Bullethead

Yeah, I'd like to see that, too. While we're on the subject, one thing that's always bugged me is that currently gun mounts don't function as they did in real life. They function like WW2 turrets in that the only point of rotation is the center of the ring mount. In WW1 mounts, however, the rotating ring just put you in the general area and carried with it the actual pivot point of the weapon, with which gunners actually aimed. That is, the guns themselves could pivot on the edge of the ring, with say a +/- 45^ or more useable angle of traverse off the ring's facing, depending on elevation and how far the gunner wanted to lean out of his cockpit. German 2-seaters typically had very wide rings (often the widest part of the fuselage), which reduced the amount of leaning the gunner had to do, thereby making it easier to fire down beside the fuselage. Entente planes (as shown in the RE8 diagrams above) typically had tapering tail sections for the same reason. This is how gunners shot under their tails. They'd rotate the ring to move the actual gun pivot out beyond the edge of the fuselage, then swing the gun back towards the tail. This enabled them to shoot downwards close alongside the fuselage, although this entailed leaning out over the edge of the cockpit so had its practical limits. But when shooting sideways and down, the gunner didn't have to lean over, so the arc that way ways rather bigger. This is what enabled members of a formation to cover each other's blind spots and is currently lacking even for AI-only flights. Shooting low also required the gunner to stand up. In this situation, having the elevation pivot point right down on top of the ring made it easier to shoot down more steeply. But the opposite is true when shooting upwards, so elevation is limited by how far down the gunner can get in his cockpit relative to the elevation pivot point. German 2-seaters seem in general to have had deeper fuselages than Entente planes, so the gunner could squat lower. Where this wasn't the case, they often raised the ring mount above the fuselage top in the form of a tubular framework. Thinner-sectioned Entente planes, OTOH, had Scarff rings, the distinguishing feature of which was the ability to raise the elevation pivot point above the ring, so that the gunner could get higher elevation for the same limited amount of squatting. However, the Scarff rings in OFF don't change in elevation. Maybe P4?

SCHWEET!!! When flying the Fee, I've been trying to be easy on my gunner (the poor bastard doesn't even have a seat, let alone a seatbelt). And even so, I've found him not liking to fire when I've got more than about 30-45^ bank on. I look forward to seeing what happens in P4.

An OFF-4 You Can't Refuse

Yes. And it's not just your own gunner. All gunners in the rest of your flight act just like your own, and this is usually entirely different from a flight that has no human in any seat anywhere in it. I didn't get into this in my previous post because the question was why a human's gunners didn't shoot in a particular situation. So I explained how AI gunners in a human flight behave and said nothing about AI-only flights. But now that this subject is under discussion, I'll talk about it. The primary difference between human-tainted gunners and otherwise is in arc of fire. AI-only gunners USUALLY (but not always) have a MUCH bigger field of fire. sometimes it's actually smaller. I too can attest to receiving gunner fire from under enemy tails, from between the wings in the forward hemisphere, and from practically above the enemy. However, each time this has happened to me, I've done my next hop in that same type of 2-seater, jumped in the back, and been totally unable to move the guns any more than mentioned in my previous post: No depression at all, elevation limited to about 45^, and not quite a 180^ arc to the rear. There are a couple exceptions. IIRC, a human can also traverse Brisfit guns 360^, and can elevate a Fee's nose gun to about 85^ while the AI is stuck with 45^. I remember a long time ago there was considerably noise in this forum than AI 2-seaters were too easy to kill because they're gunners were practically ineffective. At that time, IIRC AI gunners had the same limits as humans--you never saw front hemisphere or under-tail shots from them, and the pilots never took any notice of you at all. Then we got a patch and suddenly gunners were shooting over more of the sky and pilots were taking some limited evasion action. I don't know why these changes in gunner arcs weren't applied to human-crewed planes (and flights), but that's the way things are. While I'm very happy to hear that gunners in P4 will be different, I don't expect we'll ever be completely satisfied with how gunners work. I mean, we're never satisfied with anything . But the subject is more complex than we probably give it credit for. Right now we're concerned mostly with fields of fire. OK, those get fixed, but then somebody will say that the slipstream above a given speed, or the G-forces during a maneuver, would have prevented the gunner shooting in a given direction or even at all. And what about the aerodynamic effects on the plane itself as the gunner alternately squats low and stands tall in the airstream? So then we'll have to hunt down old Viet Nam door gunners for their opinions on those subjects, and they won't agree, so the argument will go on .

