Heck

I think two versions would cover it. A single seater, and a two seater with forward and aft armament. The variations in armament seem almost bizarre. For an aircraft that was built in these numbers, authentic photos seem rare, given the numbers used. Most of the pictures I've seen are of models, and we can't be sure of the authenticity of the research done to produce them. I saw the following versions: Two seater, Vickers forward, Lewis aft. Two seater, Lewis overwing, Lewis aft. Two seater, Lewis aft. Single seater, Vickers forward. Single seater, Overwing Lewis. If you produce a single seater with a Vickers gun, as long as the Vickers is a separate sub-part in the lod, you can use the data.ini trick to remove it and add the Lewis gun pod that's already out there to mod it into that type, without your having to make a separate model for each one. I think if you make the two seater a Vickers/Lewis combo, then once again the data.ini trick will work to create all the different versions, without creating separate lods. You could create separate lods if you like, but it seems a lot of extra work for something that can be done with data.ini tricks. It's a beautiful model, thanks for bringing this very important aircraft to the sim.

To me, the most important version to the game would be the one you've already produced. You could produce a single seat version if you wished, but from what I've read it was used in small numbers by the RNAS for strategic bombing. Even the two seat version had a short service life with the RFC. Only three squadrons used it, from the fall of 1916 to October of 1917, when all three squadrons were converted to Camels. I think it fell into the two seat fighter role simply because it had the first British syncronised forward firing gun, and the only other aircraft the British had in that role was a Fee plane. According to what I've read, even the Sopwith wasn't that well suited to the role, because the stability that made it a good bomber meant it wasn't really manuverable enough to be a fighter. The real main user of this aircraft was the French in their reconnaisance squadrons. The two seat reconnaisance model (which your model would represent nicely) became a mainstay for them, along side the AR1, thankfully replacing the obsolete pusher and twin engine types they were using well into 1917. They ordered three times the number that the British did, and were still using it well into May of 1918. This type was far more important to the French than it was to the British in terms of numbers produced and length of service. So, I think you need only the model you've already produced, plus a single seater if you wish, and you'd have the two major types covered. I know, from my point of view, I couldn't care less if a two seater has a Nieuport ring or a Scarff ring, as long as the idiot using it can keep the Huns off my tail long enough for me to do my job. And if you decide on another First Eagles modelling project after this one, I think the real lack in this sim is in German two seaters.

Make sure you have a cockpit and cockpit.ini in the aircraft folder. If not, follow this link to get one:\ http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...p;showfile=6581 You might have a problem taking off, because the plane is so large, so you might want to start in the air with this one. Hope this helps, Heck

File Name: Active Battlefield for First Eagles Version 2 File Submitter: Heck File Submitted: 21 Jan 2007 File Updated: 4 Mar 2008 File Category: Tilesets File Version: No Information Website: No Information This version includes a number of changes, which are explained in the readme. With these modifications, it works on my system, and I have no problem with stats. I can't guarantee you'll have the same results, as the stats problem seems to be very system dependent, and mission time seems to have an affect also. I'm reposting this because it works for me, and it might work for you. It adds a bit to immersion, so if you can get it to work, I think it's worth it. Complete installation instructions are contained in the readme. My thanks to Kesslebrut, and Geo, for the use of their ground objects. If you tinker with this, and wish to post a modified version, feel free, just don't mod the ground objects without the specific permission of the original authors. When Geo finishes his superb new German 77mm gun, and his new 75, I will post a types and targets ini update to take advantage of them. From the screenshot he posted at ThirdWire, they should be fantastic! As always, you use these files at your own risk. I hope they work for you as well as they worked for me. Heck Click here to download this file

