I've found that my favorite moments in arma are those where we overcome incredible odds to survive. Last night I had one of those moments, it ended up with a landing that I rank in my top 5. Fly the aircraft as far into the crash as possible. Those are the words that were drilled into my head years ago in flight training. Sometimes it works out, and because it can work out, its worth every effort to try for. The longer you remain in control the more likely to arrive at a positive outcome. Setup: Skwi and I were acting as an aerial armed recon for the ground element using the newly captured armed hellcat. We had been working our way around a military installation popping the flir ball up over trees from a ways off to check for troops then move to a new location and repeat. After lobbing some rockets at the defenders a fresh AA patrol moved in the area to engage us. After dodging several missiles and playing a game of cat and mouse with them we setup in a new location to cover our infantry's advance. I thought that the small clearing we were hovering down in would conceal us fairly well and the ridge to our side would cover us from any direct shots from the AA team. Skwi and I discovered the hard way that they had moved and the hill no longer provided any cover. It was one of those moments where everything goes into slow motion, the train wreck is happening and you are riding it. I could see the missile clearly, it was headed right at my seat with its exhaust trail billowing out from around the small round dot that rapidly grew larger. Self preservation kicked in, there was an attempt to pop flares and try to drop the last 20ft of altitude and dodge to the left. It was no good, sitting in a clearing with no where to go at low altitude it seemed like there simply was nothing to do but accept our fate. There was an explosion, the helicopter was spinning violently, my mind wants to start evaluating our situation but there is no time to check instruments, just a bright unhealthy glow of red from the top left of my screen. In flying we are trained in decision making, the luxury of careful analysis is not something afforded us in emergencies, you make a decision quickly and decisively. As soon as you make your change you start a feedback loop, did your action positively affect the situation?, yes? then do you need to do something additionally?, no? what can you do differently? I wish I could say as our chopper sat just below the tree tops spinning that there was time for all of that but my thoughts were this: rapid spinning = tail rotor out, we are starting to go up ever so slightly = main rotor must still be turning and have some control over it, seems like the rotor is slowing = too much collective and the engine is now out, collective down NOW, ground is already here pull collective back up to slow the descent, rotation speed building from collective increase can't risk the chance of flipping on landing full collective down and pray the hull can take the impact on the skids, yell for Skwi to bail and hope he can clear before any secondaries. As I jumped out of the chopper it appeared that everything was red on the warning panel, no idea how I still had any control to land with no main rotor but now was the time to run away. But running away would mean the loss of one of our newly captured helos so the only option was what any good engineer with a tool kit would do, stand right next to a chopper about to blow and try to repair it before it could blow up. Somehow the missile didn't completely destroy us. Looking back I suppose the dodge could have put the missile to our side and it hit the tail of the chopper or perhaps it started tracking one of the flares. I really wish I had a video of it to break it down even more to see what went right and what went wrong. I'd love my audio as well, as I think I was talking the entire way through it. Lesson learned, audio missile warning seems to be out, more distance from AA teams is never a bad thing, when you start working the same area for a while in a chopper be careful as Gaia does not like to play nice. The nearly company of troops we were assaulted with after that is testament to Gaia's mean streak, but that is another story for another time. On big thing is that the audio warning for tracking, lock, and launch didn't seem to be working for me last night. I had to either notice the flashing on my radar or visually acquire the missile to know when to launch flares. If someone would like to try to shoot me down a bunch this week I could use some help on Meat and Mead testing it some more. Also, we still have somewhere around 14m in the bank, I think the only thing not worth keeping for our own use would be the fighter. That is mainly since we can't take off from our airfield with it. While we should still be careful and not waste the equipment, we shouldn't be scared to take it out. I know I had a blast when we took out the tanks. We know we are inevitably going to lose more helicopters between ground fire and pilot error so there really isn't a reason to sell them back. The hellcats can stand in for the littlebirds very nicely, and the two CH-49's are basically dedicated heavy lifts for recovering wheeled vehicles to keep our mech infantry in business.. The tanks and ifv's will make for some good raids and assault support, if they are destroyed it shouldn't be too difficult to acquire new ones if we really have a mission that needs them. The civilian cars and trucks are great for allowing us to infiltrate into areas we should know better than to fly a chopper into.
