I have like a million vids from that same series of games. All of them chopper jam sessions. Watch and learn fools- I am about to soak you in some cabbage/mojo mentals. Also.... This first one stay till the end for the most tragic ending. Flip on 720p
I am a pretty good gunner, above average- competent. I know my Roll. But GOD DAMN Cabbage can FLY. More to follow.
Yeah, Scary as hell with how close to the ground he goes, but damn if he can't pull the moves off
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WarcryI'm getting my shit pushed in here!AustraliaRegistered Userregular
So my favorite part was when I went into a suicidal dive in my jet to avoid a lock on because I don't have flares yet, then slammed into a tree at like five hundred miles an hour and promptly rebounded into the air. That was nice.
To be fair to the physics engine, I was pretty much flying flat at the end of the dive. Also crashes are totally fixed
Holy fucking shit, nobody should be able to fly that good. You know what I do whenver I get in teh helicopter? 180 flip to suicide.
I wrote a chopper tutorial
Alright recruits, I understand that some of you are new to the wonderful world of chopper piloting. Never fear! As a veteran chopper pilot that cut his teeth on the insanely twitchy choppers of the wonderful Desert Combat mod for 1942 (I do miss the joys of barrel rolling Little Birds down the streets of war torn Russia ), I can teach you everything you need to know so that you don't end up upside down with your tail rotor shoved up your own ass. Unless, of course, you're intentionally trying to do that just for laughs.
Basic Controls!
Mouse: Controls the angle of the main rotor.
A and D : Tail rotor
W and S: Collective (aka Throttle)
X: LOL NO COUNTERMEASURES TILL YOU UNLOCK THEM CAUSE DICE IS DUMB
Mouse 1: Pew pew pew pew pew
Flying!
Helicopters are a weird breed of aircraft. They are a momentum based aircraft, meaning that unlike jets, how maneuverable they are depends entirely on how good you are at managing your momentum. Just making a helicopter go forward seems easy, but requires quite a bit of management to get up to speed. So what do I mean by momentum? A good way to imagine it is as if the helo is a ball on a string and you're holding that string with your hand. As you start moving your hand, the ball follows but there's a little bit of lag time as the ball gets up to speed. If you attempt to move your hand in an arc one way the ball follows but it doesn't just stay directly under your hand does it? No, due to inertia it goes outwards from you or inwards to you depending on which way it's swinging. Furthermore, if you attempt to abruptly stop the ball, momentum keeps on carrying it along in the original path. Well, a helo basically does the same thing. If you tilt the rotors in one direction, the helo will start to move in that direction and the harder you get it going in that direction, the harder it'll be to pull it from that path.
Now, the momentum generated by a helo is a combination of two counteracting forces. Helicopters are essentially in a perpetual state of falling and what you're doing with the main rotor tilt and the collective is controlling that desire to fall and turning it into directional force. (Did I mention helicopters are weird?) This is why if you tilt the rotor forward, you'll notice the helicopter start to dive forward into the ground. This is countered by gently increasing your throttle in order to balance out that desire to fall. The helo will still be attempting to lawn dart itself, but the helicopter will be pulling the helo up and forward. Now this is where it hits brown trouser time for a lot of new pilots because they can feel the helo gathering more speed than they expected and don't know what to do from here leading to the inevitable sight of new guys taking off, flying 50 feet and then going wheels up into a hangar. So lets go step by step into getting your chopper moving.
Starting from the landing pad:
1.) Press W and as your helicopter approaches the altitude you want, let go of the key and start doing slow taps to pulse the power going to the main rotor.
From what I've noticed, helos in BF3 do not feature an auto hover leaving it to the pilot to manually hover. This means you will have to learn to only give your helo bursts of engine power as necessary in order to keep your altitude and speed correct. So first things first is to learn to just maintain altitude and hover. Once you've gotten the hang of not letting your chopper end up flying straight up to the moon, you can move on to step 2.
(Once you get good at handling your chopper, you can just tilt the rotors right off the pad and take off going whatever direction you please. I've surprised more than a few guys by just pulling off the pad strafing sidways and then whipping the chopper around with the tail rotor.)
2.) Gently push your mouse forward.