Not sure about the animation stuff. I think, but I'm not sure, if you create more decals the problem will not appear as often, but it will appear sooner or later, because of what p10ppy pointed out; the number of decals+some random #, etc. I can't be sure of this, but I've often created a few more decals than the game is likely to put in the air, say 24 or more, and it seems to lessen the problem. Also, if you create a decal called say, Serial.tga, ie: one without a number, but the same name, the game will put that decal on all aircraft it can't number, so I've seen the situation where my first few aircraft were sequentially number, and then every aircraft after that had the same decal. The only way to cure this is to make 100 serial numbers and 100 personal markings. Another thing you can do is create 100 decals, for your personal markings say, but purposely create some blank decals in the sequence, like 001 is a sword, 002 Thor's Hammer, 003 is a blank .tga with no image, the same with 004, 005 is my pet cat, etc, until you reach the magic 100 that the game wants. You could do this with serial numbers too, because many aircraft had their serial numbers painted out, or not replaced after a repair...

It's a stumper, that's for sure. Forgive me if my questions seems obvious, but when I've had problems, it's usually been something so simple that I can't believe I've overlooked it, when I finally figure it out. I would double check to see if the right decal level is specified for these markings. Is there a number missing from the sequence, perhaps. A person you might want to contact is Wrench. Send him a pm. He's really good with decal stuff. I know he's mentioned a glitch in the sim, where the game says I've hit the last number, and then won't reset, so the decals disappear. You might check with him and see if he thinks that's what it is, although, it doesn't seem like it should crop up after just one mission.

Couple of odd thoughts. Do you have a numbers.lst file in that particular skin? And what's the first number in your serial number sequence? Is it 001, 002, etc. Or did you use 000,001,002, etc?

From what I've seen, and there's very few photos out there, even of Jasta 10, you have it pretty much right. In the very famous line up shot of Jasta 10 at Courtrai, almost all the aircraft you can see have yellow noses, yellow cabane and interplane struts, and yellow landing gear struts and wheel covers. It's hard to see many tails of the aircraft, and the one that's easiest to see is obviously the same yellow as the nose, but I think this is the one area of the aircraft where pilots seemed to choose personal colors, like Hecht's green tail, Heldmann's blue tail, etc. For a generic Jasta 10 scheme, I would probably default to what I've described above with the addition of the entire tail unit in yellow, like you have it. Since there's so few photos available, I think you've given us a very good generic skin for Jasta 10. If you're able to locate the book, Pfalz Scout Aces of WW1 from Osprey, you'll get some beautiful profliles in that book, and some great ideas for skins for this airplane, like Von der Marwitz's Jasta 30 Pfalz D-IIIa, which is the coolest dark wine color, an awesome looking aircraft. Keep up your great work, Quack. If I can scrape together any profiles you might not have seen, I'll let you know, and I can email them to you, if you like. Or, on my day off, Sunday, I can put together some detailed color notes on the profiles I have in Pfalz Aces. Some nice looking aircraft there. One thing I did notice from perusing the photos in that book and looking at the more modern profiles. I'm now a firm believer that Pfalz D-IIIs and D-IIIas delivered from the factory had Silbergrau struts, not plain varnish, as is often depicted in profiles. On a side note, for you modding folks out there. You can use p10ppy's great gun removal trick to remove the guns from the upper decking of your D-III, and use one of two methods to move them into the cowl. 1) You can paint on the openings in the cowl and move the gun position so the muzzle flash resides there (I don't have the painting skills to do this, so I leave it up to you, Geezer, or Gumpy to do it. In case you haven't noticed, my painting skills suck ). 2) You can use Capun's Spandau gun pods to put guns protruding in this position, although that's not historically accurate, they were under shrouds, and you do have to mount them upside down to keep them from protruding from other parts of the fuselage, so they might disturb the purists. By doing this, you can create a D-III, and a D-IIIa, by leaving the guns in the second version, although this version won't have an accurate tailplane shape, or lower wingtip shape. I've done it just for fun, because I can accept the inaccuracies of this model, but I haven't posted it, because many here seem to like a good degree of accuracy in their models, and neither of my versions do that. Any help with these skins that I can give you, Quack, just ask. You're a light years better skin painter than I am, thank you for taking this up. I'm looking forward to downloading everything you do.

