Bullethead

Yup, you can stall from using rudder. A moderate amount of rudder creates yaw, which increases drag. If you're already close to stall speed, this can put you over the edge. Less common but more dangerous is the sudden application of a lot of rudder, causing a rapid yaw. This causes unequal lift and will roll you over due to the outboard wing speeding up and the inboard wing slowing down during the yaw. If you're already close to stall speed, the inboard wing can actually stall, resulting in a snaproll instead of a barrel roll. Neither is a good thing to do on final approach, especially because by then you don't have much aileron authority to stop the roll. But if you're out of speed and have some altitude, the stomp-induced snaproll can be a useful evasive tactic.

So how exactly did you come acropper? What was the sequenceof events? Just saying you died unexpectedly without giving the circumstances says nothing. I mean, this is a wager, and of alcohol. Serious issues like these require equally serious attention to detail . And speaking of details, you wagered Foster's. While I admit that lager from Oz is better than from most other places, lager is still small change to any ale. The only lager worthy of wagering on is EKU 28 Kulminator Urtyp Hell, the only beer I've ever met that needs a beer chaser. So I'll put that up on my side I'm with Uncle Al on this sort of thing. Call in the "Adjustment Bureau" and delete the pilot. For instance, there's a caveat I should have attached to my above statement about never living or dying unexpectedly. In the DH5, it seems impossible to die in any sort of crash. But after testing this early on in a vertical dive from 15,000 feet, I'm no longer surprised by it, so this doesn't count

OFF: Just Another Way to Die OFF: Hole in the Sky OFF: Expect no Mercy OFF: Heaven's on Fire OFF: Flight of Icarus OFF: Take no Prisoners OFF: War Pigs OFF: The Crown and the Ring OFF: Down with the Sickenss

The 3D model viewer thingy hasn't worked for me in a long time, since like HitR came out, so I can't make much sense out of the coordinates shown in AirWrench. But I have this memory that the 3D viewer used to show contact points, and I don't recall seeing any on the top wings. In any case, the top wings act like they don't have contact points, for whatever reason, as shown by the pics above. I dunno. The same sort of thing has happened to me in just about every plane. NOTE: Just to be sure we're all on the same page here, I don't recall ever dying UNEXPECTEDLY from merely a "rough landing" in an intact plane. I land perfectly almost all the time, even when I'm drunk, because WW1 planes all land themselves. Just make sure you're pointing into the wind and let the plane glide on down. Nothing to it. Very occasionally, however, I'm too drunk sit up straight and as I wobble in my chair, I wobble my joystick. This usually results in a cartwheeling crash and I'm not surprised at all when this kills me. It's an extremely rare occasion that I do something in between, the "rough landing" where I lightly drag a wingtip or some such faux pas. This is usually caused by some real world distraction at the critical moment, or my joystick acting up. But while I might leave part of a wing on the runway, the "crash" was at such low speed that it shouldn't have killed me, and as far as I can remember, it never has. Nor can I say I've ever really be surprised to die when landing with battle damage. In the vast majority of cases, my ability to control of the plane in flight before landing depends entirely on keeping it at fairly high speed, so I have enough aileron and rudder authority to counteract the unequal lift from damaged or missing wing parts. As such, I almost always touch down very gently in the vertical direction but at a much higher horizontal speed than with an undamaged landing. And the problem is, in most planes (although this varies), control authority goes away before the effects of unequal lift, so a rollover of some extent (perhaps limited only to severe yawing towards the damaged side) is inevitable. If the plane rolls over, there's nothing to stop it (as shown in my pics above). In such cases, I'm not surprised because I attribute my death to the excess forward speed I had to maintain to even get that far. IOW, even though the fatal roll is very slow, I'm still tearing along the ground at about 50 knots. I defy anybody to take that on the forehead and survive. I therefore suggest that if you're thinking you're dying from "minor" "rough landings", next time take a close look at your ASI. I'll bet a 6-pack that you're going faster than you think.

OFF: Storming Heaven OFF: Burning the Sky OFF: Blood-Red Skies OFF: Breaking the Wind

But what of Nelson, for example?

I rather thought that in that day and age, marital fidelity was much the exception as opposed to the rule. Everybody had mistresses and lovers and there was no shame about it. Marriages were just for political/financial convenience and to have legitimate children to inherit the acquired swag. As such, nobody expected there to be any love between spouses, nor did anybody expect spouses to stay faithful in loveless marriages. This was the height of the Age of Reason, before the curse of Victorianism set in.

