Flyby PC

Just an observation Jammer, but your format is distorted. It looks like you are recording in widescreen format, but saving it as 4:3 tv ratio. The full image looks compressed or squeezed in. I'm not being critical. The reason I know this is because I used to do it too, - until somebody told me what I was doing wrong. If you want some advice, I'd recommend Virtualdub. It's a free download, and quite a powerful video editing program. Check it out. You'll see in the menu bar you can load filters. Do this, and check out 'null transform'. You can use this to crop off the edges to fit a narrower resolution without distorting the image. The hard bit is getting it right because there isn't an automatic utility to get the proportions correct, so it can take some practice. The good news is once you've got the hang of it, you have a massive amount of freedom to compose what you see on screen. If the action is a little off centre, too high or low, you can fix it. CFS3 has a habit of nailing your airctaft to the middle of the screen, and it's nice to play about with it I find. Be warned, virtualdub isn't the most user friendly prog you'll come across, but persevere, it's not too bad once you get used to it, and has a lot of neat stuff....

A mate of mine was learning Chinese, and told me about a traditional piece of Chinese literature which features a whole page of the word 'sheer', but it still makes complete sense to the reader, (and more sense than a single word repeated). I don't speak chinese, but context and emphasis is apparently very important to understanding it. If you missed the start of a conversation, you often wouldn't understand what they were talking about. He has quite a few languages, but he says Chinese is tough going. I don't speak any German, but I do know a lot of old scots words are very similar to German. Such as kirk and kirche. Coo and Kuh, mair and mehr. If you're interested, this is worth a read... http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/lili/personen/mpaetzold/0203ws/scot/sg01.html

I understand you Zoom Zoom, but think about it from the other direction. The gap for the bullet to pass through rotates at a constant speed, so both guns would need to fire at the same rate to hit the gap as it passed by the muzzle. If one or other gun fired faster or slower, it wouldn't coincide with the gap and hit the blade.

http://fluid.power.net/fpn/const/ It's not Lou's link, but thats the scientist....

Might be my mistake, but being synchronised doesn't mean firing at the same time ie simultaneously. The bullets from either gun have to hit the gap between the propellor blades, so I would guess one gun would fire a little before the other to fit the revolution of the blade, but the rate of fire for both guns would be governed by the propellor speed. Regarding jams, I suspect the most common jam would be more of a stoppage rather than an actual jam. - By stoppage, I mean a round becomming stuck in the breech, requiring a manual re-cocking of the weapon to expell the dud round, load a new round into the breech, and draw back the firing pin ready to fire again. If it's like a modern gun, it's the gases behind the exploding bullet which forces back the firing mechanism to 're-cock' the weapon, and spring forward again to fire the next bullet, so one dud round breaks the chain of events and will cause a stoppage. Re-cock the weapon and you're firing again. A 'jam' proper would I suspect involve some breakdown of the gun mechanism itself, perhaps damage from incomming rounds or shrapnel, and I don't think the pilot would be able to fix that. Thats a job for the armourer back on the ground. With a stoppage, the gun mechanism (and interruptor mechanism) will not be damaged, just need the weapon to be re-cocked. With a jam, or damage to the weapon, I doubt the interruptor gear would drive the firing mechanism, so while the damaged gun might be dysfuntional, I don't think that would jam the moving parts of the interruptor mechanism of the other gun. It would be a bad bit of design if it did. What is worth a read was a thread by RAFlouvert - about the fluid mechanic scientist and the British Captain who recognised the application for the scientists experiments. The British had a hydraulic fire control mechanism. I wouldn't even try to explain it, but I'll try to find the link. It's a good read if you're interested. (You reading this Lou? - help!)

It still isn't easy, but padlock view onto your own wingmen and zoom in. If you time it right you'll get them engaging the enemy, and taking damage or causing it. The knack is keeping yourself close enough to see the action clearly. On padlock view, you don't stop flying but you're blind. I found it helped to slow yourself to stall speed and jump into auto pilot. Only problem with autopilot is that with your own external view your prop stops turning. (Or did - I read there'd been some modifications to the propellors...), but on external view you can toggle autopilot on and off. To record a whole mission in one take is very difficult, but refly it a few times doing similar things but from different angles, and splice it all together. I remember once I took off in a He111, got fast enough to make sure the wingmen following me didn't abort theit take off, then slammed on the brakes and veered off to the side. I snapped onto next wingman padlock view, and got footage of a He111 making a perfect take off, but in a unique flyby mode. It was a flyby in the real sense, he flew past my viewpoint as if I was standing at the end of the runway, - don't use the flyby viewing option. I'm reasonably sure anybody familiar with CFS3 would wonder how the F do you get that view? Easy. You are standing at the end of the runway, - in your own He111 with red hot brakes.