Back in the dark days of the Seventies, they had just completed a Camel built from Sopwith drawings that had a rebuilt Clerget 130. I believe, if I remember the pilot's name correctly, that Dick Day was flying it when I saw it. Being one of my favorite WW1 aircraft of all time, I was watching this bird every second it was in the air. Then the announcer told us that Dick was going to make a pass over the aerodrome and demonstrate the Camel's fabled right turn. Cole Palen was still running the place in those days and the announcer told us that Cole would only let Dick do one of these turns per show, because it was so dangerous that low to the ground. If Dick lost it in the turn, he would spin it into the ground and kill himself, or possibly spin it into the crowd, which wouldn't have been much of a crowd pleaser. Dick came down the length of the aerodrome and right in front of the crowd went into what seemed a seventy degree bank, they said it was about 4g, and I don't know what the actual radius was, but from the ground it looked like it was turning through ninety degrees in it's own length. The little beast whipped through that 360 degree turn in seconds, and for the first time I was seeing the Camel that I had imagined, from all those years of reading. I remember distinctly, because up to that point the Camel had disappointed me, because it really didn't fly anything like I had originally imagined it would. It was painfully slow climbing out after take off, but that was simply because it's real life climb didn't match what I imagined I would see. And traveling the length of the aerodrome it didn't seem as fast I had imagined it would be, but when it did that turn, the Camel came alive in that moment when the little beasty seemed to turn around and bite it's own tail, and I realized that I was seeing real life, not what I had imagined in all those years of reading. I will never forget that day.....

Great posts, Geezer. Thank you. According to Peter Gray, Albatros engineers finally figured out what was causing this problem in the fall of 1917. It took them so many months because they were inspecting crashed airplanes, and it wasn't immediately obvious in a bad crash what had caused the failure. As you pointed out, the wings static tested just fine. When they did figure it out, they took two steps to cure it. First, they fitted a metal box sleeve around the first two feet of each lower wing spar where it entered the fuselage to keep that section from twisting. Second, they fitted an auxiliary strut from the interplane strut to the wing leading edge to keep the outer portion from twisting. They began, according to Gray, to apply these at the factory in the late fall and early winter of 1917. Since there were so many Albatros fighters of all marks already in service, they began to manufacture and issue kits of parts to the squadrons, so the squadrons could fix this problem in the field. The problem was, that in order to fit the metal box sleeves, the aircraft had to be dismantled and reassembled. When Albatros engineers visited the Jastas in February of 1918 to check on how this work had proceeded, they were shocked. Very few Jastas had taken the time to complete both fixes. Some had done no work at all, but most had attached only the auxiliary strut, because it didn't involve dismantling the aircraft, something the groud crews of most outnumbered and hard pressed Jastas felt they didn't have time to do. What shocked the Albatros engineers was that they felt they had come up with a cure, but wing failures were still occurring, because the Jastas had not taken the time in most cases to apply the complete fix, and quite a number had done nothing at all. I think taking the tack of causing wing failures by G force is the only way to go, because TK's sim can't model torsional effects due to speed, which was the real cause of the problem. The only dive speed I've ever read by a pilot of the time was Duncan Grinell-Milne's reference to a wild dive in an SE5a, during which his speed indicator read 275mph, but Grinnell-Milne admitted that it would have been inaccurate, because it wasn't corrected, as they put it at the time, and the instrumentation of the time really wasn't that accurate, no where near as precise, or accurate as the instruments used during the Second World War. That's why you always read references in WW1 to "uncorrected barograph." The information you've presented is tremendous. Thanks again. I love reading material where people appy science to the study of these WW1 aircraft, because it furthers our understanding of them. And I have a sneaking suspicion that if I asked one of the pilots at Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome if he's ever taken one of the aircraft there up to 200, or 250mph, he'd just laugh at me and say, "next question?"

