Bullethead

The Bleriot Collection of the MDI also contains a number of freaks. It seems that being the 1st to fly across the Channel gave Bleriot a taste for celebrity. Despite having updated versions of his famous monoplane in widespread use at the start of the war, he wasn't content. And no generic scout or 2-seater would do, either. Fortunately, the French Air Force wanted a heavy bomber, so Bleriot devoted himself unsuccessfully to this project for the remainder of the war, producing a large number of huge, expensive freaks that did nothing but kill test pilots. The Bleriot 67 was his first attempt, built in 1916. The most amazing thing about this beast was that its 4x 100hp Gnomes could get it off the ground at all. Unsurprisingly, its performance fell far short of specifications and it ultimately crashed. Undeterred, Bleriot built a slightly larger version (the Bleriot 71) in 1917, with 4x 220hp Hissos, but it also proved to have inadequate peformance and lost the competition to Farman and Caudron products (which themselves ultimately proved unsuccessful). This plane also crashed, although this was due to avoiding a collision during landing approach. With the failure of the Farman and Caudron bombers, Bleriot tried again in 1918 with the Bleriot 73, with 4x 300hp Hissos. This machine was the least lovely of the lot. It crashed on its 1st flight due to a gust of wind blowing off the landing path, which speaks volumes for its lack of power and responsiveness, and huge amount of drag. A modified 2nd prototype was begun but mercifully cancelled at the end of the war. The final member of this ill-starred family was the Bleriot 74. This 1919 project put the surplus wings of the 2nd Bleriot 73 on a grossly fat, tuna-shaped fuselage that nearly filled the whole gap between the wings. This was intended as an airliner. Luckily for the air travel industry, this machine revealed a fatal weakness in the tail during testing, so only managed to kill one person instead of its intended 56 passengers.

Ah yes, the horrifically ugly Breguets. But despite their lack of appeal, I have to respect them not only for their advanced features (however chaotically assembled) and their important operational work. These things were mostly made of metal (including their props), had true tricycle landing gear (not just a nose-over preventer), variable incidence wings (which functioned as flaps), and fully flying tail surfaces. That is, instead of separate rudder and elevators, the entire tail unit pivoted on a U-joint at the end of the fuselage proper. Plus, a plane like this arguably saved France (or conversely, is responsible for the whole 4 years of stalemate). IIRC, Mssr. Breguet himself flew a Br.IV on a recon mission in August 1914, and it was he who spotted the gap between the German armies which the "taxicabs of Paris" subsequently exploited. Still, looking at this machine makes me almost turn to stone

Also in the Dual Monarchy collection are these 2 beasts from Lloyd. The single-engined machine is the 40.05, while the bomber is the 40.08. Lloyd seems to have been adamantly opposed to allowing the pilot to see ahead. While this was a common feature of its designs, these 2 examples carried this feature to its extremes. The 40.05 was built in the days before synchronization, which didn't come to the Dual Monarchy until 1917. Lloyds solution was to raise the upper wing so that the observer, enclosed in the nose compartment, had a 360^ field of fire over the top of the prop. To do his observing job, the observer relied on windoews in the side of the nose. The pilot sat in the skinny part of the fuselage immediately behind the observer's fairing. I got this picture from Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft of World War One, by Grosz, Haddow, and Schiemer. I liked their caption so much I left it on the pic here. They also supplied the caption in the pic above of the Aviatik 30.17. The 40.08 was an attempt to duplicate the Caproni bombers that were then raiding the Dual Monarchy. The specification demanded copying the basic configuration of a 3-engined plane with 1 central pusher and 2 tractor engines on tail booms. Being thus constrained, Lloyd had to find other ways of expressing its creativity and this was the result. Despite being ahead of the tractor props, the nose gun was still on a raised turret to keep the pilot from seeing ahead. Lloyd went even further this time, however, by putting the pilot between the upper 2 wings and tail booms, so he couldn't see up, down, or sideways, either. I suppose they grudgingly put the tail assembly below the fuselage at Flars' insistence that the pilot at least had to be able to see backwards. Then, of course, the whole contraption had to mounted on exceptionally tall landing gear to make room for the vertical bomb bay beneath the pilot. In this pic, the machine is undergoing engine testing, hence the tail is up on jacks. The tail was supposed to be on the ground, but as you might expect, it didn't stay there when the machine was trying to move. In fact, after nosing over a number of times during taxi tests, the machine was scrapped.