I think we should definitely sell the jet, we really aren't in the business of dedicated CAS, and it should fetch us some good loot. I would like to try using the Kajman for support one of these night that we have 8-9 people running around, as we could probably afford to have a pair sitting waiting with the chopper to kill things (ideally MH as pilot and someone as gunner, I'd love to give gunning a shot, myself).
I guess I should also mention that Smokey rolled a tank. Onto its top. And Flessar was able to ram it and get it back on the tracks, all without any damage to either MBT.
Realistically, let's think about what we would really use for transport/support purposes. Helo's Littlebird Wildcat Kajman Mohawk I think we can drop at least 1 UH60. We never use them and probably won't unless we have 8 or more being moved in which case we'd more likely split up into 2 separate choppers. The Mohawks can carry huge amounts of troops as well in addition to being heavy lifters for vehicles. Wheeled/Tracked Leopard 2 Pandur II M-ATV Civilians cars/trucks Let's face it, we aren't going to use the Namer or the CSAT vehicles. The Pandur II is the perfect ground transport for a larger group with the Leopard 2 for support. The M-ATVs or Fenneks if we find them are just fine for transporting smaller groups as well. Civvy vehicles would be handy for rapid insertion considering how much faster they are than military equipment.
I should be around tonight if you need help. We've got a couple different servers using different mod sets so what we'll be focusing on is SRS Business (or Training Grounds if it is reloaded). The weapons thread is a good place to start getting an idea of what you'd like to use and what is helpful for the role(s) you'd like to play.
Also, Flessar and I found four functional mg boats parked at the beach just beside our base. I was going to air lift them back to base with the Mohawk, but it would not give me the option after at least 15-20 minutes of hovering over one. I went to M&M and tried with a Strider, which was almost an instant hook. So either those boats are messed up somehow, or I just suck at picking up boats.
What good are they going to do us at our base? Admit it, you only want to lift them so you can drop them on our heads.
Technically we fried the motors that move the commanders gun on smokeys tank, it suddenly started suffering from ED when we flipped back over and MH had to make a new one out of the blender from our mini-bar. We had to crush our ice by hand like a bunch of savages.
Actually, I wanted to see how the lift system worked without risking one of the vehicles we had already claimed. And the whole returning it to base bit was going to be a joke. Only the Borg would have a gunboat a full km from water chilling out beside a tank.
Today was a bit hit or miss, we lost a Pandur but managed to recover a new one to make up for it. Boom picked up an armed technical along with an unarmed technical. In a moment of poor judgment I wrote off one of the little birds when I clipped a tree on landing. In order to make up for it Don went into super sniper mode to help me out, we recleared the AAC airfield, blowing up 4 jets and stealing 4 hellcats. -1 little bird +2 armed hellcats +2 unarmed hellcats +2 technical (armed & unarmed)
-1 fuel truck (Still in the field, will recover tonight) +2 Pandur II The factory near Kore still has 3-4 disabled Pandur IIs, 1 active and very angry Pandur II, and two smoldering husks of Sochors. We tried to disable the Sochors, but it just wasn't meant to be. Story time later. Anyone who goes to the factory, beware of crewman and a full squad of 8 still in the area as of 1:30pm EST.
Well, after PT today, I decided to do a little exploring, of the stupid kind. Like find a civy hatchback, get shot, run all the way to the airport, find a tank with the crew out side, shoot them, hijack the tank, and drive home undamaged kind of stupid. In other news: We have another tank! T100 this time, it doesn't match our others, but that's ok, its a TANK!
And I went out after Fless stirred up the hornet's nest and pushed OpFor back towards the airport. Gaia was not happy about losing a tank, so she pushed out 1-2 squares in all directions except south. So I posted up on a hill with my shiny new sniper rifle and started dropping her recon units from 1400-2100m. 24 kills later, I took the unarmed technical back to base and reloaded it for my next adventure, but got distracted tidying up all our vehicles. The tanks are spaced out so they won't all explode if one goes, and the Pandurs are parked in three pairs by a group of reeds for the same reason. Edit: Jumped back in for half an hour and took out ten units in and around the CSAT airfield. As of 1:30pm EST, there were no visible vehicles at the airfield. There was a Pandur about 2km N of the airfield earlier, but I didn't see it on my second trip down. Caution is advised, but the airfield may be a softer target for a concentrated group effort.