You'll notice the nose pitch down when you do this. Do not panic when this happens, it's normal. Remember the helo is going to follow the rotor blades but there will be a very slight lag time between your input and the chopper responding. The blades tilt and then the helicopter responds. You'll notice that the helicopter will start to move forward and pitch into the ground. Increase engine power as necessary in order to maintain altitude.
3.) Level the blades out a bit.
But don't you have to keep them tilted forward in order to move forward? Not really, and this is where a lot of new pilots get really fucked up and why you see a lot of choppers just inching a long due to the pilot being afraid to go faster or the chopper crashing off of spawn. If you keep them tilted forward you'll keep pitching the chopper more and more in that direction and end up with your nose in the ground. Instead, pull back a little bit on the main rotor tilt and level yourself off a bit. You'll find that the chopper is now flying mostly level and at a nice, controllable speed.
4.) Stop moving
Stopping a choppers forward momentum is as simple as tilting the rotors backwards. Doing so will cause the chopper to tilt back and dump speed very quickly. As with flying forward, be sure not to over do and be sure to level yourself off before you end up backflipping into the respawn screen.
So you've gotten the hang of taking off, flying at a controlled speed, and stopping. Turning this thing is not that hard and in BF3, is mostly just a matter of abusing the tail rotor since you're never going to be going all that fast. You can turn with the main rotor, but for super basic non crashy fun, we'll just stick with the tail rotor turn. It's a lot safer to start with. As you get better you'll figure out how to use the main rotor to assist with a turn.
The Tail Rotor
The tail rotor's basic purpose is to keep the helo from spinning around in circles due to the gyro effects of the main rotor. If the main is spinning clockwise, then chopper will want to spin clockwise as well. The tail rotor pushes against that and keeps the helo straight. By increasing or decreasing the tail rotor thrust, you can cause the chopper to spin around it's vertical axis. In game, this is a simple as pressing a or d and having fun as your chopper very safely starts to spin around in circles. You cannot crash the chopper by just spinning in place like a tardypants so feel free to experiment. The tail rotor is part of what makes a helicopter so insanely awesome. You can very safely spin the chopper around to engage targets as you're creeping along or popping up from behind a hill. I.e. if you pop up and see a column of armor or infantry, you can point yourself at the start of it, and using the tail rotor to track the entire line of targets with great precision. The tail rotor is also used a lot like a rudder, to help the pilot make slight adjustments while flying with the big difference being that a rudder only lets the pilot do minute adjustments whereas the tail rotor lets the helo spin 360 degrees in either direction whenever the pilot wants. Turning is really as simple as just pressing the direction key you want to turn in and letting it go when you approach the end of the turn. It'll help keep you out some potential fuck ups so learn to use it! It's like 99.99999999999% safe to play with so go ahead and experiment with it a lot.
Things to remember:
There is lag time on what the helo is going to do after you input your command.
Don't overdo your commands or you can easily end up wheels up and dead.
A little goes a long way in a chopper.
That ends basic helo flight school. Engaging targets is an entirely different post and is honestly more of an entire book. If you want to practice your chopper piloting skills outside of Battlefield 3 (which can be a real pain in the dick to try and get time with due to the vehicles being locked until the round starts) I highly suggest downloading the Arma 2 demo. It has a neat basic training section that has a chopper section that features both an attack chopper and a heavier, more cumbersome transport chopper. These choppers will be twitchier and way more fragile than the BF3 choppers, but feature a pretty similar simplified control layout which means you will develop better skills that will make flying the BF3 choppers an absolute breeze. Apparently Arma 2 also has some sort of free version, but I'm not sure what's in there.
If you drop me a line, I will be more than glad to help new pilots learn how to fly! While I'm not the greatest helo pilot ever, I am definitely proficient and will be glad to help new guys get off the ground!
Since I can't shoot or fly, Jihad Jeeping is a pretty good fit with my abilities. Since you also get points for blowing up your own jeep in addition to an enemy tank, I got top score one round with it.
Black lives matter.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
Since I can't shoot or fly, Jihad Jeeping is a pretty good fit with my abilities. Since you also get points for blowing up your own jeep in addition to an enemy tank, I got top score one round with it.