This is the best reason to have manual campaign time advance. Whenever I get a scramble mission, I just advance time instead of flying it. The mission type is unrealistic and the outcome is never pretty. Any sane pilot would stay in a slit trench until the attack was over.

Ah yes, another example from the WW1 Aviation Collection at the 'Museum of Diseased Imaginings". We should start a thread where we post up pics of such things.

:rofl: On a related note, I'm building my next house out of sticker bushes, because they're indestructible. If you burn the underbrush out of the woods, the thorny vines survive. And they're thicker, stronger, and thornier than they were before the fire. Places you could walk through easily before become something WW1 trenchlines would have been proud of.

Bows are for girly-men. Real men use atlatls

I blame my upbringing. See, my 1st exposure to a gaming community was DOS Air Warrior back in the early 90s. Before then, I'd been avidly simming but that was before the internet really existed so it was all by my lonesome. Anyway, DOS AW cost like $5/hour to play (the game fee itself plus the exhorbitant rates charged by ISPs in those days), which was at that time considered cheap by the vets because a few years before I got into it, it had been like $8/hour. And this was in early-90s dollars, which were worth about 3x what they are now. IOW, it was nearly as expensive as a drug addiction. As a result of the cost, it was considered extremely bad form to be anything but a berserker. Get in there, fight, and die. Even if you were an expert, you didn't want to waste a dollar or 2 flying all the way back home from where the fight was. Thus, when you killed everybody in the vicinity and were a bit low on ammo, you'd just split-S into the ground and get a new ride. Folks only RTB'd for smack value, like if they had a string of scalps from worthy adversaries or people they particularly hated. Remember, this was the early 90s so conversations were usually uncensored. So in such cases, you'd talk smack on the general channel all the way home and then in the forum later that night. Otherwise, you'd stick around and give the guy a chance to avenge himself. Naturally, this bred egos. As a result, it was also considered extremely bad form to bail from a fatally damaged plane. That was an admission of inferiority, you see. Proper AW pilots had the attitude that they could beat anybody with 1 wing tied behind the backs. Expected behavior was to scream out the uncensored version of "Curse you, Red Baron!" and swearing eternal vengeance, all the way down. Thus, those rare noobs who bailed were always shot in their chutes. Even guys on their own side would do this, to teach them proper manners. I doubt there will ever be a sharktank like the DOS AW community. But that's where I formed my simming attitudes, so I treat the AI planes in the campaign as I treated real people back then, and expect the same from them in return

I admit to being a complete butcher. I show no mercy whatsoever if I'm able to continue the fight, even strafing force-landed planes. If they'd wanted to live, they shouldn't have messed with me. Perhaps what makes me more evil than others is that I do this mostly for my own selfish purposes. First, I want to make sure I and not a wingman get credit for the kill. Second, I like to take screenshots of my plane close to the shattered wreck of one of my victims. For this latter purpose, finishing off unresisting cripples is ideal, especially if you can get them to flame up . Also, nothing annoys me more than after a long and arduous fight, when I've finally gotten my Fee saddled up on an Albatros and my gunner has put several good bursts into him, for the cowardly foe to scamper away from my slow bus. :fu2: Thus, when I fly something faster, I make sure none escape.

One thing to remember is that WW1 airforces all had about 3 times more 2-seaters than they had scouts. As such, the vast majority of 2-seaters flew around unescorted except by other members of their own squadrons. The relatively few scouts available mostly flew "offensive patrols" intended to keep Germans out of a given area of sky for a while so the 2-seaters could work, instead of true escort missions. And of course the Entente mostly flew across the lines while the Germans mostly didn't. So, German scouts were about 3 times more likely to meet Entente 2-seaters than scouts, and most of these were unescorted and over German territory. Periodically, a flight of Entente scouts would wander by, but they couldn't be everywhere at once. Thus, all the German scouts had to do was swoop the 2-seaters in between the enemy scout formations. Or, if the Entente scouts spotted a Jasta and went chasing off after it, another Jasta was often placed to exploit the gap in the patrol screen. On top of this, for much of the war the performance of Entente 2-seaters pretty much sucked. Quirks, Fees, Harry Tates, ARs, Caudrons, Farmans, etc., are all pretty much known as flying coffins due to their low speeds, low ceilings, and lack of maneuverability. Thus, besides being easy to find flying around on their own, Entente 2-seaters were relatively easy to knock down, too. IOW, the Germans were in a target-rich environment. It's no wonder they shot down more 2-seaters than scouts, whether that was their main mission or not. German 2-seaters, OTOH, were in general rather good machines with relatively high performance. Their photo planes flew so high and so fast that they were very hard to catch, their bombers usually flew at night, and their arty spotters usually stayed behind their own lines where they were relatively hard to reach. Entente scout pilots were thus unlikely to meet any 2-seaters but the arty spotters, and those would often run back deeper into Hunland if they saw the scouts coming, forcing the Entente scouts either to let them go or chase them far off their assigned patrol station. The mission of the Entente scouts, after all, was to keep German scouts out of a given patrol area. Thus, despite there being more German 2-seaters, Entente scouts were much more likely to engage German scouts.

