Bullethead

I think that if you use the Pro Clip thingy, you don't have to worry about glasses. I don't wear glasses myself, but there are all sorts of reflective surfaces and even light sources behind me at my desk and TIR has no trouble with them. TIR works in 2 modes: active and passive. Active was the only choice originally. The little gizmo on your monitor spews IR over a wide area because it has to cover everywhere your head could be. This IR is supposed to bounce off the reflectors on your head and back into the gizmo. But because it covers a wide area, this IR also hits everything else in that area, such as your glasses and anything else reflective behind you. Plus, the reflections the gizmo is looking for are relatively dim, and thus hard to distinguish from the "noise" of spurious reflections. Also, the IR emitted by lightbulbs behind you is within the "signal" level that TIR is looking for, so also confuses the poor thing. With the Pro Clip thingy, however, the TIR gizmo on your monitor is in passive mode, so there's no wide area of IR hitting stuff around and behind you and creating spurious reflections. Instead, the IR emitters are on your head aimed at the monitor gizmo. Hence, your glasses will never have IR hitting them. And the IR LEDs on your head are small, bright, point sources in a specific formation. Apparently, the monitor gizmo knows to look for these characteristics when deciding whether the input is "signal" or "noise". Thus, it does a good job ignoring the IR from lightbulbs behind me.

I've known some ossifers who think that if their units have higher bodycounts, they'll get a gong and/or promotion. So they'd have assigned each major fragment to a different individual. Then they'd have assumed the wild hogs had carried off the remains of a couple more guys during the night, and that the pieces that were too small to pick up amounted to another poor sod. So even though the guy with the Starlight only saw 1, it would get sent up the chain as 5 or 6 kills. That's what I meant by "bodycount math". You know, like beer math: 2 beers per man per day for 10 men = 57 cases :)

Exiting the campaign is probably what hosed you. You should just "end flight", the top option on the list when the hit ESC. When I do that, the debrief screen comes up and will say "congrats" on your claims(s)" somewhere amongst saying who didn't make it back and how many claims your squaddies got. After you close that screen, the claim form comes up for you to fill in. Once you get that done, you can either watch the replay or go back to the main campaign window. ---------------- New Subject ------------------------ Personally, I just don't see how so many folks get so wrapped up by whether their claims are accepted or rejected. It's very simple. You ONLY get the claim form to fill in at all if you actually did shoot something down. So that's your confirmation right there. As TvO said above, "you have the deep satisfaction of having "served the fatherland", regardless of whether the claim ends up being accepted or rejected. And then you have the replay that tells you how many planes you actually shot down if it's more than 1. So YOU as a player ALWAYS know your true score, regardless what the pencil-pushers say. And if you don't like this, remember, there IS now an option where you can either skip the whole claim for thingy completely or make it where practically everything is awarded. If you don't like how the game handles your claims on the hard setting, try an easier one. We won't think any less of you, because, as mentioned above, you really did shoot the bugger down whether HQ agrees or not. I myself approach the whole claims thing from the role-player perspective, as a good line dog. I fill it in as authentically and as truthfully as I can, and try to forget about it. I know I killed the bugger and his final agonies will no doubt haunt my nightmares for the rest of my (probably very short) life. No pencil-pushing REMF pogues are going to take that away from me (although sometimes I wish they could). I'm probably going to die tomorrow anyway, so will never know whether my claims get accepted or not, so how can I really care about them? Thus, from my role-playing POV, the claim form is just the last obstacle before I can start the more enjoyable decompression process with booze and women . If I could change something about the claim system, it would be that you ALWAYS have the option of filling in the form, whether you really killed anything or not, AND that you never got the "this will automatically be rejected" message. IOW, I want the ability to lie to the pogues. This would be for role-playing purposes. Knowing I'm probably going to die soon and the pencil-pushing REMF pogues will survive the war is a source of irritation, so I'd like to make life as difficult for them as possible. I want to stuff their in-boxes with bogus crap that some staff officer with a fixation on paperwork through-put will insist that his clerks work on 24/7 until they get to the bottom of the pile. I want them to waste their time on wild goose-chases, and I want to inject so much bogus intel into the system that ultimately Trenchard will announce that the Germans have run out of airplanes in early 1917 You know, Viet Nam-style "bodycount math". The OFF version would be like 1 horse + 2 arms + 1 leg = 4 Albatri shot down. I want the REMFs trying to sort that out years after I'm dead and gone

