Flyby PC

Just had a Hawker Hurricane fly overhead. I love the sound of Merlins in the morning.

I've played Oblivion a couple of times, but never seen these stripper add-ons. I obviously live a rather sheltered life. I'm wondering......P4?

Remarkable having to count 19 seconds or so from an artillery piece to fire before the round landed. That's a long time. It was interesting how they used the range card to correct the fall of shot with a couple of letters, (or rather letter and number). Seems blindingly obvious now, but I always wondered what signals were actually sent. I had presumed grid references were the shortest things to transmit, but the truth was even simpler. It also struck me how mentally mature the young pilots must have been to fly in a defensive circle while edging your way home. When you see similar young men today, it's very hard to imagine them flying in a circle looking after the man in front while enemy planes engaged your formation using whichever tactics they might like. The temptation to panic and make a run for it must have been massive. You can just imagine the younger pilot trying to flee but being set upon by the enemy fighters. The fear and exhilaration must have been electric. You just can't square the nervous strain sufferred by all the pilots with aerial combat being an enjoyable experience. For some, it doesn't seem to be the fear of being killed, many seemed resigned to the inevitability of it, but it's more the loss of friends and the strain of killing other people which troubles them most, with fear that your courage may fail coming a close third. Trenchard got off pretty lightly too I thought, but then, perhaps I'm forgetting the brutal realities he had to confront.

It was good, but not gripping. Superb to see the aircraft actually flying and looking in mint condition, but I didn't learn anything new. Perhaps I'm forgetting how much information I've inadvertantly learned here at the OFF University. The Se5 did edge the dogfight, but I suspect the dog fight business was closely choreographed, and just a sweetener to get people to watch. I know these were vintage aircraft, but the evasive manouvres looked extremely pedestrian. Looked very much like a TV gimmick rather than a serious attempt to learn something. Worth watching though, and I would watch it again, especially for those beautiful aircraft.

There's a link to a preview clip which looks pretty good. I'm pretty sure that's an Se5 and Junkers CL1. My money's on the Se5.

"....Early aircraft designers and builders often used ash or hickory. They were looking for a type of wood that would be relatively lightweight in addition to being very strong. Just prior to World War I, Sitka Spruce was discovered by aircraft builders and found to be very well suited to their needs. The strength to weight ratio was discovered to be very favorable for aircraft use. Several other types of wood had similar strength to weight ratios but were not as easily harvested or as plentiful. At the time, spruce proved to be the best choice, not only because of the physical characteristics, but of equal importance was the fact that spruce was readily available and easy to use as a building material. With the advantages noted, spruce became very widely accepted as the primary material to be used in building an airplane". http://www.sportair.org/articles/Aircraft%20Wood%20-%20Part%20One.html There are two things which occurred to me about spruce. Judging by the low quality timber you might see on a building site, spruce wouldn't strike me as a particularly good choice, but then traditionally, it would be slower grown and probably much better quality timber than what gets used today. (I've heard that Scandinavians typically have a very low opinion of modern UK whitewood). Second thing is I would bet that whatever the type of wood, the aircraft factories would get the pick of the very best timber available - with straightest grain and fewest knots. That said, demand was so high that Britain was plundering it's forests during WW1, so much so that the Forestry Commission was set up in 1919 and given 'the general duty of promoting the interests of forestry, the development of afforestation, and the production and supply of timber'.

Never read that before. Love it. By the way, is Cerberus about to be gorging himself on crude oil? Looks like a serious and nasty mess in your part of the world. Doesn't look good from this side of the pond.

So that's why it was called a barrel roll.

What a difference 5 months makes. Thermometer just topped 30 deg C today. 30 deg! In May! In Scotland!!!! Here's hoping we get a spell of it. Lovely jubbly. About time mind. I started building my workshp three years ago. (Seems a long time, but we need to make a living first and built a bit more when we've got spare time). I've had two of the wettest Summers ever, the highest flood level ever recorded in the town, followed by the second ever highest flood level, plus one of the worst winters in terms of absolute temperature, depth of snow, and lowest mean temperature ever recorded. Heatwave next? Bring it on.

The habit stuck. Until I saw this pic, I just assumed that camouflage markings were painted with a fair degree of licence, but it would seem this wasn't the case. Every one of these Mosquitos is painted exactly the same. There's lots of speculation about the reasoning, but it would be good to get an authoritative answer why the RAF did this. RAF uniform corporate identity? You fight one of us you fight us all? Perhaps it was just the German squadrons looked like an explosion in a paint factory, and the stuffy old Brits decided we're having none of that carry on here in Blighty! Or the equally British "Just remember sonny Jim, it's not your aircraft. You've only signed for it, and RAF wants it back".

Hmmmmm,.....mmmmm. Just thinking out load, I'm having problems getting Thunderbird on Windows 7 to store my emails. I'm using an IMAP server, which stores my emails remotely from my PC, but it's not keeping them, unless I archive the mail immediately. It saves the archive ok, sent mail, and deleted mail, but for some swine of a reason, it doesn't store my inbox. The emails are gone with no means to recover them it seems. Odd thing was, it suddenly started to function properly, and kept emails from 14th May until 20th before deleting them. What changed? Why wait 5 days to delete them? What was mentioned here about logging in to the forum from different IP addresses suddenly got me thinking. I do access my emails from two different PC's with different operating systems. Is it possible it might be this which is screwing with my email? I know the best advice is use a POP server, but my incomming mail server isn't liking that option.

