Bad day's above the Western front...

[Wodin 0]

Well first off I took my Pilot of 56 Sqd up. He had 13 confirmed, 8 rejected, 29 claims and two DFC. He had fifteen hours of flight time. Took him over the lines as a bomber escort. On the way back...boom flak...crash landed, pilot is now a POW...he also in his time had taken on and killed three aces. (this was my first mission of the day)

 

So I decided to take out my Jasta 11, AlbIII early, pilot. He had 8 confirmed with 7 pending....last flight I had killed two aces of RFC 24. So up we go and bump into RFC 24 again...they dive I turn wham engine shot out and in flames didn't have time to blink....pilot dead...(that was my first flight today with him)

 

So I take up my up and coming SE5 viper pilot....flown 6, killed 5 and 3 pending...(two of those aces)....all goes well and we meet up with Jasta 40 I think it was....shot down one ace and was now hitting Hermann Gilly hard when wham enemy bus smashed right into me...dead....

 

So three flights one after the other and all my favourites dead or captured, all except one.....

 

My Camel pilot with two DFC's and I'm not taking him up today....he has 8 claims waiting to come through and 11 confirmed....not risking it....I have a few new recruits all itching to get up in the clouds...

 

I love this sim....great highs and terrible lows...

[RAF_Louvert 101]

.

 

If I were you Wodin, I would not go to Vegas any time soon.

 

But honestly, I feel your pain. Been there myself.

 

.

[Dej 17]

That's very bad luck, Wodin, I feel for you. But at least you can be comforted by the fact that it wasn't your fault.

 

You didn't take a favourite pilot up when you were tired after a long day; should've gone to bed; trusted that a short mission your side of the lines wouldn't result in a problem and forgot to load your joystick profile... ahem!

[Olham 164]

Wodin, you could regard the good side of all that bad luck - you can start again tomorrow.

So many men had only the first and only chance to try and learn all this.

(I know it doesn't help - I went through all that myself).

[Hasse Wind 46]

On some days you just can't win. The worst I've had in OFF was when I lost two very promising pilots on the same day, one after the other. I gave up flying for that day, as I had clearly angered some god of war or another.

 

I'll always remember the death of my very first successful OFF pilot. He was flying the Pup in No 54, early 1917. I had gotten some kills confirmed already and everything seemed to be going just fine in that fateful patrol mission, when suddenly my Pup exloded. A direct hit by Archie! I was literally stunned for a while. What a sim!

[Wodin 0]

^^Thats what happened to my best pilot today...

 

@Dej...well the Alb was shot down but I didn't even see the one who sent poor Georg Von Trapp to heaven....should have put abit of space between me and the diving planes and then turned into them.

[Hellshade 110]

Perspective sir.

 

"Better to fail to get confirmation for a kill on your claim form than to succeed in being a claim on someone elses."

 

Hellshade

[Javito1986 14]

Archie is terrible. If you fail to perform some evasive maneuvers when under archie fire you may get away with it a hundred times but sooner or later it WILL get you. I always turn ground accuracy up on hard for balloon busting missions, and on those I fear the flak 1000x more than any enemy aircraft.

[carrick58 23]

I agree with Olham and Dej and the other OFF pilots. However just in case don't cheat on your taxes this year.

Edited January 13, 2011 by carrick58

[Olham 164]

Archie wasn't very effective in WW1, so I would not go beyond "normal" for ground gunner accuracy.

The main effectiveness Flak had, was to assign an enemy flight to your own pilots.

When I see black puffs somewhere and follow their way, I know where the foe is traveling and can sneak up on him.

Edited January 13, 2011 by Olham

[RAF_Louvert 101]

.

 

Yes, Archie did not get really awful until well into the conflict. I set ground gun accuracy at "easy" until about mid-1916, after which I bump it to "normal" until the end of the War. This seems to be about right from all the accounts I've read of our RL heros. I do the same with rear gun accuracy for the two-seaters as there seem to be a few too many magic bullets coming from those beasties otherwise.

 

.

[Olham 164]

I think, the "Survival in the Air" series of British_eh and Bletchley offer settings for the various war periods,

which they have compiled and estimated after having read a lot of books.

I still have to study all that, I must admit - it's to be found in the "Sticky Threads".

[Wodin 0]

I've had it on hard for the adrenalin...really damn scary...however in RL as you all probably know, they altered altitude all the time when in Archie to mess the fuse timings up on the flak shells..in the sim it makes no difference...I can out fly it sometimes but up or down it follows me closely...thats how I lost my SE5a zoomed down a little and blam...may start to turn it back to normal...

[carrick58 23]

I lost one to my own Archie a while back. I was watching the Arty puffs outline a BE2 and headed over a easy kill and Puff blown apart. I think it set to Normal Archie

 

 

[Hasse Wind 46]

For early war careers, I always set Archie to easy. It took some time to develop the weapons and methods for shooting down moving aircraft with AA shells, and without radar or proximity fuses the accuracy could never be as good as in more modern AA guns.

 

However, balloon defense was somewhat different, as the gunners knew the altitude of the balloon accurately and therefore could better concentrate their fire on the attacking aircraft. That was one of the reasons that made the balloon attacks so dangerous. And if the balloon wasn't very high, it could also be defended by anti-aircraft machine guns, which were much more accurate weapons than heavier AA guns.

[jamieandnici 0]

I often find the accuracy of enemy 2 seater rear gunners a little unrealsitic at times in OFF. No matter how far away I am (sometimes 600-800 yards) , magic bullets always seem to hit their mark even when I am violently manoeuvring from side to side above and below a single aircraft. I therefore have all aircraft guns (rear as well as forward firing guns) set to innaccurate although this setting also feels too inaccurate to me.