Heheh, that's like an order of magnitude better than the in-game stats say it should go: 1760 feet . One more minor typo, with zero effect on the game, for some thankless OBD database-basher to fix someday. I feel your pain, man I think they just left a zero off. My books say it could reach about 17.5kft. I haven't had any reason to get about 12kft yet, but it did that no problem.

Hehehe, I've been waiting for a chance to use this smiley :)

Heh heh, cool, heh heh. Sorry, I was just having a Beavis moment :). You have a gift for words.

OK, I can see that. But "...Cope in the morning" and "...hope in the morning" is too close to be a coincidence. And I've heard both sets of lyrics to the same tune, depending on how drunk everybody was, so I really can't tell which tune is supposed to go with which lyrics anyway :). To the King (over the water) and the little gentleman in the black velvet waistcoat!

IIRC, not a whole lot happened on the Marne except in 1914 and 1918. It's not surprising you're not seeing very much there in 1916. In 1916, the French were totally absorbed by Verdun, so if you want French in 1916, that's the place to be. But by June/July, the Germans were shifting to the defenisve and moving units to meet the anticipated Brit offensive on the Somme, so it's best to be there from February on.

The other guy, whether human or AI, will be forced to react to what it sees you doing. He will predict your future position based on what you're doing now. So you dive toward the enemy and he'll turn to meet you, expecting you to come all the way in for a shot and the go on by. So yes, you can fool the AI with this. In head-on passes, the AI often commits to an early turn just before the merge. This is sound tactics and better than most inexperienced human simmers do :). But you're smarter and you're expecting this. So when you see him doing that, it's your cue to go vertical :).

I don't recall that part of it too well. IIRC, my thought was that it weakened their argument, because it was belaboring a minor point. Their best argument was MvR's autopsy ;). I do, however, have an RAF diagram from WW2 showing the patterns of the 8 guns of a Spit Mk I when converged at 350 yards. This resulted in 75% of the bullets hitting within the diameter of an HE111 fuselage at 400 yards.

It ain't free, and there's nothing good about such a system.