Well, the answer to that is, don't get shot up . It's way better to lose just a tip than the whole wing. With the tip missing, although it usually takes the contact point with it, the unequal lift isn't as bad as if the whole wing is gone, so you're less likely to roll over. With sufficient rudder, you can keep the bird more or less level but your landing rollout will describe a 90^ arc toward the damaged wing, so touch down with a lot of room on that side. Best of luck, and don't drink and fly

I think the reason for this is a function of what "contact points" remain on the plane as a result of damage either before or during the landing. Contact points are attached to various extremeties of the 3D plane model and are what keep it cause it to interact with the surface of the ground. Those on the bottoms of the wheels and tailskid are what make the plane sit correctly on the ground and do proper landings and takeoffs. There are others on the wingtips (usually lower wing only), the top of the rudder, the nose, and (in most cases) on top of the pilot's head. These trigger damage because these parts of the plane shouldn't normally touch the ground. A part of the plane that does NOT have a contact point will go straight through the ground without any effect. Death in a bad landing (as opposed to a vertical diving crash) is apparently caused by the pilot's contact point hitting the ground. There might be some parameters attached to this, such as a range of speeds that causes injury and anything above that death, and it might also take into account whether you have a parachute open or not. Or maybe there's nothing at all, and if this contact point touches, it's game over. I just don't know. However, the key to survival is keeping the pilot's head off the ground. This, in turn, depends entirely on what happens to the other contact points. If they stop the plane's penetration of the ground in that direction, then they will keep the pilot from contacting the ground. Contact points attached to flimsy structures like the tail and wingtips apparently disappear when that part of the plane is shot or broken off. Thus, the fate of the surrounding structure directly impacts pilot survival. For this reason, flipping over your nose is less dangerous than dragging a wingtip. If the center section of the upper wing stays intact, it'll keep your head off the ground and you'll usually live, unless the speed was too high by itself. But in a rollover, once the wing contact point(s) is/are gone, there's nothing (at least as far as internal game mechanics are concerned) between you and the ground. The attached pics show all this in operation. On this flight, while barnstorming my home drome on return from a successful sortie, I left my lower left wing in a treetop. As long as my speed was high enough, I had sufficient aileron authority to keep her level so I picked out a nice field ahead and made a fast landing. The 1st pic shows that I came down in perfect 2-pointer on smooth ground. However, as my speed decreased while rolling on the ground, my aileron authority decreased as well, so that the plane started rolling over to the left under its unequal lift. The 2nd pic shows what happened next. With the lower left wing's contact point missing, and the upper left wing not having one to begin with, the upper wing just sliced through the ground without interacting with it at all. It took no damage and did nothing to stop the airplane rolling over. The side of the fuselage and the left horizontal tail tip (also without contact points) followed it through the ground. Eventually, the plane had rolled a bit more than 90^ when my head hit the ground and killed me. The nose contact point never made contact due to the angle of the roll causing my protruding head to reach the ground first. I suppose I might have given myself a better chance if I'd kicked hard LEFT rudder into the roll, to raise me as far as possible off the ground and try to make the nose contact point hit next. That might have bounced me back onto my wheels or it might have killed me from crash impact. But just rolling over like this is usually fatal. This is why dragging a wingtip on landing can kill you. If you break the lower wingtip off, AND you're still moving fast enough for the remaining wings to generate significant aerodynamic forces, then you will continue rolling in that direction until your head hits the ground. From my tinkering with making a new plane model, I learned that the CFS3 engine has a limited number of contact points per plane. And because it was designed for WW2 monoplanes, it's hard if not impossible to add contact points to the upper wing or other parts of the plane and still have enough to cover the ones you really need. Thus, I don't think there's a way to solve this problem other than to make better landings

Be careful playing with your pilot's text files. Doing it too much tends to cause problems down the road and eventually make that pilot unplayable.