The activity of AI gunners depends entirely on workshop settings. If you have it set on realistic, they will begin to track targets at about 250 yards and will open fire at about 200 yards. With this setting, they ignore targets further away. On top of this, however, is the field of fire of a given gun. If the target is outside the field of fire, the gunner will ignore it. In OFF, most gunners have unrealistically limited fields of fire. In the typical 2-seater, the field of fire is as follows: Horizontal: about 180^ arc centered on the tail Vertical: From level to about 45^ above the tail In real life, most rear gunners could fire steeply downwards to the sides of the fuselage, forward between the wings, and the full upper hemisphere except where the upper wing and prop were in the way. The difference between this and what's in OFF makes 2-seaters MUCH more vulnerable than they really were because the planes in the formation cannot support each other, either due to range or limited arc of fire. HOWEVER, in ocmpensation, AI scouts aren't very aggressive in attacking 2-seater formations. In general, scouts will make 1 all-out attack pass from whatever angle they 1st appear from. This will often do terrible damage because it's usually from the gunners' blindspot. If you survive this, however, you're perfectly safe because after this the scouts will no longer attack. Instead, they'll meekly follow along behind just out of range and not shooting themselves. Periodically, one of them might make a show of climbing up and diving down from your high 4 or 8 while the rest keep following, but this this lone high-side attack is always just a feint, broken off before the scout comes into range or fires himself. So just ignore it. And meanwhile, as long as you've got a flight of scouts following you, other enemy flights will totally ignore you. The problem is, enemy scouts will only follow you so far before they get bored and leave. This varies considerably--sometimes they'll follow you all the way home, sometimes they break off almost immediately. Once your followers desert you, the next enemy flight to come along will attack, and the process will repeat. The initial attack of any enemy flight being very deadly, the worst-case scenario is meeting a succession of flights with short attention spans, so you're subjected to a series of initial attacks. The best-case scenario is to be attacked early on by a flight with a long attention span, which will follow you to the target and back across the lines before breaking off near your airfield. Note, however, that all the above ONLY applies if your 2-seater flight maintains formation. Any plane that leaves formation for whatever reason is immediately swarmed by erstwhile peaceful followers. What seems to trigger this feeding frenzy is getting some distance away from the rest of the flight, either from engine damage, missing a turn, or taking individual evasive action. So the best thing for a 2-seater flight leader is to cruise along, make VERY gentle waypoint turns, and to ignore all enemies except those making their 1st attack. And even in the latter case, just jink a little, not a lot, or you'll be considered "out of formation" and swarmed. For the most part, it's easy to survive fighters as a 2-seater flight leader. Just take off, trim out, and make sure your guys stay close by making gentle turns and using the "Reform" command throughout every turn you make. The main wildcard is flak, but this tends to hit the guys behind you more than the leader, unless you're doing low-level work down in the deadly AAMGs, which tend to fixate on the leading plane. The only real problem with fighters, assuming you survive the initial pass, is if they follow you all the way home. When your formation necessarily breaks up for landing, they'll be all over you. So if you're worried about this, fly home over every friendly flak concentration you see on the map, and don't hesitate to fly wall past your airfield, all the way to England if need be, in hopes the enemy will eventually break off.