Nice work, Quack. I know this is a very difficult model to paint or decal on, because of the distortions in the rear fuselage. Looking forward to these. Thanks for taking on one of my favorite planes. I don't know if you'll be able to use them, but you can have my set of weight decals if you would like them. They vary the weight slightly on the aircraft, by a couple of kilos. Let me know if you want them. Heck

Hey! I just took a look at that old thread and had an odd thought. Not surprising, considering how many times I fell on my head as a child, adolescent, and an adult, but here it is: maybe the reason Baltika had day bombers show up to oppose his night fighter Hurricanes was because he didn't define any bombers as night_only. I wonder if it would work? Make some copies of each German bomber that would have done night raids and define these new planes as night only, just as he did for 1 Hurricane Squadron. Or perhaps you could do a night only install, and create a campaign that contained only German night fighters and British night bombers. Or would the game happily create day missions for them, no matter who their defined? I'll shut up now. Although, if it could be made to work, dsawan, I think it would be great, because, as you've said, the atmospherics are great.

Put the GunEditor in your main FE folder. Right click on the file (the icon with the arrow). When the box pops up, click on properties. Under properties, click on compatibility. Choose to run the program in Windows 98 compatibility mode. Click apply. Now double click on the GunEditor. The program should open. Click the Open tab. Find your Gundata.ini file that you modified. Double click on it. All of the guns should appear in the left box of the GunEditor. Click the Save button. That should save your new Gundata.dat. My brain is fried after 12 hours at work. Somebody check to see if I missed anything in these instructions, would you?

Wow.

You've been producing some great skins, Quack. Thanks. Although, you seem to have some sort of triplane fixation. Doctors can help with that. Pups could use some of your help too. And when that 1&1/2 strutter appears.....

Not sure if I have this title correct. The Eagle and The Hawk. It starred Carey Grant and, I believe, Frederick March.

Hi, Quack. This looks like a problem with the model itself. Many of these models for addons were created for another sim called Wings of War (I think), and they were converted to be useful in First Eagles. Unfortunately some, like the Pfalz D3, have issues because of the way the model is constructed. They have odd wrapping issues in their fuselages, causing decals to bleed into areas where they shouldn't be, or lines you paint on to make sudden and odd turns, which is what I think the issue is here. It's a defect in the model itself, so I don't think you're going to be able to cure it. On this skin you'll probably have to sacrifice a little accuracy because of the model's construction. Sorry. Heck

It isn't a question of thinking so, Tailspin. You're correct. And the reason lies in the elevator control circuit of these aircraft. A Cessna 150 Aerobatic of the 1970s, flying at similar speeds to any WW1 aircraft, had control throws of less than half the possible control movement of WW1 aircraft in its elevator circuit. Why? So the pilot would have a hard time killing himself during manuvers by misuse of the controls. If you stall your airplane at 3x its unaccelerated stall speed, you place 9gs on the airframe. And few, if any, WW1 aircraft could withstand this amount of G load. The Camel, an aircraft known as relatively robust, static tested at almost 8gs. This was of course a new airframe, not one that had seen any kind of service use. So a Camel pilot, with more than twice the control throw of any modern aerobatic aircraft, had enough control movement in his elevators to stall his aircraft at pretty much any airspeed at which his bus was capable of flying, but if he stalled his aircraft at 105 mph in a loop, or a turn, he would impose one more g than his aircraft was capable of withstanding, with fatal results. I believe the reason that the RAF chose to depict the SE5A in their "don't pull out of a loop too sharply or you'll break it poster" was purposeful. The RAF wanted to hammer home to the scantily trained pilots constantly entering the service the message that a pilot could break even the strongest aircraft that he might be given to fly through the misuse of his controls. The people creating these training books and posters were experienced airman, and they knew that the materials they were creating could mean the difference between life and death, in an era where parachutes were not issued by the RAF, on the grounds that "a pilot might abandon an otherwise serviceable aircraft," so they knew that everything they said had to make the point, and make it as clear as possible.