Who was the killjoy giving it 1 star? Don't let it bother you Olham. I used to host about 20 movies and got all kinds of stars, some fair, some harsh. Trick is good or bad, don't take it personally. Gave it a ***** to redress the balance anyway. (Hasn't shown up yet, but it will...). Takes a lot of work to put a video together, but some folks are just plain mean. BTW, regarding Youtube, I found that anything less than 3 minutes long got about 5 times the traffic as something lasting 8 or 9 minutes. It's nothing to do with the film content, but 8 or 9 minutes takes a long time to load. Keep it to 4 or 5 minutes and watch your hit rate rise steadily.

I confess I don't know the firing mechanisms of WW1 guns, but I do know you can adjust the rate of fire with modern weapons by adjusting the gas port. A machine gun on sustained fire roll, (perched on a tripod or vehicle) typically has a much faster rate of fire than a weapon carried by an infantryman. Depending on the setting, two outwardly identical guns might not be synchronised to fire in time with each other. The big difference for WW1 aircraft comes with guns synchronised to fire through a propellor. The mechanism regulating the firing would not let guns fire in and out of sync, or else one or other gun would also fall out of sync with the propellor. I haven't read up on it, but its my guess your guns would remain perfectly synchronised, but your rate of fire would vary with engine speed. That's my tuppenceworth anyway.

I think Rugby Union looks more and more like Rugby League since turning professional. Just my opinion, but it seems to have lost it's vitality and by comparison with the amateur days, it's a pretty dull spectacle to watch. All that's missing is the sixth tackle rule and there's no difference. When I was at primary school in Hawick, we used to play Cocca rossi, (we never spelt it) which was essentially british bulldog. Unfortunately the playground was concrete and tarmacadam and after a couple of split heads and cuts, Cocca rossi was banned and anybody playing it got the belt. No problem. No cocca rossi? We'll just play full on, full contact, 40-a-side rugby. No ref. Brilliant fun until Peter Esselmont broke his arm. No more rugby in the playground. That's when we started fighting with the high school. Ah the good old days....

Talking about things that are about to fall from the sky, I also remember seeing a Lancaster flying for the first time, must have been 14 or so and I remember thinking if you threw a brick at it you'd have a fair to middling chance of hitting it. It seemed miraculous that any of these aircraft made it back from a raid where people were shooting guns at them. Like the Boeings, they were built tough because they had to be.

Maybe RAF pilots will know whether Longformacus is on any special flightpath? I was working there on somebody's chimneys about 10 yrs ago or so when a low flying Herc passed overhead. Having once upon a time jumped out of them, I was quite touched when the dispatcher waved. Couldn't guess the height but it was low, and both side doors were open because you could see daylight right through. My first thought was there might have been a drop, but not in that area and they weren't pulling in any static lines. Low flying wasn't unusual, but it just seemed a little odd to be so low and so close to a house. It also wasn't the usual camo, but a silvery grey colour. I don't recall the date, but about a month later, there were stories about the Spectre Gunships in Iraq and I wondered a little bit. I'm 100% sure it wasn't a gunship, but it all seemed 'odd'. I was very impressed, but a few days later, at the same job, a Spitfire, Hurricane and Lancaster flew over on it's way to some airshow. (Battle of Britain Memorial Flight). In the middle of nowhere! Couldn't believe my luck. I have to say however much as I love the sound of Merlins, the most impressive sound I've ever heard was a Vulcan Bomber taking off at Leuchars airshow. That was so loud that the ground trembled and the air actually physically crackled. It was scary loud. I've also got a soft spot for Sea King helos. I remember being very cold, very wet, very hungry, and very dirty after a night exercise, and lined up in sticks to be lifted off the range. We were about the last ones out, but every time a helo landed, we got a massive belt of warm air from the exhaust. Damn it felt good....