Ask and ye shall receive ;) NOTE: Both these pics assume the enemy sees you coming, so the initial merge will be more or less head-on as he turns to face you. You have zero intention of firing a shot on the initial pass, but are just using it to set up your 2nd pass. If you surprise the enemy, OTOH, then just take your best shot as you get close :). Figure 4-5 This is the "rope-a-dope" move. The idea is, you sucker an enemy with less zoom ability into following you up. You're just tantalizingly out of his reach, you see. But he runs out of smash first and has to point nose-down to regain speed, thus conveniently pointing his tail at you. So when you see him start to nose over, you come back down and find him all lined up in front of you ;). Not shown in this figure is the essential set-up for this. You have to spot the enemy at long range while you have a substantial altitude advantage. Then you dive steeply down to his level, building up the speed necessary to do this move, while remaining some distance away. You then approach the enemy more or less in level flight and go steeply vertical at the merge. NEVER NEVER NEVER make a diving pass at the enemy unless the enemy is also diving. If you dive at a level or climbing enemy, you'll naturally overshoot well below him and thus forfeit your E-advantage. This is why you dive steeply while far away from the enemy, so you can approach him mostly level. Anyway, the Albatri can do this move, but IMHO only as the 1st attempt in the fight. You really need a LOT of speed, and it has to be much more than the enemy's, to do this safely in WW1, or you'll be IN range as the enemy follows you up. You're not likely to have the absolute speed necessary, nor the amount of speed advantage, later in the fight. Figure 4-7 This is what the Albatross AI usually does its first few passes. I personally don't think that, as shown in this pic, this is a particularly good tactic for WW1, but the illustration has bits and pieces that can be rearranged into something much more effective. But first I'll explain what the picture shows. As shown, the Albatross again approaches the target more or less level at very high speed after an initial steep dive some distance away. In this case, instead of going steeply vertical for the "rope-a-dope", the Albatross goes into a more gentle climb for a long way, again letting the enemy follow him. Then the Albatross goes vertical and by this time, the Pup is hopefully bled enough by the long gentle climb to be unable to go vertical at all. So he has to turn somehow and the Albatross, now at low speed at the top of its zoom, can easily roll and pull into the target's rear hemispere and then come down into firing position. Doing it this way has the same limitations as the "rope-a-dope". In addition, it requires the enemy to play along following the long, gentle climb. A smart enemy will fly slightly nose-down in the horizontal phase to build up speed while the Albatross is slowing down slightly. Because it's now slower, the Albatross can't go up as high, and the smart Pup driver will be able to go up some, too. At best, the Pup can thus get behind the Albatross as it comes back down. At worst, the Pup can at least totally spoil the Alabtross' attack and usually cause it to waste a lot of E trying to make something out of nothing. This is how I usually kill them :). So IMHO what you should do instead is just look at the left 1/2 of the drawing. You'll have to renumber it, too, so that the Pup's 4, 5, 6 become 1, 2, 3, and the Albatross' 3, 4, 5, 6 become 1, 2, 3, 4. IOW, the Albatross is behind the Pup and the Pup makes a hard turn that the Albatross should'nt follow. Instead, the Albtross goes vertical into some sort of high yoyo or lag roll (depending on the situation--both do the same thing in the end) and comes back down behind the Pup again :). The big question, then, is how do you get behind the Pup in the 1st place after the head-on merge? What you do is PRETEND to make a diving initial pass instead of approaching on the level. But never get down to the target's level. Instead, while still safely out of range and still somewhat above him, you do a vertical or at least oblique early turn and zoom up and around. The enemy has no hope of getting you in his sights and will turn hard and/or zoom as much as he can after you. As a result, when you reach the top of your zoom, the enemy will be more or less below you in more or less level flight. You kick your crate around at the top of your move so you can come down into his rear hemisphere (don't dive AT him, use lag pursuit to start with so you fall in behind him and then make your pass more or less level). Now you're behind the Pup, and he will turn, and you do the modified version of the left 1/2 of the picture as discussed above. You'll probably have to repeat this several times, but you should have no trouble staying behind him even though he turns better than you do :).

Hmmm..... I dunno. Don't you have that backwards? Shouldn't the SE5 be wider than any other 2-gun fighter? I mean, the Lewis had more leverage to throw the plane around, and because it was in a different place from the Vickers, it would have had to have been converged. That is, at 1 fixed range both guns would be hitting the same point, but everywhere else, the'd be some distance apart. But anyway, I don't think having twin fuselage guns would make any real difference compared to 1 gun. The guns are mounted practically on the airlpane's centerline, so have very little leverage to exert their push. Consider most WW2 fighters with guns out in the wings. They weren't firing at the same time, had much more leverage, were often of larger caliber, and there were more of them. So if multiple guns exterted a large scattering influence, it should have been something you'd have read a lot about from WW2 air combat. But the only time I've heard it mentioned is when all the guns on 1 wing jammed, and then spoiling the aim was the least of the pilot's worries. The recoil would actually yaw the plane out of control until he quit firing.

