So I took my buddy @WitchcatAffy who you might remember from my other Chost out onto a public PVE server in DCS last night for the first time. We have done plenty of calm flying around together with me in the co-pilot's seat and I figured they're at the point where they can start doing some more exciting things, so we hopped on during prime time (plenty of friendly player fighters in the air!) into our little UH-1 transports and I figured we'd find a quiet spot to move something to somewhere and familiarise with the very common (and very cool) logistics scripting. Our first flight was right before server reset so it was a bit of a bust, but when the server did reset, we had a small problem.
The sun was gone.
Combined with the pretty thick cloud cover it was basically pitch black, so we were forced into using night vision goggles. NVGs are rendered... weirdly? As you can see above they only frame a small part of your vision and you can see the un-amplified world around the edge. You can mess with the gain a little to enhance how some things look, but it's overall fairly fuzzy. Also your instruments look like fucking this...
So you can kinda eyeball it if you're familiar but if you don't have dozens or hundreds of hours in the thing you're going to be a bit disoriented and uncomfortable. You can adjust your head position so a dial or two are outside of your NVG zone on the edge of your vision and can be read clearly, but being able to dart between several to monitor all the helicopter's movements is awkward.
On top of all this, it's winter on the server so the ground is covered in snow, which turns into a fuzzy sea of green in the goggles and messes with your sense of movement if you don't have some object to reference off of. Your air speed indicator becomes useless below a certain speed anyway and, as we established, you have a pretty condensed field of view in the NVGs, so it's fucking rough guys I'm bitching because it's bitch-worthy.
Anyway because neither of us are cowards we pressed onward. I picked an airfield with a bunch of stuff near it to spawn from and figured we could quickly scoot over to the troop pick-up point, discuss what we wanted to do, then start hauling stuff. We lifted off in a Huey each, started flying forward, and within about 30 seconds my wingfox got oblitered by a shot from an SA-10 site literally about a dozen miles from our base. For the unfamiliar, that's this:
Okay, target picked, then. New Huey acquired for my wing, we quickly wrote off a couple extra ones with mast-bumps re-adjusting to night landings, then I quickly put together a little flight plan. We'd fly super low, use the city to the south of the airfield as cover from the SA-10's radar site, wiggle up to it, then drop fellas with rocket launchers to go blow it up!
As I couldn't actually see the sight visually and confirm its layout on the terrain I went with a very cautious route, close to the floor. It turned out to be a little unnecessary as the radar itself was on top of a hill (and thus we could very comfortably be under it just by sticking to the terrain) but the countours of the coast made a great navigation reference to turn in on.
Anyway my very nervous newbie (who had (understandably, it's hard) just broken a few helicopters) was now about to make a landing on the side of a hill, in the middle of the night, after having already been on the receiving end of our target, and this was their very first experience of a non-practice public server mind so there's extra uncertainty from that.
And they nailed it, landing right next to me, perfectly smooth and safe, if a little surprised (I had every faith, personally). Extremely proud :'3 We dropped off our little AI lads who immediately made a full sprint towards the target, watched them dispatch a launcher, then slipped off into the night to make a safe return home of two intact helicopters.
This kind of stuff is fairly routine for the Huey, it's what it lives for, but this short flight getting a first win for my friend did put a big smile on my face last night. Really I just want to say again that I'm super proud of my friend @WitchcatAffy putting up with these misadventures and keeping their chin up through the rough and the unintuitive and honestly being a blast to teach. Love you, bestie. 💚