What I find the coolest is that this French system had an automatic fuze-setter. Not every system in WW2 had that. I have a fascination for these old analog computer systems (which is what fire control systems were). By the ingenious arrangement of gears, voltages, and resistors, the old guys could solve very complex problems in real time and achieve very respectable results. Of course, the hardware often filled several rooms, required a large crew of guys each entering data on various handwheels, often had rather severe limits on the range of input and output values it could accept or produce, and was built for 1 specific purpose so couldn't be used for anything else. But within their limits, these systems worked quite well. It's a shame that they're so forgotten today--their inventors deserve monuments. This is off-topic, but if anybody shares my interest in these gizmos, check out Tony Lovell's EXCELLENT instructional videos over at DreadnoughtProject.org. Here's one that shows the operation of the Dreyer Fire Control Table, which is what Brit dreadnoughts used to shoot their big guns at German dreadnoughts. On the page below, the video is in the upper right corner. Make it full-screen and enjoy the show (takes about 28 minutes). http://http://www.dreadnoughtproject.org/tfs/index.php/Dreyer_Fire_Control_Table

Now that's cool! This seems, given my limited knowledge of flak fire control, to have been pretty much the same as the standard WW2 system used by those without top-end radar. So WW1 has an artillery fire control trifecta. On land, sea, and against the air, what they developed in WW1 was used again, with only refinements in detail, in WW2 (ignoring radar, of course). Fire control systems that actually made future target position predictions (though invented prior to WW1) were just coming into general use in navies at the end of WW1 and became the standard in the immediate post-war period. About what point in time did predicting systems come into WW1 flak?

Thanks for the info. I respect your opinion and seriously don't want to offend you, but I have to be honest here. As somebody who's been on both ends of the gun-target line many times, I just cannot at all believe that any professional artilleryman in WW1 honestly believed he could do any damage whatsoever to an airplane with the mere concussion of something as puny as a WW1 flak shell. I mean, modern 81mm mortars bombs contain more explosive, and of newer, more powerful types, than WW1 flak shells of roughly similar diameter, so are rather more concussive. Yet the concussion from these things is very far from lethal to a mere human--only the fragments do any damage beyond ruptured ear drums. And that's with a super-quick groundburst (typcial of mortars) where you take 2x the blast pressure of an airburst (which has the whole sphere to dissipate energy into). WW1 planes, stick and canvas though they were, were MUCH stronger than the human body. Their "fragile" wings could hold up their own weight of a ton or 2, plus at least 1 human, plus mission equipment, AND could continue to do so under several times the force of gravity. WW1 gunners HAD to have known this from all the bloody experience gained in years of trench warfare, so IMHO cannot have been trying to do any damage at all with concussion. Honestly, I find the idea rather laughable. Sorry if I offend. Thus, I'm still convinced that the object of the "box barrage" of WW1 flak was the same as it was ever afterwards: to utterly fill a certain volume of air with lethal shell fragments. If the fragment patterns overlap, you avoid having the target being in the relatively (but not entirely) fragment-free zone close to the shell's pre-burst trajectory. WW1 flak gunners were just let down by the very small size of the effective target area of WW1 aircraft, combined with their speed and the difficulty of zeroing in on them with the few salvos available to them while the plane was in range. Like I said, I know very little about flak fire control. In the USMC of my day, there was no dedicated AAA--we had SAMs and air cover for that. Artillery merely redrew the contour lines on the maps and erased all those pesky red icons penciled in between the blue icons and their objective. Such AAA as we had was personal weapons. In my own case, it involved placing my M249 on the helmet of my A-gunner while he stood in front of me. He grasped the SAW's bipod legs and pulled down to keep the weapon seated on his head, and I squatted behind him, using him as a pole mount, and did the aiming and firing. This 2-man hold of the weapon allowed long bursts at high elevation against targets with low bearing rates--IOW those strafing us. Fortunately, the only times we had to assume this position was in self-defense against possible friendly fire, and the idiot pilots all realized their mistake before anybody got hurt. No enemy aircraft came within threatening distance due to the aforementioned air cover and missile batteries. Shrapnel (fragment) fall-back was a problem during the 1st "Blitz" in WW1, too. But of course, WW2 planes also had relatively small target areas, so you had the same problem. You needed a LOT of fragments to get any really damaging hits on any given airplane in the enemy formation. And you have to remember, this damage from fragments was the exact opposite of a well-aimed burst of direct-fire air-to-air MGs. Instead of putting a dozen or 2 bullets right into the target area, you were spraying scads of fragments and hoping at least 1 of them might find a soft spot. But just like 1 bullet in the engine usually isn't fatal, neither is 1 shell fragment. That's why flak in WW1 and WW2 were both mostly "death of a thousand cuts", rather than immediate kills.

