Helicopters How to?

Game Talk The Warehouse
1

Okay so How do I learn to drive a helicopter? is it in a book?

2

Okay found out itā€™s a mutation but how do you get it ingame?

3

Additionally are they supposed to fall out of the sky if you let go of the controls? it should still be running and holding itself stationary right?

4

No, if you do not constantly tell the helicopter how to beat the air into submission, it stops beating the air into submission and reverts to a helicopterā€™s natural relationship with gravity and inherent aerodynamic lift capabilities. Which is to say, it falls out of the sky.

7 Likes
5

That would be more realistic wouldnā€™t it lol, Iā€™ll do some testing with the autopilot.

6

Weā€™re hammering out the learning process, but it would be something like this:

  1. Find and read an extremely boring book on basic flight operations, which would give you the UNTRAINED_PILOT trait.
  2. Find and read another extremely boring book that would be the manual for the specific aircraft you want to fly.
  3. Get in aircraft, start it up, take off.
  4. After somewhere between 1 minute and 4-6 hours of flight time, encounter one of the many, many ways to kill yourself as an untrained pilot, fail to recover from it successfully, and crash land. If youā€™re lucky, you crash at a slow enough groundspeed that your injuries are survivable, but your aircraft is scrapped.
  5. Repeat steps 2-4 until you have 25-30 hours of flight time, at which point you get the TRAINED_PILOT trait and can fly more or less safely.

Also, if at any point during the safe training experience, you take your aircraft up during the rain, you crash and probably die.

It is possible to teach yourself to fly - obviously, all the early aircraft pioneers did it - but it is extremely risky and you will crash repeatedly in the process. If youā€™re lucky, none of the crashes will be fatal. It helps if you fly some extremely low powered biplane with a stall speed of about 15 mph, instead of some overmuscled AH-64 military helicopter that routinely kills trained pilots in peacetime.

8 Likes
7

Were helicopters properly released or are you just discussing debugging stuff? I didnā€™t see any PRs about it.

8

What if the specific aircraft Iā€™m trying to fly is a sedan that Iā€™ve welded a rotor to?

2 Likes
9

Then you have to write a book about itā€¦ then read it.

10

Build #10488, Cochise.

11

Homebuilt aircraft should have the advantage of not requiring you to read the operations manual.

The disadvantage is that unless youā€™re a trained aerodynamics engineer and power and airframe mechanic, your homebuilt aircraft should have a much higher chance of killing you. Being a test pilot is risky!

12

Itā€™s a bit hard to find because itā€™s an old PR, but was merged recently.

1 Like
13

An autogyro seems like something more in the CDDA survivorā€™s wheelhouse. At least as I understand it youā€™re far less likely to turn yourself into a pile of jagged metal and broken bones.

EDIT: Oh I finished reading the github comments. Silly me of course someone brought it up already. Iā€™ll see myself out.

1 Like
14

You could potentially set the pilot and drivng skills as a single skill tree, but lower the driving skill requirements needed to efficiently drive ground based vehicles, while having higher skill requirements to ā€œdriveā€ airborne vehicles without issues.

Bit like cooking does in terms of both making food and chemical concoctions.

2 Likes
15

Cooking and chemistry being combined is already not something we really want, we shouldnā€™t use that as a model and extend it.

Besides, driving a land vehicle and operating a helicopter are largely unrelated.

2 Likes
16

Fair enough.

In that context, would piloting also be broken down to cover separate modes of air born transportation? Such as Blimp, Jet and Helicopter?

17

Also sorry for the second question, but are there any plans for air based threats or obstacles survivors in the sky will need to face?

Such as hulks lopping boulders at you or flying monstrosities?

18

Eventually this will be handled by the proficiency system, but in the short term, there should be different traits to enable different vehicles. So TRAINED_ROTORCRAFT_PILOT would let you fly helicopters, TRAINED_FIXEDWING_PILOT would let you fly normal planes, etc.

Piloting as a general skill to represent your ability to navigate and control any flying vehicle works fine, with proficiencies/traits to cover the stuff you really know.

1 Like
19

Can we really pilot helicopters in CDDA ? Iā€™ve seen some Wreckage of flying vehicle, but thatā€™s all.

20

Iā€™ve been wondering how often they spawn. Iā€™ve yet to see an intact one, and the wrecks donā€™t have functional rotors that Iā€™ve found yet. The only ones Iā€™ve messed with were debug test spawned copters.

EDIT: Looked at the old pull requests, looks like they have a rare chance to spawn at a regional airport (Iā€™ve never SEEN a regional airport) for civilian models, and the military ones werenā€™t set to spawn anywhere. Donā€™t know what the current spawn rate is.