Bullethead

Semper fi, Devildog I agree. Tracers don't act crazy, they just fly a slightly different path than ball rounds. Tracer bullets are usually a tad lighter than ball rounds, due to trading some lead for what is in effect a giant match head. Thus, for the same powder charge, tracers will have a slightly higher muzzle velocity but will decelerate quicker than ball rounds. This means that at short ranges (for rifle-caliber, ground MGs, anyway) of like 200m or less, given the same point of aim, the tracer will be a couple centimeters above a ball round, but that's only noticeable if you're shooting them from a rifle clamped to a bench. With an MG firing even a very short burst, the dispersion of the burst is bigger than the ballistic difference between tracer and ball rounds so effectively they're the same. The difference in trajectories only starts to become noticeable at about 300m or more, and only becomes significant at 400-500m and beyond. At these ranges, tracer is rather lower than ball, and the difference is on the same scale as the dispersion of the ball rounds in the burst. All these ranges are, however, considerably shorter than WW1 air combat ranges, so IMHO there should be no effective difference. Remember folks, WW1 MGs shot the same ammo as infantry rifles. Those rifle cartridges had been developed in the late 1800s for accurate long-range fire using iron sights, as in killing point targets at least 500m away and being able to pin down the enemy and inflict significant losses at 1000m and more. They proved they could do this many times, starting in the 2nd Boer War. These same cartridges are still used for these purposes today, so the old boys knew what they were doing. And this was just with a prone human holding the rifle. Now picture the rifle mounted on a rigid tripod with T&E, able to fire 500-600 rounds per minute, and supplied with a long belt of ammo. That's a WW1 MG, at least of the Maxim type. Screw such a thing down to something fairly heavy like a WW1 airplane and you should get similar results.

Howdy Olham- I'm afraid I can't convert Methuen to anything, nor do I think there are programs that do it. Methuen is very aggravating in that regard.

Thanks, but I have to say, "Oh bah".. I have no idea what I'm doing and am usually drunk when I play with Gmax. Once you learn the basic methodology and where to find those things on the interface, it's not really that hard, it's just tedious, and having to start over multiple times. I'm afraid I've reached my limit, however. You'll note it was nearly a year since the last post in this thread before you posted here. My, how time flies. I was thinking it had just been a few months. But I no longer have the free time required to do this sort of thing and still be able to play. Maybe this will change at some point, but not in the foreseeable future.

I have no idea what the numerical factors mean. I just eyeball the spread of my burst. Believability really goes away for me if at 100m range my spread is more than about 2m in diameter. I know that on the ground, MGs shoot much better than this, and from a FREE tripod (without a T&E lock). IOW, hand-held and able to pivot easily under recoil, as opposed to being rigidly mounted on an airplane, which is in effect what the T&E lock does. But a 2m spread at 100m is about right for "Rat Patrol" shooting (free-pivot vehicle mount) on smooth ground at a fixed target while you're driving by, so there's deflection involved. Since nobody uses a T&E in that situation, it's a bit apples and oranges to fighter guns, but I figure it's close enough for government work. There's also this... I fire my OFF guns as I was trained to fire ground MGs offhand and from bipods, NOT tripods, and definitely not tripods with the T&E locked. That is, I fire bursts of only 3-6 rounds per gun: tap the trigger, tap the trigger, tap the trigger. I do this for 2 reasons. 1 is to avoid jams, the other is to minimize dispersion from the cumulative effects of recoil. Not having a continual but partly random force throwing me off, I can more easily correct my aim while firing, and all shots in my short bursts should go very nearly into the same spot on the target. Thus, when I fire such a burst and see a bullet go WAY askew, it's a total believability killer for me because I know that nothing in the real world would have caused that to happen except Roland Garos' deflector plate.