It is the best thing, it's pretty much the only way I can get any kills. Though I also like stalking tanks on foot and C4'ing them when they're not looking.
Basically: C4 + Anything = #1 Happy Fun Time
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
my favorite bug is that despite the 74u saying "Due to its incredibly short length the AKS-74U cannot mount a foregrip or a bipod." the grip and bipod are unlocked for it by default.
So my PA cherry has now been popped, and true to form it was brief, clumsy and rather painful.
Really impressed with how lag-free I was in a US server though, unless I was skipping all over the place for everyone else..
Question- are the jeep turrets meant to be bullshit to rotate?
@Warcry do you get weird bugs/compatibility issues with the G35 headset? It randomly stops playing back voice for me - happens with both Vent and Battlelog chat - even though I can see their levels moving in the volume mixer. Need to unplug and try again, which then turns everything into horrible bitcrushed shittiness until the drivers decide to kick in.
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Casually HardcoreOnce an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered Userregular
my favorite bug is that despite the 74u saying "Due to its incredibly short length the AKS-74U cannot mount a foregrip or a bipod." the grip and bipod are unlocked for it by default.
All you need is some attachment points and barrels and you can fit just about anything to any gun:
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TheExAmGerrymandered your districtsRegistered Userregular
The fact that people are confused by the choppers makes me happy. It scares people off from wanting to fly it which is why I now have stealth and IR flares on mine ^___^.
The fact that people are confused by the choppers makes me happy. It scares people off from wanting to fly it which is why I now have stealth and IR flares on mine ^___^.
If Battlefield has taught me anything, it's that people aren't scared off by the prospect of failing at piloting an aircraft. They'll just take that fucker and faceplant it. Over and over, if they have the chance.
The fact that people are confused by the choppers makes me happy. It scares people off from wanting to fly it which is why I now have stealth and IR flares on mine ^___^.
If Battlefield has taught me anything, it's that people aren't scared off by the prospect of failing at piloting an aircraft. They'll just take that fucker and faceplant it. Over and over, if they have the chance.
For some reason I've seen people giving choppers a wide berth save for the few that can at least not pancake them. I'm sure that'll change at retail. I've been having a ball since I can keep taking them off of spawn over and over with 0 competition. In order to stay useful, I run a Stinger and keep our immediate airspace clear so that the jets and eventually myself can take off in relative safety.
With the jets, I've discovered the best thing to do is to immediately fly over 500 meters and stay there. At that distance stingers cannot lock onto you. Then just circle around while waiting for targets to get lit up and then dive down, engage them, and get the fuck out. Keep circling and diving in like a bullet vomiting peregrine falcon and you can get results out of the jets.
The lack of inverse mouse keeps throwing me off in the chopper. At least thats what I tell myself after I crash into a tower/building/ground.
It's kinda counterintuitive to have it backwards in a helo since you're pushing your mouse in the direction you want the main rotor to tilt.
I keep trying to use the mouse to turn and yawing into trees. Finally had a chance to use a jet when the server emptied out, they seem surprisingly easy to fly. But rather useless at anything other than fighting other jets
So my PA cherry has now been popped, and true to form it was brief, clumsy and rather painful.
Really impressed with how lag-free I was in a US server though, unless I was skipping all over the place for everyone else..
Question- are the jeep turrets meant to be bullshit to rotate?
@Warcry do you get weird bugs/compatibility issues with the G35 headset? It randomly stops playing back voice for me - happens with both Vent and Battlelog chat - even though I can see their levels moving in the volume mixer. Need to unplug and try again, which then turns everything into horrible bitcrushed shittiness until the drivers decide to kick in.
Hmmmm. I may have that problem, but I'm not sure since people were abnormally quiet today, yet when I asked about I was told that it was just no-one talking.
The lack of inverse mouse keeps throwing me off in the chopper. At least thats what I tell myself after I crash into a tower/building/ground.
It's kinda counterintuitive to have it backwards in a helo since you're pushing your mouse in the direction you want the main rotor to tilt.
I keep trying to use the mouse to turn and yawing into trees. Finally had a chance to use a jet when the server emptied out, they seem surprisingly easy to fly. But rather useless at anything other than fighting other jets
Their cannon hurts vehicles also. Super fast strafe runs ftw.
