Need advice : MI-8 or Huey or Gazelle

I'm about to pull a trigger to buy one of these choppers. Which one of these helo is the most useful in Blue Flag ? I don't care anything else such as feature complete or not etc.

I'm mostly on Blue side.

BTW, ED should give Buddyspike members some kind of bonus or something. They already made me buy DCS modules. :D

Thank you for your suggestions.

Cheers

I'm not sure about the intricaties of blue flag like deploying MANPADS teams and rescueing downed pilots, but I'd argue the gazelle is probably the most useful out of the three.

- It's got a Viviane sighting system with good zoom and thermal vision so it makes for a decent scout. The system is mounted on the roof so if you're a decent pilot you can take cover behind objects but still scout.

- With the missiles you can one hit kill any land vehicle within 4300 metres. The missiles are subsonic though, a hell of a lot slower than what the Ka-50 shoots. So you need to track a target for nearly 30 seconds at max range.

- It has NADIR navigation equipment, so not only can you find your way around the battlefield, you can relay info about what you find in LatLong or UTM coordinates.

- You can hunt other choppers with the Mistral IR guided missile, or perhaps become sort of a hero and shoot down a fast-mover with it :) If you choose to fly the Gazelle capable of shooting the Mistral you lose out on the thermal capable camera system though, it gets swapped for a regular daylight TV system.

-It's multicrew capable in case you want to bring a blue flag buddy along. You can take turns controlling the chopper and/or have one player pilot while the other operates the weapons and sighting system.

Gazelle Thermal vision is the most needed I believe since I always end up flying Blue Flag at night.

Ok its Gazelle then unless somebody gives another good advice. Still 4 hours to go to pull the trigger (still at work now lol)

Thanks you Sryan. How can I rep you in this forum ?

Cheers

You won't have any issues fighting at night in the Gazelle :)

I have the other choppers too, and while I do like them, I'm not sure if they would be as useful as a gazelle in Blue Flag. Aside from capturing FARPs, rescueing pilots and things like that. The Mi-8MTV2 Hip has nice weapons such as cannons, Gattling guns, huge amount of rockets and even bombs. It's also surprisingly fast since unlike the Huey or Gazelle it actually has two engines. But the weapons are fixed wich means you must sort of strafe with the Hip similair to how you would in a ground attack aircraft. The huey can gimbal its guns, both the pintle mounted door guns as the forward firing guns, but there's only so much you can do with the 7.62 and rockets aren't always reliable in getting the job done.

You can rep me just the regular way, but it might be possible that posts here can't be repped. Similair to how you can't rep posts in chit-chat.

At any rate I was glad to help.

Considering BF the higher chances are that Huey and Gazelle are assigned to Blue side especially that last BF editions were following NATO vs. Soviet setup.

On the other hand I would say that Mi-8 has higher potential in BF than Huey:

- it's noticeably faster: less time to setup defenses, get to FARP/AB with troops, etc.... Mi-8 speed really makes a difference.

- takes more armament. You still don't have much chance to take out a FARP (not mentioning AB) on your own. AA will just tear you to pieces. But if AA is down you can actually help with destroying trucks, buildings or bunkers. I had a situations that CAS flight was out of ammo having to go back to rearm while only few, undefended targets were left. Thanks to Mi-8 being able to take out those last targets/buildings we've managed to capture the base.

- it can carry more weight. Huey with full armament (4x minigun + 2x rocket pods) + troops + AA crate can barely take off. Even if you manage to do that its speed is substantially decreased as also you can forget to fly over mountains. Mi-8 does not suffer so much, I'm pretty much flying it always fully loaded (4x rocket pods, 2x gun pods) while with Huey you need to drop some of the armament if you want to take the cargo.

Overall I find Mi-8 much more efficient in BF than Huey. The issue though is that if you're playing on Blue you're not guaranteed to get it.

Thank you for your input Firmek. I have made my decision to purchase Gazelle this night. Mi-8 next month just for red side sake lol and that's if I have some money to spend. But if Viggen or Hornet is released we can forget the Hip :D

Mi8 imho is probably the best module in DCS currently (immersion and sim reality wise). What ever you decide the Hip is a definite YES to purchase module........my 5c

Well... once Hornet is released all of my other modules will go for some time to hangars (to get a good maintenance) :D

@ObiwanVA10 yeah I'd gladly buy the Hip but monthly budget allow only one. The Gazelle comes first in this month. Thanks

@firmek I believe Viggen will be released before Hornet but that's another topic I think.

Thanks you all for your suggestions

Cheers

1. mi 8

2. gazelle

3. huey

as a huge huey fan, i suggest mi-8

Bought Gazelle last night and I can say its relatively not so much complex helo to learn. I'm no way know anything about flight model but I feel like flying BMS F-16 with rotor :D.