FWIW, I've been shelled quite a lot in real life and I think the OFF flak bursts are about right on the shock and noise level. This is because most of them are MUCH further away than they seem to be. The diameter of the burst clouds is actually a bit larger than the wingspan of a plane. Thus, if you can see the whole cloud between your wings, it's several hundred yards away. From that distance, you wouldn't feel much if any blast, especially from a relatively small shell such as used for WW1 flak. Now, if you're unlucky enough to have one burst close to you, it shakes the bejeezus out of you, although this is often hard to tell because your flight often ends immediately thereafter . On the sound of flak, a CRUMP is definitely not realistic. When shells hit the ground, they go CRUMP. It's fairly low frequency (although this depends on the size of the shell) and has noticeable (although rather less than 1 second) duration. When they burst in the air like flak, they go BANG. This is a painfully sharp, nearly instantaneous, high frequency noise that you more replay in your head afterwards than actually perceive at the time. Actually, I suppose a BANG is more appropriate for HE-filled German flak. The blackpowder-filled shrapnel used by the Entente (hence the white smoke) would probably go more BOOM than BANG, but I've never had the honor of being under its fire so don't know from personal experience. Now, put this into the overall sound environment.... Down on the ground, you've got thousands of very big guns constantly firing large, ground-bursting shells. This provides a huge amount of bass which retains its energy for miles. Compared to this, you've got the shells of 4 small guns making a little bit of treble, which loses its energy rapidly with distance and usually starts hundreds of yards away. You shouldn't hear much out of this unless the small shells are dangerously close. Think of it like this.... Some jerk with a massive subwhoofer in his car is blasting out hip-hop from 2 blocks away. Even at this distance, it's rattling the fillings in your teeth and making it impossible to hear the heated argument going on right across the street from you, which you'd easily be able to hear in the absence of the subwhoofer. Exactly! That's my main problem with head bobbing in games. You don't notice it in real life, even if it is going on, because of the image processing going on in your head. This image processing is at least partly the result of your head movements registering in your inner ear and your brain taking that into account when it displays the raw image data from your eyes. Thus, most of the movement is filtered out of what you finally perceive. Therefore, imposing head movement anyway is not realistic. It's like reaching in and disconnecting parts of your brain. If anybody doesn't believe that your brain is constantly "Photoshopping" what you see, even when you're sitting still, try this experiment... You actually have a blind spot in each eye, a little outboard of center, where the optic nerve plugs into the back. But you don't realize it because your brain covers it up by copying and pasting part of the adjacent background image over it. To see this happen, close your left eye and stare with the right at some spot on the wall across from you. Now hold up your right index finger at arm's length and line its tip up with the spot on the wall you're looking at. Keeping your right eye fixed on the spot on the wall, slowly move your finger horizontally to the right. When it gets between 10-20^ out of line with the spot on the wall, the tip of your finger will vanish. In your peripheral vision, you'll still see your arm and the lower part of your finger, but the top part will be gone and you'll just see the same distant background as is in that area of view. That's where your optic nerve blindspot is being "Photoshopped". Try it again with your left eye and left finger moving to the left.

Just to be a contrarian, I hate "head bob" because no game in my experience has ever come close to getting it right. It's always way too exaggerated and you can't tense up your neck muscles to stop or at least minimize it like you can in real life. It's like you're hopelessly drunk and shouldn't be flying (or running, or even standing still in FPS games). And trust me, when I'm gaming, I'm often drunk enough to be doing my own head bobbing, thank you very much. So IMHO it's a ridiculous feature that does nothing but consume FPS for no good purpose. I always, always turn off if the option is available, because having it on is less realistic than not having it. But I must agree that CFS3 (and therefore, sadly, OFF) has one of the absolute worst default view systems ever put into a sim. The key-based views are totally inadequate and largely impossible to program onto a stick. IOW, a total non-starter. And the padlock system, like ALL padlock systems, past, present, and future, totally sucks. I'm not picking on CFS3/OFF's padlock in particular here--they all should be encased in concrete and dropped into the Challenger Deep. Anyway, when I 1st got OFF, I was hugely disappointed because I found the game totally unplayable with its horrid built-in view systems. So, after a month or so of trying to teach myself to use the default systems and getting nowhere, I broke down and bought TIR. Best thing I ever did in my sim career. TIR is SO much better than any other view system in all respects that I now won't buy a sim that doesn't support it and wish all games used it. And so, I greatly enjoy OFF now. If the devs do 1 thing in P4, I hope it's scrapping the CFS3 view system and putting in the standard numpad system instead. That way, folks won't have to have TIR to enjoy the game.