The lack of inverse mouse keeps throwing me off in the chopper. At least thats what I tell myself after I crash into a tower/building/ground.
It's kinda counterintuitive to have it backwards in a helo since you're pushing your mouse in the direction you want the main rotor to tilt.
I keep trying to use the mouse to turn and yawing into trees. Finally had a chance to use a jet when the server emptied out, they seem surprisingly easy to fly. But rather useless at anything other than fighting other jets
Yea, that's not what the mouse is for. The mouse controls the helo's movement in a strict forward/backward/strafe left/strafe right sense. You can turn using the main rotor in BF3, but honestly you'll never be going fast enough where that sort of maneuver is viable or even needed. Just use the tail rotor (A and D keys) to do actual turns.
Get the Arma 2 Demo and load the attack chopper basic training. It'll teach you everything you need to know.
EDIT: Somehow I accidently did this as a new post instead of an edit. Whoopsy.
TOGSolid on
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TheExAmGerrymandered your districtsRegistered Userregular
The tail rotor controls are so much more responsive in this than they were in BF2. I fly heavy on the tail rotor, so I'm happy.
Battlemans: DiscoCabbage | Elite: Dangerous: Aleksandr Khabaj
Yea, I don't normally whore the tail rotor out as hard as I do in BF3 since it's actually kind of a good way to dump your speed in a hurry which can == dead helo, but in BF3 the controls are so relaxed that it really doesn't matter.
The lack of inverse mouse keeps throwing me off in the chopper. At least thats what I tell myself after I crash into a tower/building/ground.
It's kinda counterintuitive to have it backwards in a helo since you're pushing your mouse in the direction you want the main rotor to tilt.
Yeah, really looking forward to the full game and being able to properly run inverse on the mouse.
Never took a liking to flying battlefield choppers with a joystick, though jets pretty much require one. Might be time to dig out the flight stick and retrain this old brain of mine.
I don't use a joystick on the helos either. The mouse and keyboard setup is actually quite responsive and good for helo piloting. Fuck flying jets with a mouse right in the ass though. Joystick or bust.
Posts
Yeah, pretttttttty sure we decided to call it the PF Chang.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
I guess it's going to be a PDW in retail unless this is a bug, which excites me.
Dumbfiring helos out of the air like they are nothin'
I have like a million vids from that same series of games. All of them chopper jam sessions. Watch and learn fools- I am about to soak you in some cabbage/mojo mentals. Also.... This first one stay till the end for the most tragic ending. Flip on 720p
I am a pretty good gunner, above average- competent. I know my Roll. But GOD DAMN Cabbage can FLY. More to follow.
I've started to use the 360 controller, but I'm finding it really hard to shoot with the left bumper
To be fair to the physics engine, I was pretty much flying flat at the end of the dive. Also crashes are totally fixed
I wrote a chopper tutorial
Basic Controls!
Mouse: Controls the angle of the main rotor.
A and D : Tail rotor
W and S: Collective (aka Throttle)
X: LOL NO COUNTERMEASURES TILL YOU UNLOCK THEM CAUSE DICE IS DUMB
Mouse 1: Pew pew pew pew pew
Flying!
Helicopters are a weird breed of aircraft. They are a momentum based aircraft, meaning that unlike jets, how maneuverable they are depends entirely on how good you are at managing your momentum. Just making a helicopter go forward seems easy, but requires quite a bit of management to get up to speed. So what do I mean by momentum? A good way to imagine it is as if the helo is a ball on a string and you're holding that string with your hand. As you start moving your hand, the ball follows but there's a little bit of lag time as the ball gets up to speed. If you attempt to move your hand in an arc one way the ball follows but it doesn't just stay directly under your hand does it? No, due to inertia it goes outwards from you or inwards to you depending on which way it's swinging. Furthermore, if you attempt to abruptly stop the ball, momentum keeps on carrying it along in the original path. Well, a helo basically does the same thing. If you tilt the rotors in one direction, the helo will start to move in that direction and the harder you get it going in that direction, the harder it'll be to pull it from that path.