According to Green Balls, HPs climbed at 50-55 knots and cruised at about 60, and the highest I've read so far of him going is 7500 feet. The specification that the HPs were built to was, IIRC, expressly for a "night bomber". I suppose this was at least partly due to Brit experience vs. Gothas in 1917. After the losses sustained in just a few (like 3-5 max) daylight raids, the Germans switched to night operations. And the Gothas flew rather higher than the HPs, apparently. The single-engined day bombers of the IAF had a rough time, too, despite being faster. For the most part, they took acceptable losses day-to-day from flak and the home defense fighters (Kets). The Kets were mostly inexperienced pilots in inferior planes attacking in fairly small numbers which the bomber formations could largely hold off. But every couple of weeks or so, a squadron would meet a full-strength, frontline Jasta in D.VIIs and get practically annihilated. This mostly happened to the DH9 squadrons because they had inferior performance compared to the DH4. For a very detailed history of the daily operations of the IAF's day squadrons, I recommend Independent Force, by Keith Rennles.

X3 Terran Conflict is IMHO the best of the series so far, especially with the 3.0 update which added a LOT of free content. However, the mod community has made it possible to bring the older games almost up to current standards. The games are in chronological order. Thus, the main point of playing the older games is to know "the story so far". The gameplay in all of them is pretty much the same, although it gets more flexible and the graphics get better as you go along.

I'm really not in favor of reducing accuracy beyond anything I consider the believable minimum. Aiming and shooting isn't that hard. The hard part in real life was 1) seeing the enemy before he saw you, and 2) gaining an advantageous position on the enemy before he knew you were there. Once a pilot achieved these parameters, it was just a matter of pulling the trigger, which any noob could do. What separated the aces from their scores was situational awareness. The few how had it lived a relatively long time and killed many. Those who lacked it died in 2 weeks or so, usually without knowing what hit them. But the other side often had some good pilots, too, so usually both sides saw each other before one could swoop the other. This usually resulted in a standoff and little or no harm done. Problem is, the above makes for very boring gameplay. Face it, we all bought OFF to feed our addiction to intense furballs. Swirling around in hand-to-hand combat with many deadly enemies and somehow coming out on top is FUN. It's what we all brag about in the "Reports from the Front" thread. And this is only possible BECAUSE the AI fights to the death, and can easily kill you. If all you had to say was, "I swooped some unsuspecting enemies", you'd have no more respect than those who always want to be a sniper in FPS MP games. Thus, at the bottom line, I'm against dumbing down gunnery to artificially impose historical kill rates on OFF. I know from personal experience that the act of shooting moving targets from moving platforms isn't nearly as hard as some folks think, and that the weapons of WW1 were some of the most accurate ever made. Thus, I see accurate gunnery as equally important to accurate flight models. I also want intense combat, because I play OFF for MY entertainment. So what if I get more kills much faster than anybody in real life? I have more combat stick time than anybody in real life, and the game is tailored to PRODUCE combat. That's OK with me, because I also almost die pretty quickly. A short life and a merry . So IMHO, if you're concerned about the deadliness of OFF fights, and your own role in making it that way, only take 50% ammo or even less. That will sure put an upper limit on your kills per sortie.

Independent Force proper was formed from VIII Brigade RAF plus attachments. On the day it was officially designated the IAF (6 June 1918), it comprised: 100 Squadron (FE2): Night bomber 216 Squadron (ex-RNAS No. 16, HP O/400): Night bomber 55 Squadron (DH4): Day bomber 99 Squadron (DH9): Day bomber 104 Squadron (DH9): Day bomber The 1st 3 were the original components of VIII Brigade, the latter 2 joined in May 1918. Since October 1917, VIII Brigade had been primarily attacking targets just behind the lines in direct support of ground units, although they also did the odd deep raid (mostly at night). Once IAF was formed, deep missions became almost the sole business of IAF, although they did do a few direct support missions toward the end of the war. The above day bomber squadrons were 41st Wing. From this point until the Armistice, the daylight side of IAF was reinforced as follows: 110 Squadron (DH9a): Day bomber, joined 1 Sep 1918 45 Squadron (Camels): joined 22 Sep 1918 These 2 squadrons formed 85th Wing. 45 Squadron had just come from the Italian Front and were on the short list to get Snipes fitted with long-range tanks to be able to escort the day bombers there and back, but due to delays with the Snipe, this never happened. 45 wasn't re-equipped until Jan 1919. Thus, 45's main role was defensive patrol over the IAF bases while the bombers were forming and struggling up in circles (which usually took more than an hour), after which the Camels were about out of gas. And AFAIK, they never did actual escort even for short-range targets, but were more into close air support. The night side looked like this: 97 Squadron (HP O/400), joined 6 June 1918 100 Squadron re-equipped with HP O/400 on 10 Aug 1918 115 Squadron (HP O/400), joined 29 Aug 1918 215 Squadron (ex-RNAS 15, HP O/400), joined 6 June 1918 216 Squadron: as above So, in answer to your 2nd question, the reason for Camels instead of SE5s was that they were supposed to be Snipes, but that didn't happen ;).