LOL, great song! I love gallows humor like that :). The authors must have been Scots. Being a good ex-pat Jacobite, I can tell the thing was sung to the tune of "Johnnie Cope": When Charlie looked the letter upon, He drew his sword and scabbard from, Come, follow me, my merry men, And we'll meet Johnnie Cope in the morning. I'll contribute the traditional WW1 pilot's song, immortalized in Errol Flynn's "The Dawn Patrol": We meet 'neath the sounding rafters The walls all around us are bare They echo the peals of laughter It seems that the dead are there So stand by your glasses steady This world is a world of lies Here's a toast to the dead already Hurrah for the next man who dies Cut off from the land the bore us Betrayed by the land that we find The good men have all gone before us With only the dull left behind So stand to your glasses steady This world is a web of lies We've drunk to the dead already So here's to the next man who dies

You're so right :). He's every simmer's drinking buddy, not just mine. I met him at a bunch of conventions for MMOFS games, where he was often a guest speaker. So everybody fought for the honor of keeping his glass full while hanging on his every word ;). He gave up drinking later on, though, so we just had to drink his share for him. But back in the days of Kesmai's DOS Air Warrior, he was in a virtual squadron called the 4th Fighter Group, flying under the handle of Zeus. It was all hush-hush to keep him from being mobbed (everybody wanted a Shaw scalp on their wall), but I flew with 4FG so I was in on the secret. So lots of guys winged with Shaw without realizing it. I know he had several accounts back then, so he was doubtless in other squads I don't know about. One of the advertising points of the game was that Shaw played it :).

The general principles are the same from era to era, BUT the details of applying them vary considerably, even if you're just talking about guns. Shaw doesn't mention this because he wasn't writing for simmers but modern real-life pilots, but you need to keep it in mind as you read his book. The details of application change because of the changing ratio of effective guns range to aircraft turn radius over time as a function of increasing airplane speed and power. In WW1, turn radius was much shorter than guns range and airplanes were slow, so if you make a head-on pass and go straight on without turning, the enemy can usually turn 180 and shoot you in the butt before you get out of range (in WW2 and later, a head-on pass-and-extend is a sure-fire disengagement move because you're out of range before the enemy can line up on you). Thus, in WW1, it's harder to do E-fighting because such a large part of that depends on getting in for your pass and out again before the enemy can get a shot at you. You'll have to keep this in mind when reading Shaw, because his guns examples are all from WW2, Korea, and Viet Nam, when the ratios were much different. I disagree, sir. My copy of Shaw was autographed by The Man himself, whom I have met many times and drunk much beer and whiskey with, and teamed up with to sweep the virtual skies of scads of wannabes. Shaw uses 2 terms and 2 terms only for types of planes: "energy fighters" and "angles fighters". I call these E-fighters and stall- or turnfighters. What Shaw calls "energy fighting" is the same as I call it. I direct your attetion to my favorite picture in the book, Figure 4-5 on page 152. That is E-fighting, the classic "rope-a-dope" maneuver, which the AI Albatri constantly try to use on me. That is in no way related to B&Z. B&Z is not energy fighting, it's a pathetic tactic. B&Z is a fixation on speed and a total disregard for angles. You come screaming in at the target, make your pass at whatever angle you have when you get there, and extend into the next county before turning around. Both E-fighting and turnfighting seek the same thing: angles. And they're both willing to give up speed to achieve them. The difference is, turnfighters mostly do this in the horizontal and it's a 1-way street. E-fighters do it in the vertical and get their speed back coming downhill. See Figure 4-5 B&Z, being a tactic, can be done by any plane. But only turnfighters can turnfight very well, and only E-fighters can E-fight very well. There are a few never-to-be-sufficiently-damned planes that can do both (haven't found one in OFF yet, but the Aces High Lamer-7 is an example), and anybody who flies one is a panty-waist . Yes, you must give in to the Dark Side. Once you do, it all becomes easy :)

Nice song. Here's a link to a bunch of old US pilot songs from WW2 and Korea. You know, the ironic kind about crashes, booze, women, etc. The whole list is down at the bottom, and there are MP3s. http://www.csufresno.edu/folklore/drinking...anted-wings.htm

On my machine, the box on the form where you put in the main witness' name says "first and last name only--NO RANK". If the game doesn't care about it there, I don't bother with it elsewhere :).