Now, the momentum generated by a helo is a combination of two counteracting forces. Helicopters are essentially in a perpetual state of falling and what you're doing with the main rotor tilt and the collective is controlling that desire to fall and turning it into directional force. (Did I mention helicopters are weird?) This is why if you tilt the rotor forward, you'll notice the helicopter start to dive forward into the ground. This is countered by gently increasing your throttle in order to balance out that desire to fall. The helo will still be attempting to lawn dart itself, but the helicopter will be pulling the helo up and forward. Now this is where it hits brown trouser time for a lot of new pilots because they can feel the helo gathering more speed than they expected and don't know what to do from here leading to the inevitable sight of new guys taking off, flying 50 feet and then going wheels up into a hangar. So lets go step by step into getting your chopper moving.
Starting from the landing pad:
1.) Press W and as your helicopter approaches the altitude you want, let go of the key and start doing slow taps to pulse the power going to the main rotor.
From what I've noticed, helos in BF3 do not feature an auto hover leaving it to the pilot to manually hover. This means you will have to learn to only give your helo bursts of engine power as necessary in order to keep your altitude and speed correct. So first things first is to learn to just maintain altitude and hover. Once you've gotten the hang of not letting your chopper end up flying straight up to the moon, you can move on to step 2.
(Once you get good at handling your chopper, you can just tilt the rotors right off the pad and take off going whatever direction you please. I've surprised more than a few guys by just pulling off the pad strafing sidways and then whipping the chopper around with the tail rotor.)
2.) Gently push your mouse forward.
You'll notice the nose pitch down when you do this. Do not panic when this happens, it's normal. Remember the helo is going to follow the rotor blades but there will be a very slight lag time between your input and the chopper responding. The blades tilt and then the helicopter responds. You'll notice that the helicopter will start to move forward and pitch into the ground. Increase engine power as necessary in order to maintain altitude.
3.) Level the blades out a bit.
But don't you have to keep them tilted forward in order to move forward? Not really, and this is where a lot of new pilots get really fucked up and why you see a lot of choppers just inching a long due to the pilot being afraid to go faster or the chopper crashing off of spawn. If you keep them tilted forward you'll keep pitching the chopper more and more in that direction and end up with your nose in the ground. Instead, pull back a little bit on the main rotor tilt and level yourself off a bit. You'll find that the chopper is now flying mostly level and at a nice, controllable speed.
4.) Stop moving
Stopping a choppers forward momentum is as simple as tilting the rotors backwards. Doing so will cause the chopper to tilt back and dump speed very quickly. As with flying forward, be sure not to over do and be sure to level yourself off before you end up backflipping into the respawn screen.
So you've gotten the hang of taking off, flying at a controlled speed, and stopping. Turning this thing is not that hard and in BF3, is mostly just a matter of abusing the tail rotor since you're never going to be going all that fast. You can turn with the main rotor, but for super basic non crashy fun, we'll just stick with the tail rotor turn. It's a lot safer to start with. As you get better you'll figure out how to use the main rotor to assist with a turn.
The Tail Rotor
The tail rotor's basic purpose is to keep the helo from spinning around in circles due to the gyro effects of the main rotor. If the main is spinning clockwise, then chopper will want to spin clockwise as well. The tail rotor pushes against that and keeps the helo straight. By increasing or decreasing the tail rotor thrust, you can cause the chopper to spin around it's vertical axis. In game, this is a simple as pressing a or d and having fun as your chopper very safely starts to spin around in circles. You cannot crash the chopper by just spinning in place like a tardypants so feel free to experiment. The tail rotor is part of what makes a helicopter so insanely awesome. You can very safely spin the chopper around to engage targets as you're creeping along or popping up from behind a hill. I.e. if you pop up and see a column of armor or infantry, you can point yourself at the start of it, and using the tail rotor to track the entire line of targets with great precision. The tail rotor is also used a lot like a rudder, to help the pilot make slight adjustments while flying with the big difference being that a rudder only lets the pilot do minute adjustments whereas the tail rotor lets the helo spin 360 degrees in either direction whenever the pilot wants. Turning is really as simple as just pressing the direction key you want to turn in and letting it go when you approach the end of the turn. It'll help keep you out some potential fuck ups so learn to use it! It's like 99.99999999999% safe to play with so go ahead and experiment with it a lot.