Thanks for the info, Bletchley. I still have some questions, though. First, as an old artilleryman myself, I'll need some more convincing that concussion was the goal of late-WW1 flak. It certainly wasn't originally, nor was it afterwards. Instead, the goal on either side in time was to cause damage by fragments. So I think perhaps there's some confusion over the word "shrapnel". Here's what I know about that.... "Shrapnel" originally meant a specific type of shell, named for its inventor, and used from the early 1800s into WW1. Its purpose was to give field artillery at long range the same devastating antipersonnel power that cannister and grapeshot gave it at short range. It consisted of a light shell body filled with cannister shot ("shrapnel bullets"), which were scattered by a small internal explosive charge. It replaced the much less-effective explosive shell of the time, which was just a hollow iron ball filled with explosive. The reason why shrapnel shells were better than this is because at that time, the only explosive available was the low explosive black powder. Low explosives create a push, so what happened was the shell body would crack into only a few large, slow chunks. Thus, if it exploded in the midst of a squad of troops, perhaps none of them would be hit by a fragment. To potentially hit all of them, you needed a lot of small pieces, and because low explosives won't create that out of the shell body, Shrapnel's solution was to have pre-made small pieces inside the shell body. This was inefficient because the more bullets inside the shell, the less room for explosive, but it was better than the ancient design. What made shrapnel shells obsolete was the invention of high explosives. High explosives have a shattering effect on shell bodies, splintering them into scads of small fragments. Once this was realized, true shrapnel shells becaome obsolete and artillery returned to the original idea of a hollow shell filled with nothing but explosive, the shell body itself serving as the raw material for the lethal projectiles. This is more efficient than true shrapnel because you get more body fragments than you could have had shrapnel bullets, and you could use more (and much more powerful) explosive, so the fragments had a higher initial velocity and therefore a larger lethal radius. This design has continued right down to the present day. WW1 occurred on the cusp of this change because high explosives were very new then. Also, due to the massive build-up of forces prior to the war, and the need for continuous, high-volume production once it started, everybody started with large stocks of true shrapnel shells and these continued in production for some time. However, the high explosive shells were so much more effective that they replaced true shrapnel as the war progressed. Despite this, the word "shrapnel" has remained in use even to the present as synonymous with shell fragments. The practical upshot of all this is discussion, however, is that a large number of small, high-velocity shell fragments are unavoidable when a shell is filled with high explosive. The explosive necessarily creates them. Against infantry, these fragments were deliberately used as the primary kill mechanism and the shells used in exactly the same way as the true shrapnel shells they replaced: timed to burst in the air in front of the enemy, so that his position would be swept by the fragments. It therefore seems to me that flak gunners, now using shells of identical design, would also have been trying to kill airplanes with fragments. After all, they had these fragments available whether they wanted them or not, and they had a much greater casualty radius than the concussion of the shell burst. My second question is, what sort of hardware did the central flak fire control positions have?