Great stuff, Tailspin. Reading it caused me to pull out the old copy of "Practical Flying" (1918) that I have and start reading it again. You get a true impression of what was real and important to them at the time from reading it, especially those who were teaching others to fly. I had forgotten that I had it. Thanks. Oh! Reading PF again reminded me of a 1918 instructional poster that the fledgling RAF printed to warn pilots about breaking their airplanes from too aggressive a pull out from a loop. Not entry into the loop, pull out from the loop. And you'll never guess what airplane the RAF chose to show as an example of an over aggressive pilot breaking the horizontal stabilizer off (this is what usually broke in these circumstances, not the wings) in this poster. An SE5A!

What video did you see this in? I would be interested in watching it. Thanks.

I can't be sure, but I think this is the change to the data.ini that made it impossible to depart these airplanes. This is the Camel 130. Pre 11/08: AlphaStall=10.45 AlphaMax=11.24 AlphaDepart=13.24 Post patch: AlphaStall=7.69 AlphaMax=11.24 AlphaDepart=15.24 Note that the AlphaStall and AlphaDepart are now more than seven degrees apart, rather than less than three. Why did TK change this? I don't know. Perhaps we were complaining that the AI departed and crashed too much. Perhaps we pointed out that the original numbers didn't correspond to something we read somewhere. Perhaps there were too many complaints about departing in turns. Perhaps TK had to change something else, and had to change this as a result. Don't know, but I do know that if I use my previous Camel data.ini, I get departures, and if I use the later patched one, I don't. And I think this change is the reason.

Very nice work, Dagaith. Studies first, though. First Eagles is going to be around quite a while, with TK adding to it, so we'll all be waiting patiently for it to be finished. Thanks for bringing this important aircraft to the sim.

Excellent info, Streak. Thanks! Ps: How old is the little guy now? The one in your sig pic.

You hit it right on the head, Tailspin. A near perfect explanation of how WW1 aircraft controls actually worked, from what I've read over the years, and the perfect explanation of why Wolfgang Langewiesche wrote "Stick and Rudder." Many pilots trained postwar were using the rudder to initiate turns, and using the ailerons to "help out." As a result, they were often killing themselves in cross control stalls and spins, which is why Langewiesche wrote the book. They had learned an uncoordinated technique, because the instructors of the 1920's and 30's were wartime pilots who used this technique themselves, because that's what they had learned to do flying WW1 machines, and the reason the instructors used this technique was the nature of the wartime planes they had learned on. This is the one place where I disagree with TK's new flight models. These aircraft roll much too quickly. They respond much too well to aileron control. WW1 ailerons were sloppy and inefficient, and the designers were just beginning to understand things to overcome adverse yaw like washout (the Albatros fighters) and differential application. Most ailerons were subject to tip stalling, where you would get a roll in the opposite of the intended direction by overzealous use of the controls, but I don't think this can be modelled in the sim. I get the impression that TK changed this to get a more zippy feel to the sim, possibly to appeal to a wider audience, possibly because of AI changes, but I honestly feel it's not realistice at all. I'm taking a look at my old data.ini's compared to the new ones to see if I can discover what what changed that would affect this. If I discover it, I'll post the information, so people can experiment and see if changing it affects the AI's handling of the aircraft.

Many British pilots didn't like it either. And most apparently couldn't reload it above 10000'. They either had to descend to reload, or, more commonly, they'd fire off the Lewis drum, and then just use the Vickers, not wanting to give away any altitude they had just to reload the damned thing. Other than the stories of Albert Ball having some say in the plane's armament, I've never read any reasoning as to why this mixed armament was chosen, since it was a PITA , and the aircraft would have been much better with the twin Vickers armament of the Camel. Then again, it's a bit hard to explain many of the things the Royal Aircraft Factory did during the war, and a great many pilots lost their lives because of them.