When Shrek first came out, the accent got right under the radar and I don't recall anybody even reacting to it. That's unusal, because false accents usually sound like fingernails down a blackboard. It sounds authentically Scottish. You would struggle to tie it down to a distinct area, you couldn't say it was Glaswegian or Aberdonian for example, - but that can be common anyway. You get folks from plummey private schools who are taught to speak 'properly', and you want to here them trying to fit in down the pub where the 'might' be mistaken for being English. It's like the Gaelic. Different parts of the hebrides had different accents and dialects, and you could tell right away if somebody came from Barra, or Lewis, or wherever. Kids can now learn Gaelic at school, but its kind of universal gaelic, you know it's gaelic, but can't tie it down to any particular place. Full credit to him, by luck or design Mike Myres got Shrek just about right. I'm sure John Rhys-Davies put the same amount of time into his scottish accent for Gimli in Lord of the Rings, but in my opinion he didn't quite nail it. It wasn't bad, nice touch in fact, but you just knew he wasn't a scot.

Well a Hawick man invented the Lee Enfield rifle, so you're not far wrong. (That makes a change). One man's born too late is another man's lived too long. Who mentioned electrics oh wise one?

It's access for stoppages then, not drag which was critical. If an aircraft could cope with a machine gun up top, or the asymetrical weapon pointing to the side, then two balanced weapons on either wing makes complete sense, aileron turns included. All you need is sufficient clearance to clear the propellor arc, so they're no further out along the wing from the centre than the top mounted gun was above it. Drag isn't negligible, but nor is it critical. Regarding drag, I'm not an expert, but it strikes me guns mounted on the fuselage have the same surface area facing the direction of resistance as guns mounted on the wings. Guns on the wings would induce resistance through friction with the air naturally and may impact on lift, but guns on the fuselage would induce the same resistance plus the added coefficient of creating this resistance in the compressed airstream, or thrust vector, of the propellor. There might be variables I don't know about, but you could make the argument that in one capacity at least, wing mounted guns would reduce nett drag, not increase it. You're not talking a big factor here, if it was, or there would be cowlings over the muzzles. This mattered at 400mph, to the extent that Mosquitos in WW2 taped over their cannon ports, but at 100mph? Hmmm. Less convinced. Stoppages are the problem, just as they were in WW2, but evidently much more likely. You could slide the guns along a rail which needn't be clumbermbersome, and could clear a stoppage before returning the gun to it's firing position. You're only talking a foot or so, depending on your propellor radius. It could be done, I have no doubt whatsoever, and weighing a lot less than a gunner. Ammunition feed is no problem in one direction, but unless you mounted the gun upside down, one sides feed mechanism would be more complex than the other, but this would create minor asymetry, nothing more. The gun itself draws it's ammunition with it's feed paws, so the only 'mechanism' to speak of is containment of the ammunition and restricting it's movement and avoiding obstructions to ensure it reaches the breech in the right position for the feed paws to sieze hold of it. Yes, any weapons system impacts on an aircrafts performance, but that's what it's all about with warplanes. Your aircraft is a weapons platform, and you strike the best balance between flight performance and payload delivery. If performance was so dented you didn't stand a chance in a dogfight, you could jettison your guns. But since the Air Ministry didn't trust you with a parachute to escape certain death, dropping your guns to run away might have been frowned upon too.

"Contact clear" is in a Scottish accent? Er, no, no it isn't. Not even close. Have to say though, Mike Myre's Shrek accent is uncannily good, and no mean achievement for a Canadian.

I'll just tell all the WW2 aircraft designers they got it all wrong. Stick to being rude, it's what you do best.

You're already carrying two machine guns and ammo. Nothing's changed but their position. Keep up. Or should a physics teacher be provided?

If there's a will, there's a way. I reckon a decent engineer could have done it. I appreciate all the problems mentioned, but you could do it. If you could swing down the top mounted lewis to reload, I reckon you could just as easily use a straight rail to slide the guns to and from their firing positions on the wings, and slide them in again to reload them from the cockpit (if you had to). And reloading? Well, 1000 rounds of 4 bit fits in an ammo box, so I reckon you could equally build a housing to store enough ammo and feed it effectively. Bullethead's right that jamming might be a problem, but no worse a problem than it was sometimes in WW2... Now I've thought more about it, I reckon the answer is probably quite straightforward. Quite simply, you don't actually need wing mounted guns once you've got an effective interruptor gear to fire through the prop. There's no advantage to be had. You've got sufficient firepower, it's easy to aim, you can reload efficiently in flight and without any specialist ammo, and you can also address stoppages. Who needs guns on the wings? But, take the interruptor gear out the equation, and then it all makes sense...