I'm with Olham--I just use QC for testing. I have a stable of test pilots, 1 for each nationality, who do nothing but fly in QC. My campaign pilots do nothing but fly in the campaign. I only use QC for the following purposes: Getting the feel of an airplane I haven't flown much, if at all, or haven't flown in a long time. In this case, I just fly around by myself doing climbs, dives, turns, stalls, and various aerobatics to find out what its limits are. I also sometimes strafe ground objects to determine which cockpit doodad to use as a gunsight, but I never do real combat. Checking my work on a new skin I'm making.

:rofl: :rofl: Gawd, that brings up lots of happy memories. One of the main reasons I got into firefighting was so I could laugh at such dumbasses . When I have to go extricate them from such things, I usually write up the report afterwards along these lines: "Upon arrival, found some dumbass in (insert idiotic, self-inflicted circumstance here). Extricated dumbass using (whatever appropriate tool) and assisted EMS loading dumbass in ambulance." This used to infuriate my old chief but my new boss doesn't seem to care. The best part is, these cases sometimes go to court because the dumbass tries to sue whoever made whatever it was he shouldn't have been messing with. Having such a report read out in court is rather dooming to the dumbass' claims. My ultimate goal is to be certified as an expert witness on recognizing dumbasses.

Oh no, I HAVE to read stuff like this for my game job :). Thanks muchos! Ordered already.

I think most of us have ridden in rather light aircraft enough to know that most of the time, they fly along smoothly. They hit the occasional "bump in the road", but they don't stagger around constantly like drunks unless the pilot is himself drunk or they've suffered major damage, or both. Also, when they do hit a "bump", they pretty much self-correct immediately due to their weathervane effect. That's the whole reason for wing dihedral and tail surfaces--to keep a plane flying straight and to self-correct back to the intended flight path. Sure, some WW1 planes were horrible fliers but others were notoriously TOO stable. Most were somewhere in between, like almost all aircraft ever built. Besides that, fixed guns were at or near the aircraft center of gravity. Thus, they weren't affected that much but whatever bumps were encountered. IIRC, in my 1st post in this thread, I stated that about 80% of kills were scored by surprise against non-maneuvering targets. That was the case in WW1 and WW2. IOW, deflection wasn't much of an issue, if it was necessary at all, and the shooting plane was flying just as straight and smoothly as the target. Anybody can hit in such situations, and what separates the aces from the Fokker Fodder is being able to achieve these conditions. I also said that when it came to a real dogfight, kills were relatively rare. After all, these comprised at most 20% of all kills. Either the shooter couldn't achieve a lethal position on the target, or couldn't do deflection shooting. Dogfights seem to have happened fairly regularly and little harm was done. Thus, I consider McCudden was correct: they were "duds" at shooting at hale fellows well met. I have to disagree here. As I tried to explain when I said this, throwing a fixed gun off target requires a force strong enough to throw the entire aircraft off its path. That is, not only its mass but also its bult-in stability and weathervaning forces. And in most planes, such divergences were but momentary. However, a much smaller force was required to toss a pivoting gun off target. I wasn't complaining about the way OFF handles this. I was merely stating that I disagreed with folks who wanted to make guns less accurate than they really were. If I achieve a good kill position, I should be able to kill relatively easily. After all, the tools at my disposal are more than adequate for the task. My guns are some of the most accurate ever made,my aircraft is (usually) relatively stable, and I've been doing this for decades, mostly in multi-player against oppenents of equal skill and experience.

Damn, that's very tempting.... And my birthday's coming up. But I know I'd never read the whole thing, and my owning it would remove it from the hands of somebody who'd really use it. So I'll pass. Thanks for the offer, though.