I agree that no AI will ever be as good as a human opponent. The VAST majority of my flightsim time has been in MMOFS. I guess I did that for 15 years: Air Warrior, War Birds, and Aces High. The rest of my time was mostly RB2/3D offline. Still, the OFF AI is pretty damn good, way better than most I've seen. So I give it its due. In OFF, I have never fired a shot in QC except to see where my bullets go in relation to convenient sighting polygons on a given airplane, and how wide the dispersion is. I only do "Free Flight" in QC, which I used to do the following: discover the best way to get a given plane off the ground determine how many clicks of which type of trim it habitually needs, so I can set that each flight and never touch it again determine its best rate of climb at 85% power (so my wingies can keep up with me) determine the speeds and Gs needed to break the airplane, if I can determine the level stall speed determine whether and how nastily the plane will stall in a hard turn at low speed determine if the plane will spin, how to recover, and how much alt that requires figure out the best landing approach Once I've done this a time or 2, I never fly that plane in QC again unless I'm making a skin for it :). Every fight I've ever had in OFF as been in the campaign. Anyway, back to the Albatross...... As noted above, I'm way more familiar with WW2 planes, so I feel like I need to clarify some of my above statements with WW2 analogies, in case anybody else is in a similar situation. The Pup IMHO flies like the Hurricane Mk I. Not too fast, not very zoomy. but easy to fly and it turns very well. This compares to the D.II as the Bf109E, the D.III as the FW190A5, and the D.V as either the Bf109G or FW190A8. The FE2 is most like the B25 :). Note that all these are "flies like" comparisons, without regard for sturdiness, firepower, etc. Back in my MMOFS days, I flew FWs of all types way more than anything else. My favorite was always the A8, in which I felt I could take on any number of anything, until Aces High introduced the Lamer-7. Then I just flew Doras instead and felt the same way, although it wasn't as much fun (not as up-close and personal). Anyway, in OFF, flying against campaign AI Albatri, it reminds me very much of the time I spent trying to teach people how to be FW pilots. I'd get in a spit or hurri, give them an alt advantage, and let them go from there. They'd start out OK the 1st few passes, but felt like they always had to stay in until one of us was dead. And with that attitude, it was usually them. As tttiger said, the Albatross is a vertical turn-fighter. That's what I call an E-fighter. ANY plane can B&Z, and that's about the least effective tactic there is because, barring complete surprise, you NEVER get a decent low-deflection tracking shot. As somebody Shaw quoted said, "if you want to shot him down, you have to get in there and mix it up with him". That's what the Albatross was built for. You just have to do it the right way, and know when to give it up at least for a while. An E-fighter, by definition, ALWAYS has to have enough speed to be able to exploit the vertical, which is its strength. In fact, it must ALWAYS be able to exploit the vertical better than the turnfighter (zoom higher so as not to get drilled at the top, for example). This REQUIRES it to ALWAYS maintain an E-advantage over the turn-fighter. And this is just to make it an EVEN fight. An E-fighter without an E-advantage on a turnfighter is at a severe disadvantage, because it can't play its own game at all and can't win playing the turnfighter's game. So, if you fly the Albatross, any time you see yourself getting co-speed/co-alt with a slower, more maneuverable opponent, LEAVE IMMEDIATELY (unless, of course, you're saddled up on him, and he has no buddies left). Use your better dive and higher speed to just go away. Don't come back unless you can do so with a good altitude advantage. And make this decision while you still have enough altitude for you to dive away with. This is the main failing of the AI Albatross in OFF--it doesn't follow this rule.