The best data I have on the effectiveness of WW1 flak comes from the experiences of the Brit daylight strategic bombers of the IAF. These have bave been studied in great detail so it's possible to say, in most cases, what happened to each plane on each sortie. They were typically under more or less intense Archie fire for their entire time across the lines. In general, flak didn't cause many out-right losses, as in planes going down right then and there from a close burst. It happened, but not very often. However, all the planes ALWAYS sucked up scores of pieces of shrapnel which inflicted a "death of 1000 cuts". Most planes that went down from flak dis so under control with a dead engine or in an attempt to save a badly wounded crewman. If this happened near the lines either in- or out-bound, it was often possible (barring fighters about) for the crippled plane to glide to friendly territory, given how high they were flying. But more likely, they came down in Hunland. Flak damage also disrupted formations, which made losses to interceptors more severe, but fighters didin't always attack. But even when all planes returned safely, it often happened that a squadron would be out of action for several days while all the flak damage was patched up. So the bottom line seems to be, by mid-1918 at least, German flak WAS going to damage you more or less severely if you spent long enough exposed to it, especially if you were in a large formation and not maneuvering much.

I've read a lot of Bill Barnes, all fairly recent reprints, not the originals of course. What I find attractive about those stories is that they're cyberpunk long before that word existed. The hero always had the latest technology projected a decade or so into the future, before his rivals who had to make do with current stuff only a few years into the future compared to the real world. Nothing in these stories lacked a contempoirary point of departure. So Bill's adversaries always had the latest Schneider Trophy planes only with guns, but Bill had another 500 horsepower.

Oops, I only covered 1 of the 3 dimensions in this SWAG. As seen from the target, the bursts should also all be pretty close if not dead on as far as being to port or starboard goes, but should have more variability in terms of being ahead of, behind, or right under the target. From the gunner's POV, the easiest thing to get right would be to the left or right of the target's path, then ahead of or behind the target, and finally at the proper altitude.

I'm very curious as to how tight WW1 flak salvos really were. Anybody got any photos showing it? I don't think I've ever seen one. I don't doubt that WW1 flak fire control hardware could make a battery's shells all burst in practically the same spot in the air. After all, WW1 land and sea fire control could do that. Whether this was on target or not is an entirely different matter--I'm just considering the likelihood of WW1 flak gunners using of tight salvos. So I take it as a given that tight WW1 flak patterns were feasible; my question is, were they desirable? If they weren't desirable, then they wouldn't have been used and flak batteries would have shot looser patterns. In the absence of any hard data, I'm force to speculate on this. I'd appreciate somebody with such data chiming in because this is something I need to know more about. I'm pretty well up on land arty and naval fire control for most of the 20th Century but I my knowledge of flak techniques is quite lacking in comparison. Anyway, WW1 flak gunners were inventing a new science and I'm sure most of the came from a land arty background, a few from naval backgrounds, and all drawing on what they knew of both fields. With that in mind, the WW1 flak situation had elements of both land and sea artillery to consider. From a target vulnerabilty view, it was like land arty shelling infantry advancing across open ground. The target had no armor, cover, or concealment, so you wanted to fill the air around it with shrapnel--forget direct hits. From the naval side, you had a rapidly moving target at long range and unknown actual position. In WW1 naval shooting, getting the shells to splash on the target's bearing (that is, so you could tell whether they were in front of or behind a distant dot on the horizon) was relatively easy. However, airplanes were tiny compared to the broadsides of dreadnoughts (and closer even at high altitude, and moving 3-4x as fast, meaning their bearing rates were right off the naval charts) so this correcting mechanism probably was unavailable to flak gunners. Another thing to consider is, because flak is trying to kill with shrapnel, it needs the shells to burst in the position where the shrapnel has the best chance of doing damage. Due to the conservation of momentum, the center of mass of an exploding shell does not change after the explosion, and that center of mass continues moving forward with the velocity the intact shell had originally. This means that for an airburst shell, the shrapnel pattern is an expanding cone from the point of detonation centered on the extension of the shell's previous flight path. In the flak situation, the shell's trajectory is mostly upwards. This means that the most effective flak bursts sufficiently BELOW the target's altitude that the cone is at its optimum lethal extent AT the target's altitude. The optimum shrapnel spread isn't the maximum casualty radius, however, because the shrapnel pattern is somewhat doughnut-shaped, thicker at the edges than in the middle, because there's more metal on the sides than on the nose of the shell. Thus, if the shellbursts are too far below the target, by the time the shrapnel reaches the target's altitude, the pattern will be a bunch of rings with little chance of hitting anything inside the rings. Given all this, I would expect WW1 flak salvos to have all burst at close to the same altitude, more below the target than above, and with the individual shells spread about 1/2 to 2/3 their effective casualty radius against troops in the open. But that's just a guess. I look forward to hearing of more definitive data.

