Just a little thread about anything and everything to do with choppers. If you have any tasty hints, post them here so other people can learn.

 

Here's mine.

When asking for a lift from a chopper that is already airborne, pop smoke when it is approaching your position. It makes the job of landing near the ground pounders so much easier as spotting infantry on the ground can be difficult at times. It allows the chopper to land much closer to your position and saves you some running time.

In the attack helis, only 4 missiles are required to kill a tank and you have 24 in your rack. Shoot carefully and choose your targets and you will have no trouble killing tanks or APC's.

 

In the blackwhore, the minigun has been nerfed a little since the last patch. A good way to ensure the kill is to aim before the target and let the helicopters motion bring the crosshair onto the target. This ensures that the gun spends enough time hitting to confirm a kill (obviously a Vodnik will take more of a pounding so you may need to move it back over them)

 

Always keep moving. A stationary heli is a dead heli. You wouldnt believe the amount of times a rocket has gone whistling past Lucid and I on Muttrah City because we were moving

Yeah, it can be quite fun luring out those rpg troopers.

Concentrated small arms fire, I've found, is an excellent deterent when used on Cobras etc. Even though it can take a bit of a pounding, when you're receiving a lot of small arms fire it's somewhat unnerving.

 

Just a thought. [/code]

Things certainly are better now than when .5 first came out and a trip in a chopper meant almost certain death. Well done to the guys who have mastered it

Tip for the chopper: Don't fly a full chopper when you're looking after your girlfriend's sister's 4 month old kitten. Little bastard jumped up on my desk and tried to wrestle my mouse from me

Also, I find that when piloting a chopper, you don't need to have the throttle set to 100% as one would do in Vanilla. Keep it on 60-80% and you get a bit better control.

Tip for the chopper: Don't fly a full chopper when you're looking after your girlfriend's sister's 4 month old kitten. Little bastard jumped up on my desk and tried to wrestle my mouse from me

 

Stab that little Pussy!

 

My hint...Wait till you can really hear the chopper cutting into the air, sometimes it takes more then 30 or so seconds. All the choppers are not the same for their spool up time.

If you have trouble taking off, wait till you can fee the chopper inching forward after the spool up. pull back a little, and give it a bit of rotor to the left or right. After that you will find that you can pretty much shoot up into the air.

 

If players jump in your chopper as your about to take off, let yourself and the chopper settle, especially if its on a carrier. For some reason you chopper can become unbalanced.

 

If you don't touch your mouse when spooling up your chopper, you can see which way it is likely to tip if any, so rotor around from initial position, and it usually fixes it, if not, be aware of your horizon marker in the HUD, if its tilting to either side, just give it a little stick to compensate.

 

If your in an attack little bird, they have speed as their advantage, as well as a really nifty dive capability. Take your bird up really really high, before the target, and swoop that MoFo's heiny. pull out of it at around 70-100 ft, and you will find, depending how skilled you are, you will be ground hugging, which will help you escape. This tactic is especially useful for AA and Machine gun placements.

If approaching a hot LZ (landing zone) drop your men a little way away so as not to risk getting ambushed on landing. Always land and then get out of there as fast as you can. Finally make sure you are close to the ground before coming in for landing as the vertical drop on helis is really really slow and if you try to land vertically you will be a sitting duck.

Yeah good post Cap'n. The advantages of the little birds lets you swoop to the ground, and still keep the speed for take off again.

Your approach vector should be rather shallow, anywhere from 25-30 degrees.

 

It can even be best sometimes to not land at all. Just hover above the ground 5 or so feet and let the troops bail. Once you land, you loose some torque, so you have to wait a bit.

 

Oh and anyone who can't get the Eurocopter off the ground on Greasy don't feel bad, nor can I on most occasions. The only way I have found to get it off the ground is to pitch it forward then back a few times, or full nose forward for a bit to get it straight, and hop to hell you can hover it for a bit longer so it can get vert lift.

I think there is something really wrong with that Choppers model. It doesn't matter where you land it or take off from, it will always bank into the left, which makes me think that its view pod on that side is below its skids. Which brings me onto another point with that chopper, It's skids footprint is very skinny, so it can roll, which if you have tried to take off you will know about.

But anyway It is worth it if you can get it taken off, it is rather fast, and does pack a punch in the littlbird.

I have found out the way to take off in the Eurocopter no worries wat so ever.

Hop in it, and don't touch or move anything for 30 secs. Throttle up and away you will go. It isn't like the US or PLA alternatives, you can't fast throttle it, it puts it into the forward pitch and crashes it.

I've found the Black Hawk on Al Basra pitches forward on to its nose when trying to hold it on the ground after coming back for second and more pickups at the airbase. Also don't wait too long for troops to on load as the chances of a lag spike increase, and on the ground you have little to no chance of recovery, I found the latter out in quite spectacular fashon. :roll:

When you first get in the chopper if you pilot with your mouse, do not touch the mouse at all before you take off. Hold down control (will put you in look mode) which hopefully will mean you won't veer off the the right, left, etc and crash a horrible death.

