spook27

Here’s something to get you started - Yankee Air Pirate has some amazing missions, including some CAS down south. Fire one up and try it out with the Tadpole or Smoker suggested, but also try the mission using the Huey Cobra by Capun instead (by changing the aircraft at the loadout screen). No mods required, no fancy stuff, these great geniuses have provided for us! – get YAP, get the Cobra, simple. Meanwhile, I continue to collect Vietnam era helos and experiment with campaign files. Gotta keep your edge though, last night I had three passes before I could get that damn Crusader back on the deck….

Wonderful photos, thanks for sharing them with us all. Makes me want to fire up IL2FB/AEP/PF, there’s a really good Do-335 there!

Looking forward to this, great work! Good Blog as well!

Hi bucklehead101! Having read ‘Chickenhawk’ you now understand how a helo works, how to fly it, and the kind of ‘feel’ I’m trying to achieve in WoV. Here’s what we have so far – 1 USMC and US Army Aviation Squadrons, 1st Cav, Aerial Rocket Artillery....etc. 2 Operations down South in August 1968 (so we can have Hueys, Cobras and Littlebirds). 3 Huey Formations, Strike packets of four to sixteen choppers at once. 4 Single ship Dust-off Hueys and Jollys on SAR/Medivac flights. Leading a ‘strike’ you will go in low to rocket and hose the area ahead of the strike force, directing the other ships to attack ground troops. To see that many Hueys in the air together is awesome! I have written and tested the campaign, learning much. I don’t build objects, so I will provide a list of things you will need to go and get. The Helos – UH-1B - OH-6A - H-34 Choctaw - UH-34 Gunship - SH-3J - AH-1G - AH-1J. They are all found here at ‘CombatACE’. Thanks to Capun, Charles, Eightlein, Gramps, Pappychksix, Pasko, Kesselbrut, USAFMTL, The Wrench & Wehner. You will also need Yankee Air Pirate (YAP) – This fabulous addon adds many new objects, aircraft mods, historic missions and more importantly, vastly improved scenery for WoV. Yankee Air Pirate provides a deeper understanding of the war through their superb research, the missions are great! WoV is much poorer without it, anyone serious about WoV should buy and install it now with no reservations. Really crucial to all this, YAP adds targets down south, simulating insurgencies through Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, properly capturing the fluidity of the Vietnam War and making Chopper Ops across Central and South Vietnam realistically possible. In my humble opinion it’s worth every penny spent and I might add, the customer support is superb, the guys are accessible and they are really there, an excellent job! No surprise really, they are regulars at CombatACE! Let me make that crystal clear – You have to go buy YAP. All you will get from me are the new campaign files and my ‘tweak notes’. I am also putting together some stuff on flying Helos in WoV and how to get the best out the campaign once I am satisfied with it. IMHO – If you don’t have YAP, you are missing out a lot on the potential of WoV and my Huey campaign won’t work for you. Get tooled up people! – I will talk to YAP owners and Huey Nuggets later on this channel!

That Huey cockpit by Kesselbrut is superb and really the reason I'd like to make more use of the aircraft.

Yep I will put down my notes on flying, anything that helps. What started out here as an interesting idea has become quite a large project thanks to your encouragement and as I realised how good it could get! I have changed the ambience, the flavour of WoV, with this campaign. The skies down south are now filled with choppers, you are able to fly with large attack formations, simulating ground operations rather than focussing purely on the air war – A Huey pilot was really just another kind of grunt! The flights thrown up by the campaign engine continue to surprise and delight (mostly). We have Hueys, Cobras, Littlebirds, 47s, Jollys, Choctaws, often all airborne at once performing individual roles. Some Huns and F-4s live up north, operating as Interceptors and hopefully keeping your skies clear! The Navy are at Yankee Station and continue to send in strike packages, although I have cut back their activity along with the Air Force and Marines in order to avoid helos being assigned as escorts to fastjets! The beauty of it is that the campaign files are standalone and don't modify anything else, so you can get back to the jets and boats when you get tired of the egg-beaters!

Following further testing, I have added the 1st Cavalry Division (Air Mobile) to the Squadron List. I kept them as a USAF 'Service' for simplicity, but it is a great thrill to see the briefing screen type up '...elements of the 1st Cavalry Division.....' I'm now tweaking the campaign further to try and achieve multiple flights, large formations and lots of Helo traffic down south. I've written an entirely new campaign file set in August 1965 when the Air Cav' deployed.

Thanks for the tip mate, that is brilliant mod, now we have hotter LZs, ie CAS Missions! A little more testing and I shall put the package together.