Collective

Hey,

I recently start learning the Ka-50 and I was wondering about the collective. In older tutorial videos the collective and it's switches look slightly different then now. Were there major updates during die moduls livetime?

My second question goes into a more technical / hardware direction.

I'm building a collective because I find the commerial ones too expensive. The prototype works quite well.

Does in real helicopters (as well as the Ka-50) the collectives have horizontal middle position and goes up- and downwards. Or is the Horizontal position the lowest most? (see figure)

How big is the deflection angle beetween min and max?

thank you for your help

Hi,

The collective is like your first drawing - it just comes up from a zero position.

Some helicopters (Lynx/Wildcat, for example) have the facility to push the collective down and add negative lift to stick the aircraft to the deck before it's lashed down, harpoon has engaged or it's otherwise secured. But that's immaterial here.

Hey,

 

 

I recently start learning the Ka-50 and I was wondering about the collective. In older tutorial videos the collective and it's switches look slightly different then now. Were there major updates during die moduls livetime?

Yes, the entire 3D model of the cockpit as well as the textures got updated in February:

Ka-50 cockpit released

2.5.6 Open Beta Update

 

The updated cockpit is available in the current DCS World Open Beta. This new cockpit has been rebuilt from scratch and consists of a new, high-resolution 3D mesh and textures that take advantage of advanced rendering and lighting technologies.

 

Check Changelog

 

Over the past decade, we’ve been working hard on our fixed-wing aircraft. Thousands of features take thousands of man-hours. However, with our core principles in mind, we feel an important duty to take care of our older modules built on previous versions. That’s why to celebrate the improvements we’re offering you the chance to complete your helo hangar with a limited time offer on all our helicopters.

 

 

I'm building a collective because I find the commerial ones too expensive. The prototype works quite well.

All you need is the common and basic lever that you just have with max-min scale, so no center position or such at all.

How big is the deflection angle beetween min and max?

For specifically the KA-50?

You can either try to model a real ones, but I think that is not sensible for various reasons. Like if you are going to fly other helicopters, it doesn't matter what you have. And then if you are not having a proper seat and all other things from cockpit it is not required to have real kind.

As you likely are in the normal home cockpit scenario, it is better to make a design based your own arm length, seat position and so on. Of course you wouldn't want to move a collective 90 degrees to get from min to max blade AoA, but you don't either want a 5 degrees so you have too high resolution for small movement. Commonly those has been AFAIK about 30 degrees travels, but it as well depends a lot about your collective arm length. So if you have a 40 cm arm then you need more angles but if you have 70 cm arm then almost half of that.

If you will think about your flight, you are rarely in the minimal range and maximum range, but more like a 50-75% range. So that is more about the position you want to have your hand nicely rested on collective (if you have the friction there) and so on have good movement scale right there.

I have own collective and I went with a different route than typical as I wanted a nice fluid dynamics feeling and so on I opted for the counter-weight balance system instead mechanical. To get a nice/good one, I would have wanted to go through a fluid-mechanism where you push/pull through a fluid compressor but I didn't want to risk any leaks and totally not handle any other related problems, so simple counter-weight system with pulleys is second best thing for a dry use.

For angles I just went by the touch, for a nice good throw, for the angle I simply chose the good arm length to give a nice collective throttle angle so it doesn't turn too much as it is not nice to have like a car handbrake kind feeling.

And if you use a good high resolution sensor, you have that 16 thousands input resolution and you totally do not need anything like that for a collective as seriously 256 steps is already more than plenty and anything past that is just nitpicking. Example, if you are going to have a collective that moves up/down by a 20 cm, then you have 12.8 steps between each centimeter. That means you have about one step on each millimeter. And if you are going to move the collective for a normal flight about 5-7 cm range, you are not going to notice that 1 millimeter resolution in that scale, especially when you have pedals and cyclic, wind conditions, speed and all other factors there that are mattering far more. If your rotor AoA scale is from 0 to 15 degrees, it is then that 1 mm cyclic movement will change rotor AoA by 0.05 degrees.

Let's say you get a 10-bit sensor that offers you a 1024 steps. Now you have less than 0.25 mm resolution. Go to 12-bit (4096) or 14-bit (16384) and 16-bit (65536) and you have ridiculous resolution to give.

If you buy a sensor with 360, 180, 90, 60 etc degree, you will notice that you can play with numbers, but it doesn't change how much you really want to move your hand on controller.

So, if you have a 12-bit sensor, then you can have any collective arm length and degree to really get the wanted good nice collective throw. The degree doesn't matter anymore technically but only the arm length for the feeling. There is as well big difference how is your collective arm angled. Is it straight? Do you have a positive or negative angle in it?

So instead trying to mimic a proper angle degree, try to get a nicer hand movement in home cockpit as you will enjoy from it more than knowing that you have collective at proper angle.

And as you are not limited to real cockpit controls limitations and such, you can improve your skill demands by making longer throw than really required.

Then afterwards, you can always physically limit a collective movement for wanted, and calibrate the controller to that range. So example if from 16384 steps you only use a 4000 steps, it is far far more than you will need.

Thank you!

I expected values between 30 and 45 degrees.

Iam using a Texas Instrument linear hall sensor drv5055 with a low-pass filter.

At 3.3V suppy voltage it has approx 3V of travel. The usb interface's ADC I use seems to have 10bit input. The software game device seems to have 8bit. It feels fine.

The interface is called Arcaze. It is pretty straight forward.

I was thinking of doing the PC-interface on my own, but I decided to use a working solution to concentrate to the collective hardware.

Thank you for your input.