Re-living a classic WW1 memoir in Wings Over Flanders Fields!   The man and the book   The SE5a, low down over enemy territory, pulled up to release its last two bombs onto a German gun battery. The bombs' release was accompanied by a blast directly below and behind the aircraft, possibly a premature detonation, which ripped off the tailplane on one side, leaving it trailing behind, held by an elevator control wire. The SE dived vertically, pulling out too late to prevent the undercarriage fro

Wings Over Flanders Fields - the CombatAce Review, part 3     The WOFF Campaign System   Up to now, I have tried to keep this review factual and observational with the minimum of gushing hyperbole. But this is the point at which it gets rather difficult to give a fair or adequate picture without resorting to superlatives. So I'll settle for saying at the outset 'I'm simply blown away by the WOFF campaign!', then try to settle back down to business.   This first bit will be familiar to p

Wings Over Flanders Fields - the CombatAce Review, part 2   The Planeset WOFF comes with an impressive planeset - fifty-five aircraft, albeit this includes some close variants. All of them are flyable. The two-seaters come with an observer's cockpit to which you can jump to man the defensive gun or guns carried there, leaving an AI pilot to fly the aircraft. Here's the list of planes, grouped by the maker's nationality. The British and US flew many French types, while the French flew the Bri

OBD Software Raises The Bar for WWI Air Combat Simulation! What can players expect? Wings Over Flanders Fields - 'WOFF' - is the latest in a line of World War 1 air war sims that started with a modest but promising freeware mod for Microsoft's Combat Flight Simulator 3. The first commercial installment, Over Flanders Fields - Between Heaven and Hell (a.k.a. 'OFF Phase 3'), quickly made a name for itself. Features included much the best out-of-the-box, all-flyable planeset of any WW1 sim, comp

Fighting in the M4 Sherman in Steel Fury - Kharkov 1942! Until recently, I didn't realise that Graviteam's Eastern Front WW2 tanksim lets you sign up as a US Army tanker and fight in the famous M4 Sherman tank. It doesn't of course...at least, not out-of-the-box. But SF '42 is one of those sims which has been much enhanced by the work of that intrepid and talented group of people we call 'modders'. And the 'New Tank Add-on' (NTA) mod - current version, NTA 1.8 - includes a Sherman and mission

Recreating a classic WW1 pilot's tale flying Sopwiths in France!   This mission report was inspired by my reading material on a recent short holiday. I had last read Norman Macmillan's 'Into the Blue' back in the early 1970s along with other classics then available from the local public library, such as my favourites, Arthur Gould Lee's 'No Parachute' and 'Open Cockpit'.   While the latter two are back in print, I had to go to eBay to get a copy of 'Into the Blue', and I much enjoyed re-re

The Strike Fighters series is over a decade old this year. The series is renowned among combat flight enthusiasts for it's open modability, gentle learning curve, and (foremost) the scenarios it models. When it comes to The Cold War, no other sim does it like the SF series does. As amazing as something like the DCS series may be, it won't let me shoot down Mig-15's over the Yalu one mission, then without even transitioning to a new program, shoot down a flight of Backfires with AIM-54's the next