I came from the factory hardwided for it. I've always liked aviation of all sorts, so my WW1 interest is really inseparable from my other aviation interests. They all started when I hatched and have been pursued with equal vigor all my life. It's like having a fridge full of beer from all over the world. Some days I'm in the mood for a Brit IPA, sometimes a Belgian Trappist, sometimes an Oktoberfest. So it is with aviation. Some days I want WW1, sometimes WW2, sometimes even civilan.

I've always liked WW1 flightsims (but that's a story for another thread). However, I hadn't played any for a number of years, ever since RB2/RB3D/FCJ quit working on my machine. And due to other things like developing my own games, I hadn't known about any new WW1 sims on the way. Then one day somebody in my company's forum mentioned in an OT thread that OFF P3 was about to come out. That was the 1st I'd heard of OFF, so I missed P1 and P2 completely. My company deals with WW1 ships so most of us like WW1 airplanes as well and discuss them now and again. Anyway, I and several others from my forum followed the link and here we are.

This quote was talking about an observer's gun, not a fixed gun. That makes a HUGE difference. IMOH, they're totally apples and oranges. So please note that everything I've said so far has just been about fixed guns. One of the major differences between fixed and free guns is that with fixed guns, whatever throws them off has to move the entire airplane, whereas with free guns, moving only the gun and/or gunner is sufficient. Obviously, the former takes considerably more force to accomplish than the latter. Thus, there are more patches of turbulence that will affect a free gun than a fixed gun. Also, the bumps that affect the whole plane will usually produce a smaller divergence than those affecting the free gun and/or gunner. This was compounded by how an the observer's gun was mounted. The gun was attached to the airplane by a pivot point at or near the center of gravity of the gun, to make it easier for the gunner to pivot the weapon and hold it at any given angle. This ease of movement, however, also made the gun easy to move with external forces like turbulence. Now combine this with the fact that the gunner, who wasn't rigidly mounted to the airplane, either, was holding 1 end of the weapon. Anything that moved the observer in his cockpit--turbulence, G forces, etc.--therefore moved the gun. I figure this was worse for Entente gunners who held Lewis spade grips in their hands, so that only their arms needed to be bounced around, not their whole bodies. The German Parabellum had a shoulder stock precisely to damp out relative motion between the gunner's body and his arms. Another significant difference between fixed and free guns is that free guns are affected by the airplane's own forward motion and fixed guns aren't. The futher a gunner aimed to the side, the greater the force exerted on the weapon itself by the wind. This not only made it hard to keep the weapon aimed on target, at high enough speeds it prevented the gun from being brought to bear at all. Remember, we're talking about gale- or even hurricane-force winds here, due to the speed of the aircraft. And even when it was possible, the air hitting the gun was usually rather turbulent due to having just passed through the struts and wires in the cabane area, so was shaking the weapon as well as trying to push it back in line with the fuselage (an issue the Parabellum's stock also helped deal with). These factors were the primary reason for the development of turrets and, in their absence, the very limited rear gun arcs (no more 360^ Scarff rings, etc.) in post-WW1 aircraft. What amazes me, however, is that despite these limitations, 2-seater gunners were often able to put up an effective fight. The best source I know of about this is Independent Force, by Keith Rennles. This book summarizes and quotes the actual mission reports from all the raids of the daylight bomber squadrons. Over and over again, you read of the bombers having long battles with attacking fighters. The defensive fire from the formation usually kept the Germans at long range (several hundred meters), at least after the 1st clash, from where they'd lob bursts into the formation hoping for a lucky hit. Individual Germans would sometimes try to get closer but would usually pick an angle from which many gunners could bear, so would get hammered. A 10-ship bomber formation might expend 4000-5000 Lewis rounds in the course of a mission, mostly fired a very long range at sniping Germans, and often returned with few or even no losses. But periodically, a more determined group of Germans would meet them and use better tactics. They'd dive in from the flanks, where it was hardest for the gunners to aim at them, and break up the formation. Once scattered, the 2-seaters were much easier prey and losses were often heavy in such cases. So, having read this book several times, I try to set things up in OFF where 2-seater formations are formidable foes requiring proper tactics. Problem is, none of the rear gunner arcs in OFF can shoot below the horizontal even off to the sides where the fuselage isn't in the way (I assume this is a hold-over from the WW2 game engine--see above). Also, they can't shoot upwards more than about 45^. This robs the 2-seaters of their historical ability to cover each other, which was the whole reason for being in formation at all. Thus, the only way to compensate for fewer guns facing you is to make each gun pretty accurate. The drawback to this, however, is that it makes individual 2-seaters more formidable than they should be, and Brisfits extremely dangerous. So I really hope that P4 gives us gunner arcs that are closer to WW1 than WW2.