Was there anything mind-altering in the coffee or smoke?

Oh yes. See, once upon a time I bombed Dover harbor, hitting purely military targets at the docks. I doubt I even broke a window in the town itself. But in retaliation, the evil Englanders, led by Lou, rained indescriminate destruction on civilians in Berlin.

Thanks for the info, Olham. Looks like a great site. I made a black Fee once, for Lou after he bombed Berlin. It's from later in the war when the roundels lacked the white ring, though.

Cell phone coverage is as spotty hereabouts as broadband. And even if it worked better, it's damnably expensive to use it as your ISP. I could tell you many horror stories of people in this region who called 911 one their cell phones and got a completely different jurisdiction than they were in, but which (due to an extraordinary lack of imagination amongst the locals) had roads of the same name as where the caller was having his problem. Thus, the emergency responders in the wrong jurisdiction went out on a wild goose chase while the problem for the caller got worse and worse before anybody realized the mistake.

BTW, on the subject of campaign and AI improvements, what are the odds of getting a command to put your flight into a Lufbery Circle?

Good luck in your new digs :). Nobody with any sense wants to live in a city. I'm totally with you on the broadband access, though. Where would we be without porn? Where I live, broadband's a real problem. Over the years, I've been repeatedly promised both DSL and cable but those have continued to be put off or canceled indefinitely. The current thing in the process of not happening is U-Verse. A few months ago they ran the cable by right in front of my house but so far haven't done anything else. Thus, my only option is satellite, which isn't optimal. There are usage limits, a built-in 3-second lag that utterly prevents MP gaming, it isn't terribly fast to begin with, and it doesn't work on rainy days (which means the drought has had 1 benefit). And in your case, your high latitude might be another factor, especially in the winter.

Oh, I agree with you. There is some humor in this whole thing. But it seems to me a concerted effort could exterminate the things. After all, it worked on passenger pidgeons and buffalo.

It's no laughing matter. In rivers like that, there are NO other fish left and recreational boating is pretty much over with. No waterskiing, no jetskiing, at risk of death. Several folks have been killed trying by getting a big carp upside the head. Plus of course fishing is pointless. Nothing to fish for and no need of tackle with these damn carp. The really scary part is that the damn things are within a couple miles of getting into the Great Lakes via canals and there's a big effort being mounted to keep them out, but it probably won't work. Once they get there, they're expected to wipe out the native fisheries as they did in the rivers. Over here, few want to eat carp so they don't even have much human predation. There are some locally organized carp roundups but those only happen periodically on a small, scattered scale. The main use of the things is to be ground up as fish meal but there's no money in it because the supply is so abundant, so nobody does it for a living. And nobody wants to just throw them on the bank due to the stench that would cause. Thus, they've pretty much taken over with no challengers. What I find strange is that while they started in Arkansas, they went north into colder water. We don't have them (thank the Dark Gods) down here on the bayou. I guess we have alligators and gars to thank for that.

Well, the Medieval church wasn't the nonviolent thing it's tried to be come since. Prelates were temporal rulers, led armies, manipulated politics, conspired in assassinations, etc. Thus, to lay rulers, neither churches nor churchmen were any different than their own castles or themselves. I never had such books when I was little. Before I could read and my Dad read me bedtime stories, he always picked a real history book as serious as those we all read today. His favorite subject was WW2 naval battles, being as he was a veteran of that, but we also did WW1 pilot memoirs, archaeology, and ancient history. By the time I was 6, I could give a blow-by-blow of the Battle of Midway and point out all the key points that caused the result. I also knew about attacking 2-seaters from under the tail from having heard Biddle's stories from Fighting Airman. Thus, by the time I could read for myself, I went straight into adult history books myself. I honestly had no use at all for fiction and literature, apart from required reading in school, until I got into high school and learned of such authors as Voltair, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Twain, plus developed a taste for Shakespeare.