I spend most of my time flying for the Brits in Bloody April (Pups and FE2s) so don't fly the Albatross much. However, I'm constantly fighting against a mix of D.II and various D.III types, so I can give an opinion on that, as seen from the Pup and FE2. In my experience, the AI pilots get themselves killed a lot by staying in the fight too long. They almost always have an E-advantage on them to start with and use it fairly well for a few passes, making slashing attacks followed by zooming extensions/reversals that I have no hope of following. However, if I manage to avoid their first few passes, and they bleed down to a more co-E state, they continue fighting instead of running away. Only now, their only option is turn-fighting, and the Brit fighters of early 1917 are better at that than they are. Thus, I soon get on them and they can't shake me except by throttling way down, which might make me overshoot that pass, but which cedes the E-advantage to me, so it's only a matter of time after that. To me, the best move to use against an attacking Albatross is to dive slightly towards them as they dive on me, which screws up their pass from too much vertical separation for them to hit me. Once I see I've achieved that, I do a HARD early 180^ turn just before the merge so I end up pointing the same way as them and pretty much just below them. Then I follow them as best I can as they extend. Once they zoom up, I aim for the center-point of the turn they're going to make to cut the corner on them, try to get under them again when they reach the top of their zoom, and then turn hard into them as they dive by. They usually turn toward me as I do this, giving me a snapshot into their tops, which lately has been resulting in a lot of dead Albatross pilots althought I think that's just luck. Anyway, my moves cause the Albatross to bleed a lot of E, especially by these turns toward me, so after doing this 2 or 3 times I'm usually saddled up nicely. The FE2 is murder on D.IIs in this process, because they can't zoom as high. Thus, it often happens that my observer can be hosing the Albatross while it's hanging at the top of its zoom and I'm at the center of its turn below, and then follow it as it comes back down across my nose. OTOH, the Pup is far better at the initial early turn to set this up in the first place. In the Fee, it's sometimes problematic just surviving the 1st pass, but if I can do that, I've got a real chance. I usually find that it takes a large number of hits to bring down an Albatross from behind. However, they appear much more vulnerable from the top. If I can hit with a 90^ deflection shot, I seem to have a fairly good chance of killing the pilot and down he goes at once, with just a few bullets. But getting these hits is the trick :). Still, even if I miss the pilot, I often hit the radiator instead, which really takes the wind out of an Albatross' sails. They appear to throttle way back to avoid overheating, which basically makes them sitting ducks. They should dive away if there's enough altitude, but most of them stay in the fight and thus die. I find the Albatross WAY better in the vertical than both the Fee and the Pup. Hell, the Fee really can't make any vertical moves at all, and the Pup doesn't have the macho to follow an Albatross all the way up. I learned early on not to even try, because I stall out first, and then the Albatross is on my 6. The Albatross also gains energy very quickly in dives, way better than my rides can. Many times I've seen nearly co-E Albatri do a split-S away below me, and I used to ignore them after that, thinking there was no way they could get back up to my level for a while, leaving me free to deal with the others. WRONG! They just zoom right back up again onto my 6. At the bottom line, the Albatross is a very dangerous foe if it has any altitude to work with. But once you get it below about 1000', it can no longer dive to regain its E. It should run away before that happens, but it rarely does. Thus, I kill more of them than I should. I do a fair amount of escort missions at high altitude. On these sorties, the planes I'm escorting often stay up high, so I need to stay high, too. I find it practically impossible to drive off Albatri if I keep my own alt, however. I can't go fast enough to play sheepdog very well without diving for speed, and even when I make the Albatri dive below my buffs, they just zoom right back up again. So in the end, the only way I can keep the Albatri away from my buffs is to drag them down with me, at which point it's a fight to the death between us. Hopefully, the now-unescorted buffs can go the rest of the way unmolested, because I'll never see them again :). But anyway, the typical fight is me playing dodgeball with the Albatri while steadily losing altitude, until we get near the ground and I can take the offensive.