Game publishers are all evil and should be burned at the stake. However, they're only accomplices to the ultimate culprits, the retailers, who should be hung, drawn, and quartered. Both are only interested in short-term profit, and between the 2 of them, they destroyed the PC gaming industry. Retailers of course only want to stock items that sell in large quantities, because they only have so much shelf space, and stuff that sits there forever keeps them from using that space for something that moves. They also know that very few games are major hits with high demand over the long-term. For most games, the vast majority of the sales happen in the 1st month or so after release. Thus, before a retailer will agree to stock a game, it gets an agreement from the supplier (usually the game publisher) that if the initial batch of units doesn't sell out within some ridiculously short time (usually about 4 weeks), the retailer can either return the unsold units to the supplier at the supplier's cost, or put them in the bargain bin for less than 1/2 the original price. Either way the supplier (publisher + developer) lose LOTS of money if the game isn't an immediate hit. Of course, if the game continues to sell like hotcakes, the retailer will take all the supplier can deliver for as long as the demand lasts, but that's by far the exception. The short-term mechanics of the retailer are thus pushed upstream to the publisher. Publishers aren't creative entities; they merely package and (critically) advertise games from many developers. Most developers rely on publishers because most developers are too small to self-publish or advertise. But in exchange for getting the publisher to do this for them, they have to give the publisher a fair amount of editorial control. See, to meet the schedule set by the retailers, the publishers likewise are only interested in 2 things: games that they can hype into decent sales for the month it takes the market to realize they're really total crap, and mass-market blockbusters that will sell well for several months to a year. They have no interest at all in stuff in the middle, such as simulations, which tend to sell fairly steadily but at low volume for a long time. Because the rate of sales is low, retailers won't give them time to buld up long-term sales volume, so they're losers from the publisher's POV as well. So, what happens is, publishers vet the ideas of their developers. If the publisher thinks the game might make a month's good sales, or is an established franchise with proven mass appeal, the publisher will go with it. Otherwise, it will refuse to publish that game and we never see it. Thus, the publisher decides what games are produced at all. Also, it's the publisher that decides whether a game will be a short-term thing few ever hear of or a major thing everybody will want, and spends its advertising money accordingly. Note that none of this has anything to do with the game's actual gameplay or even stability merits--it's just what the publisher THINKS it can sell. Customer support after the sale is the developer's problem, after all. Anyway, the ultimate success of a game is pretty much determined by the publisher's initial impression, long before either the retailer, let alone the market, has a say. Then the publisher sets release dates for its developers so that some of them are releasing something new every month, to generate cash flow for the publisher. If these release dates mean unfinished products go out the door, the publisher doesn't care as long as it can make money in the 1st month. IOW, it's the combined effect of retailer and publisher that CREATED niche markets, because they refuse to publish or sell games that don't meet THEIR criteria. As a result, most things you see on shelves are total crap, here today and gone tomorrow, with a few good (if you like that sort of thing), mass-appeal franchises like WoW, Half Life, etc., thrown in every once in a while. The customers recognized this long ago, so gave up on PC gaming except for the mass-appeal franchises. In between the periodic releases of such things, they play consoles. As a result, consoles have evolved ot be able to handle (more or less) what passes for major PC titles these days. As a result, customers have very little incentive to spend several thousand bucks on a top-end gaming PC. Nowadays, the PC has devolved into the iPad, no more than a glorified cell phone with a screen big enough to read web pages. Folks don't miss playing real games on such things because they can get all the big titles on their XBox. I thus believe that the days of rapid increases in PC horsepower are over. That was driven by gaming, and PC gaming has been in a coma for the last decade at least. Indy game developers have cropped up recently in an attempt to escape the combined tyranny of evil retailers and publishers. Many of these folks self-publish and self-retail, because neither publishers nor retailers will give them the time of day. That essentially means that their products are download only, and thus have DRMs. DRMs, however, have generated so much hatred that many customers refuse to buy games that have them, even if that's the only way they can get games of that genre. Furthermore, the indy developers are all too small to do much advertising, so few ever hear of their products, no matter how good they might be. The net result is that most indies sell very few games, and making games thus has to be a hobby supported by a day job. This increases development calendar time, thus further reducing cash flow and making the indy route even less viable. So I don't see a real long-term future even for indies. Much as it pains me to say it, PC gaming is dead. The entire field has become just a niche in the real gaming market, which totally belongs to consoles. "Niche markets" within PC gaming are too small to measure even with electron microscopes. We're just pretending otherwise for as long as we can. I predict that before this decade is out, neither PC games nor even PC graphics cards will be manufactured. About 2020, the very last PC video card in existence will burn out in somebody's c.2013 "retro-gaming" PC, and that will be the final end of it. I just hope the machine dies playing one of my games (no offense to OBD--I hope the guy plays OFF the day before ).