I know what you mean. I found a bunch of games where you've got a catapult and are trying to knock down toy casltes made of blocks, or build a bridge across a gap (damn engineer degree!) plus that damn Interlocked game that's like all those wooden puzzles that line my shelves. I looked up and 1/2 the day was gone.

Thanks. If there's 1 thing in OFF I cna claim a lot of experience with, it's ATTEMPTING to land with extensive damage :).

I can't decide but I do have a top-5 in no particular order, and 3 of them are groups Peter Sellers Rodney Dangerfield Laurel and Hardie The Stooges The Pythons

Well, BHAH obviously means "Bullethead's Addictive Habit". So P4 could be something like "BHNA" (Bullethead's New Addiction)

Live, occasionally, usually not. Walk away, not yet, but I'm sure I'll see it someday. Damn, that gives me flashbacks. I saw a very similar thing about 15 years ago on I-35W southbound between Dallas and Hillsboro. A guy came flying by me, got in the median, and went straight into an overpass column. Hut he never got airborne, hit it head-on, and stuck there. The front and rear bumpers of his car were nearly touching, the doors were wrapped around the column. I stopped, got out, and was in the process of saying "Dammmnnnnn.........." when the pursuing cop arrived and told me to move along. Needless to say, that guy was sponged up.

This one's hilarious: http://www.officegamespot.com/gunblood.htm

I recall reading something like that, too. But in the fire service, I've seen people killed on bikes and skateboards that were only doing about 10mph--they landed on their heads. I've seen people killed in 20mph fenderbenders. One was an unrestrained infant bounced from mother's arms off the dashboard, the other just happened to have his neck jerked the wrong way. But OTOH, I've seen people walk away from 80mph wrecks that utterly destroyed their cars. Thus, I don't particularly mind when I die in a landing accident in OFF. It could happen and the goal is to avoid having any part of the plane touch the ground except the wheels. If you can do that, then you don't have to worry about dying in a minor accident

Very interesting. I'd never heard of this thing, nor of a monoplane with an "upper wing" gun mount. I have a question, though. I recently watched a vid of a real Pup with a real le Rhone being started up. One of the steps in the process was taking a large syringe thingy and priming each cylinder with a shot of fuel prior to swinging the prop. I wonder how they managed that task on this plane with its fancy grille.

Nope, it's still copyrighted. Damn Sonny Bono! For those interested, here's a table showing the copyright status of books under US law, depending on when they where published and whether or not they were renewed under the pre-Bono system. http://www.copyrightguru.com/copyright_duration_table.html

