Project Reality Forums

It's exceedingly lame to have the crash be so lethal. I've been like 40 meters off the ground and got hit by an RPG and lost power, so I crashed into the ground at 140 KPH, I exploded on impact. That's just flat out retarded. I should be injured, and bleeding, but not dead.

Also the 500 KPH was an exageration, I think anything under 250 KPH should be survivable aslong as you land the heli on it's belly. The severity of your injuries should be dependant on the speed, and angle, but you should atleast survive. Having to spend at minimum 30 seconds for a respawn because this game gives you NO chance of survival after being shot down is just lame, and should be changed. Give us a way to survive if we manage to slow our speed enough, that'd be good.

stupid, you are taking after your name here. Look up something called autorotation. If you know much about helicopters then you will know you can land without engine power using this method, and that helicopters do not fall out of the sky like a stone if the engine is disabled. Basically as soon as the engine fails, you shove the collective all the way down to keep the rotors spinning, give it a bit of right pedal as theres no torque any more, then glide the thing in keeping an eye on the RPMs and flare near the ground.

Needless to say this isnt in PR at present.

Essentially, what I would like, is if the Heli pilot is able to reduce his speed below a certain point before impact, he should be rewarded with the gift of life. Sometimes you get hit and you just aren't in a position to land that thing, and you will die. But other times you CAN slow down, just not enough for the game, since anything higher then 70 KPH seems to make you go boom.

I'm watching Black Hawk Down right now, and I don't kn how accurate it is, but one of the Blackhawks came down from like 200 meters, or more, and at a speed comparable to 250 KPH ingame and they survived. It would be nice if the heli's in PR, and the pilots aswell as passengers, were that durable. Would certainly make maps like Basrah unique.

A stronger undercarriage wouldn't hurt.
I set my mouse up like this and use a joystick to fly.
The joystick sensitivity is connected to mouse sensitivity.
ControlMap.invertMouse 1
ControlMap.mouseSensitivity 0.0008
ControlMap.setYawFactor 0.009

Remember some of the helicopters are Throttle Intensive.
Your stability depends on what you got your joystick throttle at.

I use a mouse to fly heli's, it's more stable and gives me more control, when I try using my joystick I can't even keep the heli level, let alone fly it.

Colt556 wrote:I use a mouse to fly heli's, it's more stable and gives me more control, when I try using my joystick I can't even keep the heli level, let alone fly it.

Im glad to hear you got success with a mouse. Perhaps they can make them more mouse friendly on helicopters and jets.
For me it would take away the "flavor of physics" That make the jets more interesting to fly.

I go into regular bf2 and the jets taste like oatmeal with out brown sugar and salt. If you get my drift... A plain hamburger taco.

I use a joystick with the jets, allthough I can fly them with a mouse, the Joystick is just more fluid allthough unstable, same with the heli's.

eh... could we get back on topic? First of all, it all depends on whether a chopper blows up by the fact of where it is hit, so if it gets hit in the tail rotor, it shouldn't blow up... somewhere critical maybe. My guess though, is that the BF2 engine can't handle such intense "Physics" like these. Hitboxes... and all that.

Well as far as I know from modding, any modern game can handle what you're suggesting. Essentially you put individual hitboxes around differant areas, a hitbox for the main rotors, one for the tail rotor, for the undercarage, for the nose, for the sides. And code in responses for each hitbox. If an RPG hits the rear rotor hitbox it causes the heli to spin. If it hits the undercarage it causes normal damage, if it hits the main rotors you drop like a rock.

The only part I'm not sure on, is how you would do all that with the HP system. Could you program each section of the heli to have it's own ammount of HP? So if the tail loses 100% of it's HP you start spinning? If not how would you make it all work? An RPG hits the tail but because the overall heli has 30 HP, it dies anyways. Maybe you could remove HP entirely on critical systems and simply code in responses to situations. Code it so an RPG does no damage to the tail, but if the tail hitbox detects an impact from an RPG, it spins anyways. However I have no idea if that's even possible on the engine.

[R-CON]Alex6714 wrote:Aviation fuel is infact not explosive, and very hard to burn in liquid state iirc.

yes it has to be sprayed out into a fine mist with the perfect airfuel mixture before it can actually ignite by sparks etc. that is if there is actually a flame then it will ignite but AT shells can only cause fuel to ignite if it directly hits the fuel tank.

I will give you the autorotation Mescaldrav, it is a viable technique taught to nearly all helicopter pilots. The big problem is that that is a dangerous and difficult manuever in even a practice setting, much less after being struck by a rocket.

the way it seems its about the issue of hollywood instaexploding assets. or well not just suddenly istaexploding, but you know going from smoking a bit to fireball in the blink of an eye. try go offroading with a civicar, bike or atv ingame and youll know.

what would be really nice to see is that only explosive stuff like c4, rpgs and the like can go that far on the hitpoints scale that it can blow stuff up. smallarmsfire and groundcollision though wouldnt go beyond that point and could only disable. now that would be something.

To help soften up this arguement abit. I already heard a few months back (Not sure where, but it was from a reliable developer.) that they had attempted to make it possible to land a helicopter after taking severe damage. I think it was on the basis of increasing how hard the helicopter chasis was so that it could withstand striking the ground. But that never worked out as you can see.

But anyways, rather than trying to alter the helicopter or kits so you can bail out of a low flying helicopter (Considering that bailing out of a helicopter is not a good idea as you usually have 20 foot blades swinging around your head from above.) try to approach it from another perspective...