I could have sworn I replied to this thread yesterday but I don't see it. Maybe it was a different thread? Anyway, my big gripe with pilot bodies is that they're hands are welded to the controls. This is unrealistic because you can't do the essential pilot activities of drinking, smoking, and making obscene gestures

Over in the 1C forum, I've been pounding this same point in way of protest over IL2 COD not having any offline play worthy of the name. I consider the lack of such a real tragedy. Noone doubts that the IL2 team can do the nuts and bolts side quite well--highly accurate flight and combat models, pretty graphics. But unless you're into "small batch" online play, buying COD is like buying a tricked-out Harley that you're only able to ride around the block in your own neighborhood, over and over again. No freedom of the open road, which is what you want a Harley for in the 1st place. "Small batch" online appeals to a few people, most of whom already comprise the IL2 community. But it won't attract people who want a wider experience, which is a damn shame because the quality of the nuts and bolts deserves a wide audience. In fairness to Oleg et al, the decision to cut the dynamic campaign from COD doesn't seem to have been his decision. It looks instead like Ubi, the publisher, got tired of waiting (IIRC, COD has been in development for like 4 years already) and forced a release date on Oleg. It's the same old story that has ruined the PC game industry: the conflicts of interest between developers and customers OT1H, and the evil publishers and retailers OTOH. Oh well. Maybe someday COD will have a true dynamic campaign, by which time it will also have been patched and will be in the bargain bin. Then I'll get a better product than will be availalbe at release, and Ubi and Oleg will get less of my money. But I digress... As a developer, I know that it's all about gameplay. Gameplay is what people consider to be fun, hopefully even addictive. It's what attracts and keeps customers. In fact, customers are willing to sacrifice a bit on the technical side to get the gameplay they want. We here all love OFF's gameplay so are willing to put up with its various quirks and annoyances. I hope my own customers feel the same way. But everybody's tastes differ, so to maximize the customer base, you need either a type of gameplay that has very wide appeal, or you need several types of gameplay that each bring in different groups of customers. From a developer's POV, the latter isn't optimal because it can tie your hands--changes in 1 area may have negative impacts in another, and customers in all areas equally demand changes and improvements. Thus, it's better to have a main cash cow with a large fan base, and other aspects of gameplay as lagniappe. What I find most discouraging about this whole story is that most of the IL2 community, being "small batch" players, doesn't grok this concept. To them, offline play is meaningless so they view a dynamic campaign as just another mere "feature". Meanwhile, they keep saying how they hope COD will attract new customers so Oleg can make new and better stuff in the future. Thus, when I say that while I find the technical stuff quite tempting, I won't get the game due to a lack of attractive gameplay, they put me in the same category as somebody whining that the Whirlwind or some other obscure, minor plane isn't in the game. They keep saying "pretty graphics, realistic flight model--what else do you need?"

I could have sworn there are a few planes in OFF, ones I hardly ever fly, that have the pilot's body. Or it could be that was just CFS3 when I was doing my 1 obligatory flight prior to installing OFF. In Aces High, a few planes also had the pilot's body but most don't. I much prefer not having the body there. It never looks good and obscures the instruments. But most importantly, it's never realistic. The body is there, the hands hare welded to the controls, so they can never do the important pilot functions of smoking, drinking, and making obscene gestures

Glad to know you're still around in case I do get started again :).

I'm not prejudiced. I hate everybody equally and individually

Geez, I said the exact opposite of what I meant. What I meant was, the ranges at which the difference between the trajectories of tracer and ball starts to approach or even exceed dispersion of the overall burst is FAR beyond the ranges we shoot at in OFF. Thus in OFF, what you see with the tracer should be what you get with the ball.