Have you filled the hole in yet? That can get you, too. And the longer the hole stays open, the less stable it gets... Stand behind the spoil pile and throw dirt from maximum range. If you have to get close to the edge (which you shouldn't, put down plywood sheets to spread your weight. And while having a cell phone is nice, it won't help you if your arms are pinned so it's best to have somebody standing by at a safe distance ;). Well, I think you've learned from this one I'll tell you a story.... When my Grandma died about 30 years ago, before I knew anything about the dangers of trenches, I got caught in a collapse. I was at the foot on the left side of the coffin and the dirt was piled right at the grave's edge on that side, so the 2 guys ahead of me had to clamber over it. We got the coffin lined up and were in the process of lowering it onto the straps when my side of the grave collapsed. It started with me and spread towards the head, so the middle pallbearer next also went in but the guy at the front managed to jump clear. And of course all the spoil, now robbed of support, cascaded into the grave on top of us. This all happened in a flash. I suddenly found myself in a sitting position, eye-level with the bottom of the coffin and my legs across the grave under it, as dirt poured down over my shoulders. Because we'd dropped the coffin about 6" onto the straps, it was bouncing badly and I could hear Grandma rattling around in it. My biggest fear was that it would dislodge the strap rails and fall on my legs so I started struggling to free myself. Fortunately for me, the funeral director was right behind me and had a superhuman adrenaline rush. He grabbed me under the arms and literally threw me out of the hole onto the remains of still-collapsing spoil pile. I had to run in place to keep from going back in but at least I was out. Me, the guy at the head of the coffin, and the funeral directon now worked to free the middle pallbearer. This was complicated because he was a big, fat guy and his widest part was wedged under the coffin. Plus of course, the collapse was continuing. But somehow, after what seemed like an eternity but was probably only 15 seconds or so, we got him out and all of us made it to the head of the grave where we were supposed to stand by the preacher. At this point, we all felt pretty miserable for screwing up the solemn occasion. We were covered in mud, the grave was about 3/4 filled in, the flowers had fallen off the coffin and been trampled down into the mud, and Grandma was probably now face down inside the box. I wanted to run and hide. But when I slowly lifted my gaze to the congretation that had followed us to the grave, I could see they were all struggling to keep from laughing out loud. Even the preacher had trouble getting started with his lines. In fact, afterwards everybody said it was the most entertaining funeral they'd ever been to, or that they didn't know the church was doing a "bury 1, get 2 free" deal. Just goes to show, NOBODY there recognized the dangers there, nor appreciated how close we came to being there permanently. So don't feel bad for not knowing about trench safety beforehand. Since then, I've made it a point at all funerals I've been to to check out the grave ahead of time and have things made safer if necessary. And it is something of a distinction to say I've been buried and risen from the grave

I enjoyed your story (especially because it was you down in the mud and not me) However, as a trench rescue specialist, I have some safety concerns should you ever have to do this sort of thing again. From your description, it appears that you didn't use any shoring on the trench walls, so they were free to collapse on you. And their tendency to do so was aggravated by the long-term wetness of the ground from the leak and by piling the dirt close to the edge of the hole. Since you lived, I guess the air at the bottom wasn't too bad, but dirt can easily give off enough of both toxic and oxygen-excluding gases to put you down. Anyway, no harm done, and you dodged a bullet you never knew was fired at you. But do be more careful next time. If my picture of your trench is correct, it was an extremely dangerous place and you're lucky to be here. Sure, folks get away with similar things all the time, but there isn't much of a safety margin. And remember, "trench rescue" is a misnomer. It really should be "trench recovery" because the odds of surviving a collapse are very slim, and of course there's the possibility of bad air even if the trench stays up. So before next time, read up on the safety techniques

Well, he wasn't man enough to wrestle a bull, which is of course well within the powers of most female Scots . The story goes that about the time of Bannockburn, the Bruce was riding along when he was charged by a bull and would have been killed had not one of my scumbag Borderer ancestors, William of Rule, been on hand and tackled the beast. The grateful sovereign dubbed him Lord Turnbull and gave him lands, thus creating Clan Turnbull, to the subsequent woe of folks on both sides of the Border and across the seas. I suppose Auld Willy was glad of the gift, but no doubt wondered why the Bruce couldn't have done the same himself

I wouldn't advise trying. As it happens, I can prove I'm descended from the De Clair family who built Caerphilly Castle down in SE Wales. When I went there, I had my pedigree in my pocket, and I pounded my walking stick on the drawbridge and yelled, "Open the gates, the lord has returned!" And do you know those bastards of the National Trust tried to stick me with 1000 years of back taxes?!?!?!?!?! So we compromised and they just let me in for free if I promised not to raise an army and march on London