I simply trying to say that we should adjust the throttle scale after withstanding damage. How? Well, rather than completely losing engine power, how about modifying it in some way so that the lift created by the main rotor is in a range between 1/4 to 1/2 the power in comparison of what it really should make. So basically in normal operation the helicopter would fly as it was intended. However, after losing main rotor power you come to a 1/4 to 1/2 power state which is just barely enough power to keep it in the air, but enough power to slow the descent.

Meaning that after you take a hit the helicopter will be unable to develope enough throttle to gain altitude, or enough throttle to still fly back to base while trying to fly in a level state. Basically what will happen is you will constantly descend in the helicopter but at a much softer and gradual descent that will still offer directional control (Providing that you did not also lose your tail rotor.). So while you're going down you can turn your helicopter in a certain direction, but you're going to have a date with terra-firma within the next 5 seconds.

So to sum it all up...

Currently in Project Reality: If you take damage you completely lose main rotor power, then you crash bang boom.

My alternative suggestion: If you take damage and you lose 1/4 to 1/2 of your main rotor power, you then gradually descend at a set velocity and it will rely on pilot skill to maintain a proper level flight as it descends to the ground it will theoretically crash land if the terrain permits (Example: You land on a road and not into the side of a building). If the pilot is unable to maintain the proper level flight as it descends to the ground it will accept additional damage and theoretically crash and explode.

What you think?

ostupidman wrote:If the helicopters engine is purely disabled by lack of fuel or simple external damage then yes they will spin for a short time, but not for long and not with enough power to continue lift. Also if the damage is with the area of the engine and rotor most likely there is going to be severe internal engine damage and rotor damage causing the rotors to lock. Once again....splat.

Fail. Autorotaion is used and makes it possiblke for a helicopter to more or less safely land (with a good pilot of course) when the engine has stopped. It involves reducing the collectivew to maintain rotor RPM, as when descending air is passing through the rotors and moving them. When you get close to the cround you raise the collective and lose RPM (which is while you wait - to early - dead, to late - dead). However this allows you to gain a temporary amount of lift, and if done at the right time enough to slow the copper down for a safe impact.

Of course, it depends on where you get hit etc...


Also as I said earlier, aviation fuel in liquid sate is not explosive however the vapours are very damgerous.

Correct, as I posted above, but mini fail there Alex. You only raise the collective to keep the rotors from overspeeding and to maintain a sensible descent rate. Once the collective is set you normally don't touch it, as it tends to f**k with the attitude of the aircraft, causing you to have to make more cyclic adjustments and generally ending up mashing all your limbs around unecessarily. Flare is usually only done with the cyclic in this case.....


PS, Sorry for calling you stupid, ostupidman. Didn't mean it....

gclark03 wrote:Jonny, Mosquill, this is your cue to begin even more problem-solving.

In real life, crash-landings are either very rare or very poorly documented by the media. I hear about a lot more deadly BH crashes in Iraq/Afghanistan than successful crash-landings; then again, what do I know?

Yes, you hardly ever hear about sucsessful crash landing of choppers because they are rare and as Alex has managed, secsessful crash landings happen in PR.
This is the way it should be.

Ofcourse, this needs optimising. Perhaps a controlled landing is possible.
What we see in PR at the moment is a complete systems failure of all systems. This is not nessecarily going to happen IRL.
But then again, a BTR-90 getting hit by an AT-4 IRL would cause SEVERE injury, if not death to those in the vehicle; so i see no reason why anyone would survive an MI-8 getting hit by an AT-4


I think a decent compromise, is that after a few seconds the pilot would begin to fall out of the sky (as appears in game at the moment), but the difference would be that the pilot still has relative control over pitch, and roll (up, down, left, right keys; or simply put, the mouse controls).
This would allow pilots to have a crack at performing an emergency landings, where veriables such as hight, speed, terrain and skill/experience of the pilot would affect the countcome of the crash, much like in IRL.

[R-CON]Alex6714 wrote:Aviation fuel is infact not explosive, and very hard to burn in liquid state iirc.

Huh?! I thought Kerosene was pretty much the most flamable of all oil-based fules. I think those chemicals/fuels that are fractioned from crude oil at the lowest temperatures(Eg Kerosene) than those, during fractional distilation are the most flamable; and those that fraction at a higher tempurature are less flamable(like Naptha, ect)
Perhaps they do something to it?
Then again, i could have it COMPLETELY back-to-front


...mongol...

Well ostupidman you're wrong about there not being such systems, you should've done your research first. I'm surprised it took so long for someone to bring up autorotation but I'm glad at least some people are using facts to back up suggestions/arguments.

I agree with crash landings needing to be possible, and I've thought for a while that it'd be cool if I saw more crash landings happening. Would it also be possible to make people with pilot kits have like a 2 minute spawn so it's actually worth crash landing? Of course it's already worth it in a full transport heli though.

In this test he inserts a lighted match into an open container of Jet A fuel and the fuel puts out the match because it needs to be heated to 127 degrees to ignite. However, when misted into the atmosphere, the fuel will burn quickly and even explode because it has the proper fuel/air mixture.

Can´t find the proper video.

Oh please forgive me SleepyHe4d. How dare I post in your forums. How dare I comment on the massive system failures cause by a rocket to a helicopter. How about next time we all just bow out of a forum and grant your all knowing worshipfullness full control. Alex yeah jet fuel isn't doesn't go boom just cause of a spark or match. What my argument was, and what this started out as was talking about being hit by a LAT. Which has enough explosive power and heat to set it off.

ostupidman wrote:Oh please forgive me SleepyHe4d. How dare I post in your forums. How dare I comment on the massive system failures cause by a rocket to a helicopter. How about next time we all just bow out of a forum and grant your all knowing worshipfullness full control.

There, that's better.

Okay, sorry, I'm just like that.