And blame it all on a volcano! Sweet. It's hole in the ground for me though. Once the worms have done their bit, the earth can grind what's left of me down into a nice bit of sandstone. - Or limestone rather, since I'm more calcium than silica.

It's more CFS3 than WW1, but you know you're doing too much Flight Sim flying when your roll pan mortar mixer looks like a Wirbelwind Flakpanzer.

Anybody got a suggestion for this ? When I first switch on my PC, if I try to go online, I'm told there's no connection, neither for email or broadband. Thing is, there is! The light on my router flashes to confirm it's connected to a broadband service, but my PC is blocked from establishing a connection. How do I fix this? Easy. I simply switch off my PC and restart it, (properly, I don't just pull the plug) and though I've changed absolutely nothing, I'm online right away. All my drivers are up to date, and my router has been reset repeatedly without fixing the problem. Anybody got any suggestions? I've been living with this for a few months, but the novelty is wearing off and it's just a bit of a nuisance. Anybody suggest a fix? (Edit - And yes, I have tried switching it off and on again).

Thanks guys, big time. I'll give it a go with an external adaptor , first chance I get to get to a shop....

I'll give that a go later... Meantime, when it did it again this morning, just seconds ago, I checked my control device manager, and it had no Network Adapter in the list of devices. Now I've restarted, it's there again. Why might that be happening? Oddly, when I run Add new hardware, whole system hung up....

When I press repair the connection, it tries to reset the IP address but fails. I haven't tried the Routers IP. I'll investigate. DHCP? Don't know what it is. And I'm not sure what resetting the router with a clip means. (The meaning of the 'clip' I don't understand). Thanks guys, I'm glad you keep trying. It's a confusing one. Thankfully restarting does get me online, but it's never more annoying than first thing in the morning. I usually check my email on the way out the door to work and it's a real pain to start up windows XP once, never mind twice. (I've got Win 7 at work, and I love its one click shut down). The problem started when I was cut off briefly. I pay my internet & phone through a third party, and the quarterly BT line rental was overlooked. Phone company says they sent me reminders, but I didn't get them. First thing I knew was my ISP trying to reset my internet but telling me the line was cut. (Thanks BT, you're real pros, and only 25 minutes to answer your customer service line). Anyway, that's when the glitch started.

No. XP and a wired connection. Shouldn't be happening.

Ahem... http://www.century-o...%20war/turk.htm Albatross B1 Rumpler B1 Farman HF20 Sopwith Tabloid Floatplane Gotha Gotha WD2 Seaplanes Be 2 Morones (???) Not sure how well researched the link actually is, but seems fairly well informed. Need some ships & balloons too....

Map includes Gallipoli.... http://www.century-o...%20war/turk.htm Edit - There's an old fella in his 90's I meet when walking my dogs. His father lost a leg in the Dardanelles, and ended up making a living as a cobbler. Don't mean to be funny, but it always struck me as a weird choice of career, - being a constant reminder of the foot you've had shot off. The old fella's a real character. He used to work in forestry before there were chainsaws, and life was tough just using an axe. He says it was ok once you got the right edge on your axe. He reckons he must have been the last person to take a horse drawn wagon through a ford on the outskirts of town, and he also used to go out on the tiles with my father when he came out the airforce. I just hope I'm even half as interesting to listen to when I'm 96.... and half as fit too.

MAW was truly outstanding. I will never forget flying a swordfish mission at night over shipping when the sky lit up with flares. As I recall, there was nothing like it in CFS3 previous to MAW. Talk about immersion, - I was instantly transported to another world. What a spectacle! Took your time getting some WW1 aircraft dragged out to the desert Lou. I had my big bad Mossie in there years ago. OK, so there weren't any Mosquitos there at that time in the war, but there would have been if I was in charge! Having said that, I've had hours and hours of fun with the Glads and Hurricanes. Happy times with the Boys of 60! - http://www.youtube.c...h?v=JTSthEjxecA

You could try the sfc scannow command - It means self file check or something. Windows checks it's own files for integrity and re-writes any problems it finds. - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929833 I'd read some more about it first, just in case it's not the fix you need or disrupts your software. I'm no expert, it's just a fix I've heard about.

I know the CAM ships of WW2, (Catapult Aircraft Merchant) had facilities to launch an aircraft but not to recover it, and that elsewhere, float planes were recovered by crane. I've seen photo's my dad took of swordfish floatplanes being lifted. If the aircraft had no bouyancy to stay on the surface, I suspect the chances of recovery at sea of anything but the pilot were nil. I expect you'd need to ditch alongside and swim for it, find a carrier in your group if there was such a thing, or take your chances like the 1942 Doolittle rain on Tokyo trying to find dry land, hopefully friendly. It begs the question under what desperate circumstances the plane would be launched.

Not being cheeky but have you got a legit CFS3 to build from? Sounds like something is wrong regarding CTD's textures and sluggishness. A common fault with no-cd CFS3 versions was the updates wouldn't install properly and systems would misbehave. The cut scenes you get in CFS3 were taken out, and while I did miss them at first, I'm used to it now. If you want to see crashes, - start shooting stuff down. The whole OFF world is a mod, and as far as I'm concerned, it's very rare to get a mod which is such a massively vast improvement on raw CFS3. Take a look at some OFF videos on youtube or the homepage. If your system isn't looking the same, then you can be sure something still isn't right with yours.

Regarding the films themselves, I'd never before seen the early RNAS planes taking off from battleships with a tiny runway supported by the big guns!!! That's just incredible. Want one of those in P4. - A big battleship with a snooker table from the mess for take offs!