One of the ebooks Lou linked up for us is Green Balls, written by an HP observer. It's quite interesting. But anyway, screenshots... SCHWEET!!!!!

Well, it depends on how far back you go... Flightims like F15 Strike Eagle, Falcon 3, Apache, F19 Stealth Fighter (from before we knew it was really F117), all were exceptionally good games. They had good modeling, dynamic campaigns, and ran reliably. All very, very good, especially when you consider they put all that on just one or two 512K floppies. Of course, the graphics were utterly laughable: at that time, I had a 4-color monitor so saw everything in either black, white, cyan, or magenta. But that just goes to show--graphics aren't what makes a good game, it's sound mechanics and replay value. HOWEVER, I agree, the next batch of sims was crap, and it only got worse from there. The start of this slide coincided with PCs becoming mainstream and the ancestors of the 1st graphics cards. At this point, game companies started putting on their money into graphics at the expense of gameplay. Thus, the suddenly large market ate up crappy games in record numbers, so the Evil Publishers and Evil Retailers saw nothing but dollar signs. So they conspired to force the Good Developers into shorter and shorter product cycles, until eventually ALL you had was graphics, not gameplay, and not even a game that would work at all out of the box. And the Forces of Evil laughed all the way to the bank, until they realized that the Internet had gone mainstream at the same time, so now folks knew better than to buy their schlock, and they all went bust while the customers went to consoles. I think you would find the X Universe series of games belies your opinion. These are totally excellent. You can do whatever you want, build and empire, go kill stuff, get rich, or all of the above. You've got a whole universe to explore at your own speed and in your own way. You can end up commanding huge fleets of your own and establishing your own kingdom if you want. The games are entirely moddable, the devs update them reguarly with added content besides bug fixes, you name it. http://www.egosoft.com/news/current_en.php

Ah, this reminds me of some of my favorite "Robot Chicken" sketches, called "Dicks with Time Machines" First of all, I'm assuming I couldn't affect things prior to the outbreak of hostilities, but given that those started off in Serbia, first stop would be Berlin. There I'd beat Moltke the Dweeb about the head and shoulders until he was able to tell Kaiser Bill that yes, the direction of mobilization COULD be reversed at the last moment. Thus, the Schlieffen Plan wouldn't have been used at all, Belgium wouldn't have been invaded, and the UK wouldn't have become involved. France would have destroyed herself on the defensive wire of the Western Front and given up shortly thereafter in the absence of German aggression. Meanwhile, the combined might of German and Austria would have quickly smashed Russia. As a result, Italy wouldn't have become involved, either, nor would the U-boat campaign have ever started, so the US could have stayed out, too. Thus, the war might actually have been over by Xmas 1914 and many fewer people would have died. The net result would have been just another in the long string of European wars where a few provinces changed hands and civilization would not have collapsed as it did because of WW1. Thus, we'd still today be living in la Belle Époque instead of the Dark Ages. Failing that, I'd have made sure Moltke kept the right wing strong. And failing that, I would go to the flag bridge of HMS Barham at about 1500 on 31 May 1916, where I would ask Rear Admiral Evan-Thomas why he was steaming in the opposite direction of Vice Admiral Beatty despite there obviously being a fight in the offing. Then an hour or so later I'd teleport to the flag bridge of SMS Friedrich der Gross and ask Vice Admiral Scheer why he was chasing Beatty hell-for-leather when it was pretty obvious that Beatty was leading him to Jellicoe.