I find the pitching is due to torque of the main rotor (Being pushed into a +ve...Forward) So If you just hop in any chopper and don't throttle at all, you will be fine. It will still spin up without the throttle being touched. The throttle is just for movement and lift off, not for spooling the rotors.

 

So any shopper pitching is due to people touching the throttle, which puts the choppers out of wack, Bad coding on PR's part. So if you are new to it, just hop in, sit and count 1 Mississippi..to 30 Mississippi then give it some throttle and a little stick to get it full airborne.

Bulletmagnet brought something to my attention the other day apparently the choppers on greasy mullet are some how different in the coding side of things and tend to get hay wire when and people climb onboard other than the pilot. Normally I would have shrugged such a accusation off but I noticed the problem about 5 mins after he told when the black hawk I was flying went ape poopy when someone spawned in on it.

The BH have extra seats which set things in action which just shouldn't. It happens on that airport map too.

The little birds can feel it also when people jump on the side seats, it unbalances them.

One thing I will say about choppers and just a suggestion coz i can't fly them is when your dropping off soldiers on hills or behind them swoop past several before actually taking them where they want.

 

It's way to obvious when a chopper comes down behind a hill then leaves that he has dropped off and then they get slaughtered.

When on transport, try dropping infantry onto water. You can bail them out from quite high, even while moving, and they'll only sustain minimal damage. It's better than fast-roping or parachuting, because hostiles won't even realize that you just dropped a load of guys off. A medic is good to heal the 10hp (or so) water damage from any fall above 5m.

 

To loose altitude quickly, you can strafe from side-to-side while rolling in the same direction. Takes a bit of practice, but you can get down pretty fast if you get it right. Come to think of it, rolling and strafing is pretty important for evading AA fire too.

 

And as we discovered on that weird training night the other week, a pilot *can* be caught mid-air by the same helicopter he bailed out of :lol:

oh my god , fast roping would be so awesome in PR. 8)

It can't be done. It has been brought up numerous times and shot down every time. Basics from what I understand of it, the chopper is a solid object...thats why you can attach a grapple...Though the grapple is some other sort of object which can't permanently be attached while moving. The way I figure it though, have it as a BH weapon which the pilot deploys...and the hook just drops to the ground. But it also brings up the question of how does a trooper grab onto it when departing the chopper?

Just press E twice real quick.

you would just exit and enter the chopper real quick.

yeah too bad , no game has ever done fast roping , or at least done it right , though there is a rather awesome looking game from the core dev team of Rainbow six 3 : raven shield in development that seems to have fast roping.....

Didn't Blackhawke Down have fastroping?

A lot of games have had fastroping, but I'm yet to play a good FPS multiplayer game that's had it.

Just dragging up an old thread for some tips on the Blackhawk now that the LB is less prevelant.

 

1/ Don't fly the thing so damn high. Keep it as low as possible. Three reasons; you'll get shot less, the enemy won't see where your dropping your troops off and you'll be able to land faster.

 

2/ If the ground your trying to land on isn't at least almost flat, DON'T land. You'll flip. That's all there is to it. Hover and get your mates to jump out.

 

3/If in doubt, circle about. If you think an area is too hot for a landing or you know your not going to be able to make a landing, circle around and take another pass at it.

 

4/When landing, think of it kinda as if you were landing a plane. You need to come in at a low angle but FAST. Streets and carriers are perfect, backyards and rooftops are not.

 

5/Contrary to popular belief the blackhawk is very agile. It will quite happily pivot in the air a full 180 degrees once you've got the hang of it. It's biggest flaw is that it can't lose speed like the little bird can so don't expect too much out of it at full speed.

 

6/Tell your gunners that if there's nothing to shoot at don't touch the miniguns. Also a good thing to keep in mind is that the passenger seats can make very good firing positions. Ever had light AT's or grenadiers firing out of one side in conjunction with the mini gun? Not for all occasions but keep notes cos if you can get a few circles of a flag while doing this you can turn it into a killing field. Oh, the L-AT's will kill the guy sitting on the other side of the BH so tell him to watch out.

 

7/Make sure your squad mates know that you can only see straight ahead. I almost got my squad wiped out on Kashan last night when I put the chopper down next to an MEC tank I couldn't see. Passengers listen up - If you get shot down from a tank or APC and your pilot's at least half decent, it's most probably your own fault for not spotting it for him. It's hard enough for a pilot to concentrate on getting the chopper to land close to a move marker without having to hold CTRL to scan around everywhere to make sure it's safe.

 

8/If your flying to an enemy held point, for gods sake, don't fly directly towards it. You'll die. So will everyone you were carrying. Choppers are fast. It only takes half a minute to go a kilometre east or west of the point head PAST it then drop your troops off behind it. When dropping them off, make sure there isn't a direct line of sight between the flag and the chopper. If there is, you and/or your troops will die.