Things to remember:
There is lag time on what the helo is going to do after you input your command.
Don't overdo your commands or you can easily end up wheels up and dead.
A little goes a long way in a chopper.
That ends basic helo flight school. Engaging targets is an entirely different post and is honestly more of an entire book. If you want to practice your chopper piloting skills outside of Battlefield 3 (which can be a real pain in the dick to try and get time with due to the vehicles being locked until the round starts) I highly suggest downloading the Arma 2 demo. It has a neat basic training section that has a chopper section that features both an attack chopper and a heavier, more cumbersome transport chopper. These choppers will be twitchier and way more fragile than the BF3 choppers, but feature a pretty similar simplified control layout which means you will develop better skills that will make flying the BF3 choppers an absolute breeze. Apparently Arma 2 also has some sort of free version, but I'm not sure what's in there.
Links for both of em!
http://www.arma2.com/demo/arma-2-demo_en.html
http://www.arma2.com/free
If you drop me a line, I will be more than glad to help new pilots learn how to fly! While I'm not the greatest helo pilot ever, I am definitely proficient and will be glad to help new guys get off the ground!
not when my jet bullets shove him into the passing tree
Yes!
When the fuck did this start happening!?
Last random one...
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
Yeah, pretty easily my favorite LMG. Pity you only get it half the time you play.
Also, any way to check the tags you've taken? I've stolen 95 so far, just interested to see how many are unique.
It is the best thing, it's pretty much the only way I can get any kills. Though I also like stalking tanks on foot and C4'ing them when they're not looking.
Basically: C4 + Anything = #1 Happy Fun Time
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
Really impressed with how lag-free I was in a US server though, unless I was skipping all over the place for everyone else..
Question- are the jeep turrets meant to be bullshit to rotate?
@Warcry do you get weird bugs/compatibility issues with the G35 headset? It randomly stops playing back voice for me - happens with both Vent and Battlelog chat - even though I can see their levels moving in the volume mixer. Need to unplug and try again, which then turns everything into horrible bitcrushed shittiness until the drivers decide to kick in.
All you need is some attachment points and barrels and you can fit just about anything to any gun:
*shakes fist*
By the way Mojo, did you manage to catch our first flanking run on that Tunguska? I wanna see that again.
Battlemans: DiscoCabbage | Elite: Dangerous: Aleksandr Khabaj
It's kinda counterintuitive to have it backwards in a helo since you're pushing your mouse in the direction you want the main rotor to tilt.
If Battlefield has taught me anything, it's that people aren't scared off by the prospect of failing at piloting an aircraft. They'll just take that fucker and faceplant it. Over and over, if they have the chance.
Old PA forum lookalike style for the new forums | My ko-fi donation thing.
With the jets, I've discovered the best thing to do is to immediately fly over 500 meters and stay there. At that distance stingers cannot lock onto you. Then just circle around while waiting for targets to get lit up and then dive down, engage them, and get the fuck out. Keep circling and diving in like a bullet vomiting peregrine falcon and you can get results out of the jets.
Battlelog Forums, everybody
You can hold ctrl to creep along at a slower pace, too.
Battlemans: DiscoCabbage | Elite: Dangerous: Aleksandr Khabaj
Dear god. I can now be the slowly rolling ominous death machine that I have only dreamed of.
Hmmmm. I may have that problem, but I'm not sure since people were abnormally quiet today, yet when I asked about I was told that it was just no-one talking.
Yea, that's not what the mouse is for. The mouse controls the helo's movement in a strict forward/backward/strafe left/strafe right sense. You can turn using the main rotor in BF3, but honestly you'll never be going fast enough where that sort of maneuver is viable or even needed. Just use the tail rotor (A and D keys) to do actual turns.
Get the Arma 2 Demo and load the attack chopper basic training. It'll teach you everything you need to know.
EDIT: Somehow I accidently did this as a new post instead of an edit. Whoopsy.
Battlemans: DiscoCabbage | Elite: Dangerous: Aleksandr Khabaj
I don't use a joystick on the helos either. The mouse and keyboard setup is actually quite responsive and good for helo piloting. Fuck flying jets with a mouse right in the ass though. Joystick or bust.