Herr Prop-Wasche

Hey, I'm not retired and I made it! Of course, I live in Dayton, so I really have no excuse. Thinking about the show last night and I realized that it was actually a little disappointing, due to the lack of most German planes--no Albs. Also, very few British. Most seemed to be Nieport's of some sort. Come to think about it, but the last meeting seemed to have had a lot of German aircraft. Maybe they rotate the featured aircraft from year to year. Okay, as soon as I can figure out how to upload these pictures from my camera, I will have some for you. Patience, padawans!

A fire truck with a racing stripe. Nice!

The HPW skies mod is a very small mod. Basically, I took two or three existing OBD cloud types and made mostly minor changes to some aspect of the cloud type (height, density) to "create" a new cloud type. I then inserted the new cloud type into the cloud array used by some of the weather conditions (good, light, medium, heavy, variable, precipitation), depending upon the cloud type and the weather condition. The result should not have much, if any, effect on the AI's ability to see through the clouds, but of course there is the possibility, as Pol said.

Hallo, Duke. Welcom back to the (un)friendly skies but friendly forum. 1) You may be able to see a fuel leak if you look behind to your tail. Of course, If you are flying an Se5 or an Alb DV, this view is blocked by the headrest. In that case, switch to the outside or chase view and see if you can spot the leak. Otherwise, you have to look at your fuel guage, if equipped. I don't believe there is an increased risk of fire with a fuel leak, except as a sign that your engine or fuel tank is getting closer to the "threshold" for a possible fire. 2) You can see oil leaks by looking behind you, as above. Frankly, I haven't looked to see if the oil guage also shows a loss of oil pressure. 3) The engine sputtering sound, I think, seems to be triggered after your engine has received ANY damage--unfortunately. However, my DM has substantially increased the hit points for the engine so it still performs roughly as well as it does 100% undamaged, up to the point where the engine catches fire. Possible spoiler below regarding engine hit points, threshold values, and fires--don't click if you don't want to know!

Welcome back, Mr. BH. I suppose the hot and humid summer in La. is as good a time as any to engage in "rum-soaked" activities. The look of that carp is the same as mine when I saw that you were posting again!

I'm reading "Sagittarias Rising" right now, and it is a lot like "No Parachute" in a lot of ways, particularly in the lack of vitriol and anger toward the fighters on the other side. Lee's work has more vivid details about the actual battles, whilst Lewis' is more impressionistic. Lee is also much more willing than Lewis to criticize the General staff for their lack of foresight about parachutes and the poor performance of most of the RAF fighters until the Se5a came along. One of the most interesting things to read in "Sagittarias Rising" is Lewis' description of flying the Morane Parasol. Words like "pilot killer" and "deathtrap" spring to mind, although he says it could outperform the Fokker DI in both the climb and level flight speed. The elevator was apparently extremely sensitive, leading to easy stalls, so much so that pilots were told not to attempt ANY turns below 500 feet!

Prolly not until August 2014, for obvious reasons! Sorry, just kidding!

I wonder how many hours Pol, Winder, and Sandbagger have spent at the Imperial War Museum, just getting every niggling little detail just so!

News and weather tend to go together, right? In honor of that tradition, I have two more mods I would like to announce. The first is actually just an update for my News mod from a couple of years ago. I have done some minor editing of the news for 1915-1918 to add a few more stories and a few more details. I also cleaned up the spelling so that it now consistently reflects U.K. spelling preferences (honour vs. honor, etc.). The second mod is both new and more ambitious. Basically, I have re-writtten the weather files so that each year from 1915 - 1918 is divided into active and quiet sectors of the front. Depending on whether the OFF Manager tells you that you are in an active or a quiet sector, you activate the appropriate mod, e.g. HPW 1916 Weather Active Sector. Using my mod, if you are in an active sector, you can expect to fly more missions per day. You are also more likely to fly in adverse weather conditions, such as rain or snow--after all, there is a war on! On the other hand, if you are based in a quiet sector, you are likely to fly fewer missions per day, and are less likely to fly in poor weather. In cases of extremely poor weather, you may not fly at all for several days or even a week or more! Regardless of whether you are in an active or quiet sector, I also modified the weather descriptions so they are a little more "descriptive." See if you notice the "easter egg" on Armistice Day! The weather mod also contains an optional HPW Skies mod. This mod does not have to be used with the weather mod, but if you do decide to use it, you will notice that I have added a few more cloud types. Don't worry, the cloud types use OFF cloud skins, so there is no loss in quality if you use this optional mod. Finally, the HPW Skies mod also makes it a little more likely for you to experience clear skies under very good weather conditions and gives you a little more variability in variably cloudy conditions. Together with the additional cloud types, I think you will see even more variability in the skies over Flander's Fields. As always, the mods will be available in the download section of the forum after they are approved by the admins. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns, and I will answer them in this thread. Happy flying!

I have a few minor updates for the weather files. To install, just drop the attached 1916, 1917, and 1918 OFFHistoricalWeather files into their respective MODS\HPW 19** Weather Active Sector\campaigns\CampaignData\weather folder. The most significant change was to the 1917 weather file. I reduced the number of missions by approximately 20% so it is not as busy in the active sectors. It is still much busier than the OBD version, but is now closer to the 1916 level of activity than the 1918 level of activity. I also corrected an error in the OBD version of the 1917 weather file that was also carried over into my version. If you do not want to install my mod, but want to correct the OBD version of the 1917 weather file, open up the OFFHistoricalWeather1917.txt file, and find the following text: and change the 12 to an 11. This will change the date from reading "26 November 1917 to 28 December 1917", to the correct reading of "26 November 1917 to 28 November 1917." OFFHistoricalWeather1916.txt OFFHistoricalWeather1917.txt OFFHistoricalWeather1918.txt

That's fantastic, ForeignDevil, and a whole lot less expensive than plastic modeling, I bet!