Oh man, I can't imagine any tougher MP rookery than DOS Air Warrior. This was back when the Internet was what Gawd intended it to be, a place inhabited only by the geekiest of rather intelligent, reasonably affluent, full-grown adult sociopaths. This was because the Internet was hideously expensive (not only in hardware but in online time) and using a computer at all required some knowledge of how they actually work inside. You hat to be able to write your own programs to get online at all, not to mention printer drivers. It was thus the exclusive hunting reserve of burnt-out, computer-savvy Yuppies with mortgages, kids, and serious cocaine and/or drinking problems. There were a very few women (but those few fit right in) but absolutely no kids at all. Thus, there was no need for content filters, ESRB ratings, or moderation. Everything online was R-rated. It would have been X-rated had that been possible, but unfortunately in that archaic semi-digital age (our joysticks were still analog) we hadn't yet invented graphical browsers, nor a "World Wide Web" to use them on, nor the bandwidth to diownload erotic images larger than today's thumbnails in less than a week, so the whole internet porn industry was still a wet dream. Given that games in those days were fairly primitive in mechanics and utterly (but knowingly) without anti-hacking measures, the generally well-educated players could easily spot their flaws. Because these players were all at least part-time hackers (in those days, "hacker" and "programmer" were synonymous). they could write up ways to exploit those flaws that weren't accessible (as many were) from just playing the game.. Because they were all sociopaths, both player and game developer alike (normal people back then still went out on the town for fun), nobody cared about the hacking/cheating/exploiting. After all, back then Internet was Geek Heaven, so you had to play by geek rules, which meant such things were all part of the game. If you were so gauche as to whine about such treatment in the forums, you got mercilessly flamed in highly imaginative and creative ways, not only by the perpetrator of your woes but also by most bystanders and even the game's developers. After all, whining was proof positive that you were a poser who'd only gotten online at all due to cribbing off a geek friend, because real geeks knew what to expect and relished it. Ah, those were the days! , But sadly, those times haven't been seen since complete idiots started giving computers to kids who were raised without firm masculine guidance. I mean, computers are weapons of mass destriuction, giving the user the power to commit international fraud and robbery on truly massive scales, and even able to topple governments. Kids should only be allowed to have computers after they've already proved themselves capable of handling relatively benign things like guns and cars, with which they can only kill a few folks at once. So, that was the background community of DOS Air Warrior. Then there was the game itself. Noobs suddenly had to grock all the intricacies of ACM in a shark tank filled with guys who'd been doing it for years and who all were positively anxious to make noobs quit the game out of sheer humiliation. Those few noobs who didn't quit gained respect and found the vets quite willing to share their knowledge, mostly out of egoism. But noobs had to take a serious beating first, and keep coming back despite paying like $5/hour for it.

Every Tuesday night, I play poker with a guy who flew P38s in North Africa in 1942. One day he got the worst of it, being on fire and with an MG bullet through the face across the cheekbones, so he bailed out. As you all probably know, the P38's horizontal tail required special precautions when bailing out, but this guy didn't have time for that. Thus, he hit the tailplane. Fortunately, the impact knocked his chute open, because it also knocked him out. It also broke his back. He woke up in a DAK field hospital. It wasn't until the 2nd day that they took the bandage off his face and he realized he wasn't blind, after which he felt he could deal with the rest. Soon afterwards, the DAK retreated and left him behind with the other serious casualties, so he was picked up by advancing US troops. He spent the rest of the war and the better part of a year afterwards in a US hospital. Today, at nearly 90 years of age, he gets around better than most his age (not needing a cane, driving a Mustang, and going several times a year to Florida to compete in big poker tournaments), although his face looks like he skidded on it down several miles of gravel road. The only personal experience I have that comes close isn't from war but from the fire service. I've jumped from a window just ahead of a flashover, and have seen several others do the same but from the 2nd floor. Of course, these were all cases of bad judgment--we shouldn't have been in there at all. Perhaps my old P38 friend shouldn't have been in his fight, either. But anyway, IMHO, if you're in immediate danger of burning up, you'll jump. Just like the folks above the fire at the World Trade Center on 9/11.

