I think something else you may have to consider is the control scheme.

If you go realistic, you'll frustrate many people. From what i've heard, flying a helicopter is an exercise in frustration much like learning to pat your head whilst rubbing your stomach and whistling a tune if you can't already naturally do these three things at once.

I've only ever really had experience of helicopters in 'realistic' flight sims such as X-Plane and FlightGear. In these, it was so annoying that I gave up. I have however flown both simulated planes and a real plane and these were easy to get to grips with in both situations.

My thought: beyond the dynamics and simulation, regardless of whether you choose to have a realistic sim or not, please please don't choose realistic control schemes unless you want to severely limit your game's audience. Just my $0.02 worth.

To be honest i aim to reproduce handling like in battlefield 2 where you change thrust and pitch (thus there is a limitation for forward pitch) you can yaw and roll too - however i would like to use real forces to simulate that, and in future i could build a drone heli and test new flight avionics.... Time will tell, anyway for now ill calc lift for each blade like for a jet wing (with different lift drag coeffs i wish to calculate it dynamically).

Then ill read further more about things what happen inside the rotor 'work area'.

dot poducts will determine velocity calculations and sine if it is 1.0-cos (not everywhere but it seems simple for now)

2 hours ago, Brain said:

From what i've heard, flying a helicopter is an exercise in frustration much like learning to pat your head whilst rubbing your stomach and whistling a tune if you can't already naturally do these three things at once.

Flying a helicopter is quite a fun. In short description how realistic helicopter flying looks like and feels like (experience from Robinson R-44):

• Cyclic - is a "stick" that controls main rotor direction (lateral "left-right" ends up in roll and longitudinal "front-back" ends up in pitch - resulting in fore/aft movement), in is similar in appearance to stick in airplane. Helicopters (like Robinson R44 have one cyclic control which is available for both front row seats)
• Collective and throttle - closely resembles hand brake stick in car in appearance. Changes angle of attack of blades, and throttle increases/decreases engine torque. In some helicopters throttle is not part of collective stick and is separated control. These control with how much force your rotor will push you up.
• Anti-torque - pedals, change your yaw rate (control aft rotor). These are not really used for rotation of helicopter (unlike lots of people think), but to compensate for torque generated by main rotor and also compensate for wind.

Controlling a helicopter is controlling 'instability' in flight. You literally adjust things as you go to keep you afloat (it differs very much from plane experience).

To the OP - if you have few hours and aviation school around, I'm sure they would allow you to have short piloted session (where you will try controls of the helicopter), at not so high cost (making papers for such thing is very expensive on the other hand - mainly due to running cost and pilot cost). I'd advise to go for it - it will give you a feel and touch on how helicopters really fly, which vast majority of games got completely wrong.

Note: I apologize for any typos, writing from laptop and dog is trying to eat my hands, literally...