Gepard

Tornados, german nickname "Tony".

Light Flak is shooting.

Somewhere over North Vietnam.

I'm working now on the traffic lines for Armed Recon missions. Armed Recon is, in my eyes, one of the most boring missions. You have to find a line of 16 trucks which are driving slowly in a straight way. The only challenge is to adjust the course of your plane with the course of the trucks and then dive down and strafe them with guns, unguided rockets or drop some clusters about them. Thats all. Maybe, that it becomes a little bit more challenging, when MiG's appear. But mostly it is a boring job. I thought i should make it a little bit more challenging. So i have concentrated all truck traffic in the Vinh area of DRV terrain. And then i added SAM and Flak cover to this area. This is more or less realistic, since each village in North Vietnam had a militia, which was armed with guns, machine guns, sometimes assault rifles or 20 mm Flak. They shot on all, what was flying and had had some success. the biggest prey was a F-111, which was downed by concentrated fire from old german 98k carabines. So if you fly a Armed Recon mission in the next update, then you can enjoy a certain amount of ground fire. And by the way, while test flying the Flak downed me a couple of times, something, that never had happen before in Armed Recon.

Hun. Waiting for the next mission.

Here an other airbase made by Wrench: Nakhon Phanom RTAFB I have simplyfied it a little bit because of my old computers performance. If Wrench makes an add on to DRV 2.1 he will surely include the original base. In the last days i was working on truck routes. I have located all of them in the Vinh area and placed some Flak in that area. So Armoured Recon missions are not as boring as usual anymore.

The LASUR indicator not only shows the flightpath to intercept the target. Left of the indicator you have 3 lamps which shows the distance to target in kilometers. The "x" lamp on the right signals the order to finish the interception and break away. The lamps above and below have something to do with target position and the use of the weapons. There should be a signal lamp to give the order to attack the target and a second lamp which gives the order to activate the radar. With this informations it was possible to bring a MiG-21 into a perfect fire position without to warn the RWR of the enemy plane.

20 Ampermeter 21 Bremsdruckanzeige 22 Staurohrheizung 23 Einstellung für Warnhöhenvorwähler RW-UM des Funkhöhenmesser >>>>>> Altitude warning system switch for radio altimeter 24 Helligkeit Flutlicht 26 Notabwurf Rumpfanhängung

Nothing. It is simply an outdated mod, which does not work properly anymore.

Nothing. It is simply an outdated mod, which does not work properly anymore.

I sunk a Sampan! I made the stock vSampan2 to an groundobject. Gave it NVietnam as nation and it worked properly. More or less. The only small problem is, that the Sampan is moving sidewards on the sea.

I have deleted all parked aircrafts and helicopters. Perhaps they were the reason for the slideshow experience, which i had on my old computer. I think it would be a good idea, if you would make some addons for DRV terrain with more detailed airfields. Let me first finish the terrain and then you may start with improvements. At the moment i rework the last target areas and check for mistakes, like Flak hidden in houses. And i'm still looking for the "potholes" in the heightfield and fill them up to terrain level. (Needs more time as expected.) Finally i will rework the DRV-movements.ini. And perhaps i get it working that the stock Sampans will act as moving ships on shipping routes. Maybe. I hope that i can finish my work on DRV 2.0 terrain in the third week of August.

Some days ago Wrench send me the files for Udorn RTAFB. I had to simplify it a little bit, because my old computer had the tendency to make a slide show, when i tried a final landing approach. But now it works as it should. And i hope the differences to the original is not to big. It is a very big base. In the background you see the old Udorn RTAB, which was simply a stock airfield. The differences are enormous.

To say it with the words from the movie "Good Morning Vietnam!" Da Da Da Nang!!

Knocking out some north vietnamese torpedo boats.

Heavy Flak!!!

Okay, i will call it local communist party HQ. Screenshot: I relocated the TOD buildings in the towns to make space for target objects, like factories, Flak, the famous communication building etc. So it looks ate the moment.

I need the help of a native speaker. In the target.data i have several target areas called "... local communist party bureau". Is this correct or should it be: "... local communist party office" ? I like the idea to drop bombs on the bigwigs, guys which send out soldiers to die and hide itself in save distance from the frontline.

Taxiing after successful mission.

Da Nang town, harbor and airbase

A begin of a rework of Da Nang area. River added, port added. I think i made the town a little bit to big. It is more as it is today, but i think during Vietnam War it was smaller. I will try to find an aerial photo of that timeframe and then i will make the changes.

A similar system, but only with different materials.

To come back to the SAM sites and the concrete roads. Swambast is right and wrong at the same time. It is correct to say, that the SAM batteries were semi mobile. The SAM sites were static. The vietnamese built more SAM sites, than they had SAM batteries. They rotated the batteries through the SAM sites per random or, when the site "demask itself" with opening the fire. After the battle was fought, the vietnamese moved the SAM battery to reduce the risk to be attacked by the opponent. Later, so in the mid of Vietnam war, they learned, that the opponent was able to destroy fortified SAM sites and he had the power to do this. From that time a lot of SAM batteries were placed somewhere in the nowhere. They stayed there for a couple of days or till they were fighting a battle. Then they were relocated. Old soldiers rule: "After firing move to a new fire position. If not you will die." The SAM sites itself were built in the dry periode of the year. In this time there was no need to inforce the soil with concrete. A truck or lorry (how our british friend would call it) could easily drive on it. But this changed very fast in rain periode. The truck could not operate under this conditions and so the ways were inforced by concrete. But you should not imagine a 5 or 6 meter wide road made by concrete or tarmac. It was made by a technology, which we call in eastern Germany "Plattenstraße in Form einer Spurbahn". No idea, how you call in the America or the rest of the world. Basically such a road is puzzled together by single plates of concrete. Each plate is 3 meters long, 1 meter wide and 0.25 meters thick. The plate has rectangular holes. It weighs 1 metric ton. To form a road two lines of plates were laid out. The distance between the plates is 1 meter. The room between the plates and outside the plates will be filled with gravel and get finally a layer of soil. The reason is, that on the soil vegetation can grew up. After a while such a road is very difficult to see from a plane at certain distances. Here you see such a road which was made by this technology. It can operate 40 ton trucks under all weather conditions easily. You see the "hole plates", the two lines of plates and you see how the road is vanishing at a certain distance.

I used static airlines in some of my terrains. They are made by JimBib.