But what really put Blizzard on the map was first of all the original Diablo. EVERYBODY had that game, released in 1996, and IMHO they never should have made later versions because they've all sucked compared to the original. After Diablo I, the word "Blizzard" was what "Mircroprose" had been some years before--everybody wanted their stuff. And about this time, the abonimable RTS craze had begun with Command & Conquer, Blizzard made a fantasy version called Warcraft, which was also immensely successful. And that's where WC2, SC et seq, and WoW came from. Blizzard wasn't the first in any genre, not MP RPG, not RTS, not MMORPG, but they knew how to make the best games in those genres and put them out while they were still fresh. Kudos to them. But I shall always Hate Blizzard for one thing: instituting the current and (IMHO) new-fangled intolerance of online cheating, exploiting, PKing, etc. That came from the immense succes of Diablo, which originally had all kinds of hilarious ways to ruin noobs' fun and, afterwards, to bask in the warm glow of their Hate as they whined on the forums. And Blizzard caved in to the whiners, instead of doing what the industry had always done before and told them to man up or shut up. The only folks lower in Hell than Blizzard are the bastards who set up AOL and instituted the equally new-fangled intolerance for "flames" and "personal attacks" in forums (which was ALL they originally contained), which put a stop to the gaming community policing itself. Between AOL and Blizzard, the internet went from an enjoyable place of Wild West anarchy to a limp-wristed Orwellian world of moderated faux-civility, cussword filters, bannings, and leet-speak. I pray to the Dark Gods that those responsible get chained to the same rock as Prometheus. May vultures tear out their livers repeatedly for all eternity.

Based on my experience, I don't think either of these variables is nearly as significant as you think. i've killed countless rabbits, coyotes, wild hogs, armadillos, and other varmints that were all running at full gallop, usually at high deflection, and mostly at night, from the back of a pickup bouncing along rough terrain at farily high speed to keep up with them, while holding my weapon offhand, not rigidly mounted in any way. It's not that hard, but even so I consider such shooting rather harder most shots in air combat, due to their high bearing rate of the target and the MUCH bumpier ride. The vast majority of shots in air combat were by surprise at non-maneuvering targets, after all, at at hale fellows well met. Thus, IMHO the rather lower kills/sortie of real life compared to us in OFF is due to the following factors: 1. Most OFF pilots are veterans of a decade or 2 of sim combat so can hit even the most extreme deflection shots without breaking a sweat. No real-life fighter pilot ever had that advantage. 2. Most real-life pilots were neither good shots nor good pilots. In all air warfare when guns ruled, 80% of the kills were scored by 20% of the pilots. And 80% of the kills were surprise swoops, which says something for a lack of SA, again indicating a general lack of skill amongst flyboys. 3. The OFF AI tends to fight to the death. Thus, players are FORCED into fighting 1 enemy after another until the whole enemy flight is destroyed. It's either that or be shot down yourself. In real life, however, fights tended to end fairly quickly as pilots realized they were disadvantaged and broke contact after the 1st clash. Thus, most pilots weren't presented with a continuous string of opponents, so couldn't shoot down very many enemies per sortie even if they wanted to.

Well, on the plus side, by the time the game gets a dynamic campaign (assuming it ever does), it'll be in the bargain bin. Also, patches will have been released by that point. Thus, I'll get a better product for a lower price. On the minus side, I'll have to wait for it. But OTOH, not being an IL-2 fan, I didn't even know the thing was coming at all until last week, so I don't feel like I've waited at all yet, and think of the hypothetical future game worth buying as having just been announced for delivery early next year or so.

It was actually Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord :). Glad you liked it. I used to work for what was then called Big Time Software, later Battlefront :).

Thanks for the warning. I sure ain't buying it without a dynamic campaign because I can't do multi-player with my satellite internet. Damn, that's highly disappointing. I was really looking forward to this game.