The motor was just one source of dispersion. There are a host of factors that add to MG dispersion, most of which affect ground-mounted guns as well as those in WW1 planes :). I use the normal dispersion, which I think is quite wide enough. Have you ever just fired your guns on the ground, without even starting the motor? You'll see your tracer scattering out over a fairly wide area. It's especially visible from the external view in front of your plane. Look down your own barrel and see how the bullets come at you differently every time. While there's no way to tell for sure, it looks to me like the best you can hope for with normal dispersion is that a bullet will hit somewhere within about 3-4 feet of your point of aim at about 100 yards (IOW, within a circle 6-8' wide). That's about the same as I could do back in the day firing the old 7.62mm M60 off my shoulder, without benefit of any sort of gun mount, so I'd think airplane guns should shoot a bit tighter. But OTOH, I'm a Marine; maybe flyboys just inherently can't shoot as well? Regardless, I'm quite sure that in their quest for realism, OBD set their system up so that normal dispersion most closely matched what they considered the most realistic, taking all the various factors into account. They know far more knowledgeable about the subject of WW1 airplane guns than I am, so I take their word for it. The various patches always seem to install just fine. Remember, each patch includes all the previous fixes, so even if somehow something got hosed to begin with, putting in the latest patch should set it right.

Thanks for noticing :). I always look at my ride in external view before I take off to write down the serial number on the skin. I seriously doubt this has any effect on the outcome (especially because the number doesn't change even if I wreck the plane), but the real guys always included it, so I do, too. Still, it doesn't change the fact that much of what I said, although I reported as honestly as I could, was still factually wrong. Just goes to show that eye-witness testimony is usually crap, and it's the "circumstantial" evidence that really matters :). But seriously, I take all this as a sign that the claim system is pretty good, even on the hard setting. Even if you're behind the lines, even if you get some key facts wrong, even if your witness isn't your regular wingman, you can still end up with a pretty good chance of confirmation if you cobble together something approximately like what the real guys did back in the day. The main reason I posted this pic was to show that, to give hope to those who think HQ hates them :). We obviously approach this game differently. For my part, it makes absolutely no difference whether my claims get accepted or rejected. It's not like OFF is a MMOFS where everybody's scores are there for all to see, and thus have a true bearing on the respect you get from others. The OFF campaign is SP only, so my "official" score is just between me and my computer. Besides, the replay feature always lets me know how many kills I really got, whether they're confirmed or not. So I never sweat details like you have above. I just write down a fair description of events as they appeared to me, in a format that bears a resemblance to what they really did back in the day. I consider that just an extension of the role-playing that the OFF campaign is all about. I don't even worry about including "magic words". If there really are any, I figure that using an authentic format will necessarily include at least some of them. IIRC, OBD has said that being authentic increases your odds, if that matters to you. But as I say, it doesn't matter to me. I know I killed this bugger (and another I didn't notice), whether the campaign ever acknowledges it or not :).

Fingers crossed! Geez, more stones to come.... Did the doc say what caused all this? You might want to ask him on that, so you can stop whatever it is you're doing.

Wow, 100 for the pending number! WTG! I'm quite curious to see how this one turns out. I wrote it as I thought it happened at the time, but then when I saw the replay after I filed it, I discovered I was rather far from the truth. It turns out I killed 2 Albatri, but they all looked just alike and it was a very confused fight, so I never noticed I'd changed targets. Wilkins is my official wingman, but he disappeared early in the flight so I thought he was dead and put down Ackers, who was right beside me at the time. The funny thing is, the Duty Board shows me with 2 claims even though I only filed for this one. Given that this was behind the lines, the witness wasn't my regular wingman, and there are key inaccuracies in my account, I'm surprised it's rated as high as 80 :).

I used to have the same problem of hosing a plane down thoroughly and not knocking it down. However, my last 3 kills were scored with a combined total of 19 hits spread between them (9 on the 1st, 6 on the 2nd, 4 on the 3rd) out of about 250 rounds fired in total. I'm using the normal bullet strength. All these kills were scored in high deflection snapshots at ranges averaging about 200 feet, hence the low hit percentage. Average burst size was only 6 rounds (I'm flying a Pup). I was firing at the top of the enemy most times, sometimes from slightly behind as well, as the enemy turned hard across my nose. I always had a clear shot at the pilot and that's what I was aiming for. I never saw any hit graphics (smoke puffs, pieces flying) and none of these 3 planes caught fire. All, however, immediately went out of control and quickly crashed (all fights were at less than 1000 feet). I have realistic sounds set so can only hear my own engine, but I figure I must have hit the pilot each time.