is nothing for the gunner/co-pilot to do but observe.

http://www.bristol.ca/CRV7Rocket.html

Oh, but the rocket in game has basically zero blast/HE effect, so it almost useless for unguided area fire and is much less useful in the counter-insurgency role for which it could be perfectly suited.

Really? I could've sworn I splashed a few groups of insurgents using the rockets in one of the standalone missions in BAF.

Yeah, it is pretty much worthless against infantry unless you directly hit them (then they will soar like eagles). Also does nothing to light vehicles with even a miss of a few feet. Just compare the CRV7-HEDP/CRV7-PG to the US Hydras. Huge difference, yet these are supposed to be the same warhead. CRV7-FAT, however, has a much larger area of effect than the HEDP, maybe even more than the Hydra, yet this is supposed to be a pure AT weapon (warhead consists of just 5 tungsten penetrators. I'm beginning to suspect they accidently switched them at some point, unless actually intend the FAT to be a GPF warhead (General Purpose Flechette: 80 anti-infantry/light armor flechettes with large AoE).


To be fair, Hellfires also unrealistically suck again infantry in the open.