Thing that strikes me about the positioning of machine guns, why couldn't they mount them in a similar location to more modern fighters - out on the wing. No interruptor issues, relatively easy to aim, and I'm sure it wasn't a wing load issue. Seems such an obvious solution, and surely no more complicated to engineer a firing mechanism.

Anybody notice the american ensignia on WW1-5? Not red to blue to white roundels, but the white star on blue with the red centre typical of pre and early ww2 US aircraft. Anybody shed more light on what we're seeing? (Good sight btw Ironhat).

I tried, but I can't fly for the other side. It just isn't right. I find myself cheering when the good guys come to shoot me down and it always seems like such a long way to bomb somebody I might know. I tell myself it's just a SIM and doesn't matter, shut your eyes and pull the trigger........ but then I know I'm being silly. This is OFF, and it does matter.

Patriotism is dangerous. Not because it's wrong, but because it's so easy to manipulate. I remember once renewing the mastic around a window, and some of the packing was an old newspaper. It's very common, in the old days they'd roll up paper to stuff in the gap and mastic over the top. It's like a mini time capsule, because logically, the date on the newspaper is give or take the time the work was done. Most of the time it's just rubbish, dog racing odds and such like, but now and again you get a snippet that's interesting. This particular time, the paper was dated 1939, and had an article about our plucky friends in Finland giving the evil Soviets a bloody nose in their winter war. I don't recall what paper it was, maybe it wasn't even on the scrap I found, (they are never complete), but the article was very one sided and critical of the Russians. It wasn't as subtle as the modern day press, and you'd never think from reading it that 18 months later we'd be sending arms and weapons to help our brave Soviet allies in their struggles. Is it Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World that has Eastasia and Euroasia always at war? I'm sure it's 1984. Anyway, he was on the money. It struck me then how quickly our allegiences really do change when our Goverments want them to. Before you ask, you can't really keep these bits of paper because you just get one read before the paper gives up the ghost and crumbles away to flakes. Earliest I've seen was 1911, but I don't recollect what it read, - the only thing of interest was the date. Be superb to find something really interesting some day....(that and a long lost hoard of gold and diamonds buried in a wall, deeds to a diamond mine, some long lost masterpiece......).

It is a bit weird. I would swear I was pretty dispassionate about WW1, even WW2 to the same extent. I have no hostility towards the Germans, none whatsoever. You're correct Olham, it isn't good guys vs the bad guys, and despite my unfortunate turn of phrase, that's not actually how I think of it. I'd like to think I could be wholly objective and 'fair' about every aspect of our history. I'm not as well read about WW1 as I might be about WW2, but I do indeed read books from all sides and any persuasion. But whenever I take to the skies in a Fokker or an Albatross, seems there's always a niggling conflict of interest. Sopwiths and De havilands etc fly for 'us', and the Fokkers etc fly for 'them'. Brainwashed? Biggoted? Good Lord, I do hope not..... edit - And regarding tensions with the Entente... As Churchill said about the Americans and Soviets in WW2, "The only thing worse that fighting a war with allies, is fighting a war without them".

I don't like warping because it's only enemy aircraft which drop you out of warp. If you're looking a target, especially ships, you can suddenly see your mission objective, but be miles past it before you hit Ctrl X, and then you can't find the damn thing again because it's moved... Best solution to a long flight is Teamspeak on a multiplayer mission. Good banter, instant feedback, and you learn all sorts of stuff too. A couple of hours will pass and you won't even know it. I'm not a purist with the old chestnut 'ah the real pilots didn't have a warp button', off course they didn't. But OFF is an addiction and the warp function makes the difference between getting to work and not getting to work. Autopilot is only limited GregSM, it keeps you steady on your speed, heading and altitude, but it won't correct itself to follow a course or flightpath. It's not so much autopilot as 'cruise control'.

Ha, ha, ha, ha! Got to love the British squaddie's political correctness. The "Splitarse" road to Arras!