With a damaged plane, I find it best to divide my thinking about landing into 3 distinct phases: approach, touchdown, and rollout. Each presents different problems and what works in 1 phase will often kill you in another, so you have to change tactics a couple times during the whole process. The goal in the approach phase is to regain and/or maintain control of the plane, by whatever means necessary, so that you have some hope of putting it down in the attitude you want. It all depends on what the airplane's willing to do at this point, and you might have to compromise on landing location to get the proper attitude. If you can't land in the proper attitude, you're going to crash, it's that simple, so make sure of that before you worry about trees and trenches on the landing ground. Those are problems for Phase 3. Be aware that during the approach, your ability to control the plane is often dependent on speed. It often happens that a plane that can be held level at 80 knots will roll uncontrollably at 50 knots. So if you have the altitude available, it's a good idea to test the plane's low-speed handling before committing to a landing. Try a practice landing on top of a cloud or at least on some fixed point on your altimeter. Be sure to come off the rudder entirely just before you "land", to see what happens then (see below). This could show you that you're pretty well screwed but at least you'll know what to expect and can do your best to counter it when it counts. Also, what the plane does in this test can influence your choice of landing location, assuming you have sufficient control to pick your spot. A number of times, I've deliberately landed on slopes so the ground would be more parallel to what the attitude the plane wanted to assume at low speed. Also, planes often turn towards the damaged side during rollout, so if possible set up your approach so you'll have plenty of room on that side. The actual touchdown is just that--the instant of touching down. There are 2 key points to this. First off, of course, your vertical speed has to be pretty low or you'll crash. Second is, you have to be moving straight ahead. If you have yaw when you hit the ground, there's a good chance your wheels (if you still have them) will dig in and trip you, or break off, which usually isn't much fun, either. Thus, if you've been standing on the rudder to maintain control during the approach, you have to come off it just before you hit the ground (which is why you want to see what happens when you do so during your practice landing above). You don't always have to come all the way off, just ease off as you get close to the ground, so the plane slowly straightens out just as you touch. Also note that by this point in the game, you're just focused on setting down at the proper attitude (straight ahead, as level as possible) with the proper sink rate. The time for worrying about where you're landing and which direction you're pointing is over. You had your chance at those things during your approach. And this is true for ALL landings, whether you're damaged or not. OK, now you're on the ground rolling along probably a bit faster than your stall speed, due to the need for excess speed to retain control during the approach. This is the most dangerous phase because you're fast enough that aerodynamic forces can still roll or yaw you over, but you're often too slow to have enough control authority to prevent this entirely. This is why it's sometimes a good idea to land across sloping ground. Just remember, don't be surprised if you die in this phase. No matter how far you had to limp home to get here, the mere fact that you did it shows that part of the process wasn't very hard. If you crash before touchdown, it shows that the task was impossible to begin with. For this reason, I tend to set down immediately on the 1st friendly ground I come to, even if I could fly all the way home. I'd rather get it over with than waste time flying 20 miles only to die anyway Anyway, during your approach, aerodynamic forces were your friends because they kept you in the air and gave you control. During the rollout, though, they're enemies. Thus, the key objective during the rollout is to slow down enough to eliminate them. The problem is, due to the excess speed you had to maintain to keep control, your tailskid is still well off the ground at this point, and you have enough speed that if you pull back much on the stick, you'll leave the ground and stall instead of putting the tail on the ground. And while you're struggling with this, your aileron authority especially is going away and any unequal lift from damage is trying to roll you over. Thus, rollout in a damaged plane is often a real rodeo ride. Successful outcomes depend largely on what plane you're in (some have better survival instincts than others) and the extent of the damage. There are, however, a few things you can do to help. They don't always work--sometimes you're just screwed--but I've had fair success with them. What I find works best is a combination of small to moderate amounts of rudder TOWARD my damaged side combined with slowly increasing backpressure on the stick. When you're on the ground, rudder tends to create a rolling force away from the turn, just like how cars and boats lean to the outisde of turns. This is often the only way to keep the plane rightside up, but it does make your landing run into an arc, so plan for this in advance and land with plenty of room on that side. Just don't overdo it and stick the outboard wingtip in the ground, or snap your wheels off. Anyway, the turn causes some skidding which helps slow you down as well as keep you level. Meanwhile, the backpressure on the stick increases your angle of attack, which increases drag, which slows you down. You have to do this very slowly and gently, though, to prevent going back up in the air while you've still got enough speed for that. Eventually, you'll get the tailskid on the ground. Congratulations! Once your tail's down, you've pretty much got it made. You're now slow enough that aerodynamic forces from damaged parts are no longer a factor and you can finish your rollout as with a normal landing. Of course, you might now be heading straight for a tree, but you should have thought of that during your approach Hmmm, this is an old book. It should now be public domain. Strange that I can't find a free PDF of it, but I haven't yet looked all that hard.

As a fellow game developer, I can sympathize. Eek! Having such a thing happen is my worst nightmare

Drinks to Hauksbee