I use Normal/Normal for all cases except when I fly a Fee, in which case I do Normal/Hard so my gunner has a harder time due to my sometimes un-Fee-like aerobatics. I've shot a number of MGs in my life, including some of WW1 vintage, and I do not at all subscribe to the belief that MGs of that time scattered rounds hither and yon. In actual fact, they were more accurate than most MG's today, due to being heavier. That is to say, as accurate as a long-range, high-power rifle. Which is exactly what an MG (especially a WW1 MG) is, except it fires relatively faster. Sure, during a burst, an MG will bounce a bit and thus not all bullets will go down the same path, but the scatter cone is really quite small--small enough to still shoot at point targets and hit most of the time within a few hundred meters. It's only at extremely long ranges, like several thousand meters, that the scatter cone will cover a company's frontage. Hell, in single-shot mode, you can use the ancient M2 .50cal (a 1918 design IIRC) as a sniper rifle and kill folks at 3000m, if you put a 30x scope on it. To be honest, I continue to be shocked that the ghosts of Maxim, Browning, and even Lewis (not to mention all the 1st of July ghosts from the Somme) haven't risen up and struck dead those who believe WW1 MGs were inaccurate. So that's how I roll for fixed guns. And I usually put rear guns on Normal as well, or 2-seaters are too easy to kill. But I put rear guns on Hard when I fly a Fee, leaving the opposition on Normal fixed guns. This is for 2 reasons. First, you don't have to aim in a Fee due to the front gun swiveling, so if you use Normal killing Albatri is way too easy. Second, I do ACM in a Fee that probably would have tossed the gunner out in real life, so I figure my gunner should be shaking from fear and thus inaccurate.

So a worthy virtual warrior died and Darwin missed a great chance at 2 real-life nitwits. Things like this would make a man go mad, were it not for distilled spirits

Banged your head too hard on the MG butts? Serves you right for shooting up one of my Fees . I, too, have had my share of miraculous escapes and freak deaths from what appeared to be pretty survivable situations. Sometimes I find this very frustrating, but then I think about weird things I've seen in real life. For instance, last week in my job as a fireman I went to what looked like a bad wreck. This pickup truck had been heading south at 65mph or so on a straight and level stretch of divided 4-lane highway in rather light traffic. The driver for some reason wasn't paying attention, however, and drifted not only off the road but off even ran the right wheels off the edge of the paved shoulder, which is what I supposed got the idiot's attention back on the task at hand. Anyway, at this point the truck was within inches of hitting a guardrail and the driver grossly overcorrected in panic. This put the pickup into a violent spin angled off to its left. It spun across the southbound lanes, the median, and the northbound lanes (fortunately without hitting anybody else), flipped over, and came to a stop upside down in the northbound ditch. As I pulled up at the scene, I was expecting a rather gory mess and having to cut the people out of the wreckage. The pickup was rather smashed and pieces and the contents of its bed were strewn all over the road. Also, it was an old vehicle without airbags and other modern safety stuff. I've worked hundreds of wrecks that have looked this bad and none of them have had happy endings. But in this case, both occupants had not only gotten themselves out, they weren't hurt or even dazed. One of them had a slight scratch on an arm from wriggling out past a piece of jagged metal, but that was it. They both refused medical treatment. And the really amazing part was that both occupants were rather fat. I don't see how they fit in the cab even before it partially caved in on them, let alone escaped having their legs pinned by the crushed-in dashboard. Hell, the fuel tank wasn't even leaking. But OTOH, I've seem people killed stone dead in 10mph fenderbenders, if they happen to hit their heads just right. So you never know.

Thanks for the tip. Poor choice of time for it, up against the end of the Super Bowl, and I have to work tomorrow. But I'll get it a look if I can.

That's an interesting issue. True, propaganda and legend-buliding has always happened and happens even today--we've seen a few examples in the current wars. But OTOH, the pendulum for the credibility of ancient sources is swinging back the other way these days. This is not to say that everything should be taken at face value. However, such accounts shouldn't automatically be dismissed, either. It seems the folks who started downgrading the size of ancient armies back in the 19th Century did so more from hubris than from actual data. These were folks still soaking up the implications of their own recent Industrial Revolution and the rise of European nation states, which within living memory had made armies much bigger than they had been for many centuries before. Thus, when they saw accounts of ancient armies the size of Napolean's or Moltke's, they scoffed because they assumed that such sizes were impossible outside of their own modern situation. IOW, if the Europeans hadn't been able to do it before, then nobody else could have, either, especially if they were from "primitive, uncivilized" societies. But since then, we've deciphered many more ancient texts and learned a lot more from many archaeological disciplines. And in more than a few cases, the new evidence largely supports the numbers in the ancient sources. It seems ancient people figured out ways of doing things that hadn't occurred to Europeans, and/or that ancient populations were rather larger than previously supposed. Anyway, we're getting way off course here, but it's something I find fascinating.

I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety.

Abide me, if thou dar'st; for well I wot.