Bullethead

If you were making something that stands alone, I could understand. But you're not. You're making something that cannot run without OFF any more than OFF can't run without CFS3. The database here is full of missions other folks have uploaded. These contain 3rd-party skins, 3rd-party flying machines (Zeps, Gothas, etc.) and 3rd-party ground objects (submarine bases, searchlights, flaming onions). Some are also set in areas of the map where you can't fly during normal play, like Berlin, London, and Paris. Every one of these missions uses P3 planes and every one of them requires P3 to run, so does not stand alone. OBD has never had a problem with them, I see no legal basis for them to have a problem with such missions, and I completely fail to understand how your Italian project is any different at all.

See, this is why I make got into flintknapping. I learned long ago that I will never be able to make any type of modern craftsmanship even vaguely approximating the standards set by guys like this, but I can channel my inner caveman well enough to hang in that field :)

I've never been a master of anything but disaster so you can't be talking to me. But feel free to use my skins however you want. They were uploaded here for all to use to their hearts' content and all include a disclaimer of all copyrights, and that (per OBD request) they all started with an OBD skin, even if none of the original paintjob now remains. I don't understand the need for P2 planes, however. Is that an OBD requirement or just an excess of caution?

Every book written prior to 1923 or so is public domain. RAF_Louvert has uploaded a bunch of WW1 memoirs and other books about WW1 aviation to the Downloads section of this forum. Go get them. And there are scads more you can get for free in the various online libraries. I've never used FreeTrack so can't help you there. But I can tell you that unless you're cool with using padlock views during ACM, you'll have to get some sort of head-tracking device, because CFS3 was made in the era when using the tried-and-true, and MUCH BETTER, additive keypad view system was considered passe'. Personally, I find padlocks totally unplayable but that's what CFS3 was built around, and so OFF inherited it. So, given that for me a head-tracker was required, I cut back (slightly) on beer and tobacco for a couple weeks and bought Track IR, on the theory that getting a factory-made device would be better than anything I could slap together with my total lack of understanding of electronics. After 5 minutes of using Track IR, I was convinced it was worth every penny, every brief moment of sobriety, and every slight nicotine fit. Now I won't go back to the old (but still better-than-padlock) additive keypad view system. If a game doesn't support Track IR, I don't buy it. And just to be sure you understand how serious I am about getting Track IR, remember what I had to cut back on to get it. As it says in my signature... It's all for me grog Me jolly jolly grog It's all for me BEER AND TOBACCO I spent all me tin On the lassies drinkin' gin So across the western ocean I must wander

Nelson could get away with that for a lot of situational factors specific to his time and place. And even with that working in his favor, his leading ships still got badly shot up charging into the French/Spanish line without being able to reply effectively, for like an hour due to the weak wind that day.

I'd also like to point out that I feel no shame whatsoever using the in-game map and tactical screens. These aren't just for new players. And the game allows you to make more or less use out of them as best fits your own tastes. For instance, I myself almost always hit X to "warp" between Point A and Point B, rather than fly along in real time having to navigate myself. I don't have all day to play this game, usually just an hour or 2 before bedtime, and I want to KILL SOMETHING. So I skip all the dull parts and cut right to the action. Thus, I've never used a paper map in all the years I've been playing this game. That said, however, I ALWAYS take the time to learn the neighborhood around my home base because you always have to land yourself once you've warped to the last waypoint, and sometimes the weather is so bad that the only way to find your runway is to follow local landmarks. Also, the tactical display can be set to show everything on the ground and in the air at once, or filtered to show different types of objects (planes, buildings, ships, airfields, etc.). This allows you to get more or less info from it, depending on taste. For instance, it can either be like having AWACs support, or it can nothing more than an aid to navigation if you don't want to mess with paper maps. To do the latter, set it to display ships. There are no ships in the game, so the display will show nothing, but the waypoint like will still be there for you to follow.

Well, as with flightsims, the more you know about the subject matter to start with, the easier things will be. But also as in flightsims, you'll learn with experience. At the risk of contradicting what I said above, WW1 naval combat actually had a lot in common with infantry maneuvers. But I'm talking about the grand tactics from the days of Freidrich der Grosse and Napolean. One way to view a WW1 fleet action is as a land battle from the 1700-1800 timeframe, with each battleship being a whole battalion of infantry, not an individual soldier. So, you formed up your battalions in lines and blazed away at the opposing line, perhaps trying to edge over and around his flank. The destroyers squadrons are cavalry regiments, guarding the flanks of the line and available for death-or-glory charges when you need them. Forget that the whole of both fleets are steaming along at high speed, just think about their movements relative to each other and it's like 2 armies standing in essentially the same place all day blazing away. So, just as old armies marched in columns and fought in lines, so did WW1 ships. And deploying from columns into line required the columns to be spaced correctly, and for each column to wheel around to face the enemy broadside on. But you only have to worry about such things when you've decided to risk your whole fleet. Most actions will be much smaller affairs between a few cruisers and destroyers, which are much easier to control without specialized knowledge.

You have to remember that in WW1, arming airplanes was a matter of taking an off-the-shelf machinegun originally designed for land use and somehow making it work in a role not even envisioned yet when the gun was designed. Thus, everybody had problems with synchronization to some extent. You will find mention in memoirs of guys shooting a few holes in their props. In general for WW1 systems, you had 2 independent machines, the engine and the gun, neither designed to work with the other, and both wanting to do their own things. The synchronizer connected them and made them cooperate within acceptable tolerances, at least on those occasions when the operating cycles of both were more or less "in harmony". This is why nearly all systems were only "safe" to use (remember, acceptable tolerances) within certain ranges of engine RPM. The further you got out of that range, the more likely you were to shoot your prop. Engine RPM could, of course, vary from 1 extreme to the other of the "safe" range. Because the engine and gun were mechanically interconnected, slower engine speed meant slower rate of fire and vice versa. This affected every synchronization system ever made, not just Austrian. The special problem the Austrians had, on top of all these others, was that the Schwarzlose was in some ways a BETTER infantry weapon than the Maxim-type. The Schwarzlose had a much simpler mechanism with very few moving parts, and the moving parts it did have were big and heavy. Thus, on the ground, it was less likely to gum up with mud, had fewer problems with overheating, was much easier to strip, clean, and reassemble, and the individual parts weren't as likely to break. It was also cheaper to mass-produce. However, these virtues made it much more difficult to synchronize. To attach a synchronizer to a gun, you have to modify some of its moving parts, and the smaller the parts are, the easier this is and the better it works. There were several ways to get into the guts of a Maxim this way but very few options on the Schwarzlose and none of them were ideal. Thus, it took the Austrians longer to develop a system and the systems they came up with didn't work as well as those elsewhere. They had looser tolerances, so that even in their "safe" zones, there was a higher chance of shooting the prop. But you can't hold this against the Schwarzlose. It was a very good weapon for its intended purpose, and other nations were just lucky that they'd gone with Maxims when the need for synchronization arose. The Austrians were of course quite aware of this. What they needed was a gun designed from the get-go for airborne use. By the end of the war, they had the Gebauer Engine Gun. This differed from all other systems in not being a stand-alone weapon, but an accessory of the engine itself, not really much different in concept from the engine's own oil pump. This solved all problems related to making 2 stand-alone systems try to work together because there was only 1 system. Rate of fire still varied with engine RPM but the gun was incapable of firing when the prop was in the way regardless of engine speed, and its rate of fire could be MUCH higher than anything possible with conventional systems. Sadly for the Austrians, the war ended before this could go into production. It did see limited post-war use, but never achieved the success it deserved. An interesting note on all this is that the Austrians had a warning system for when their synchronized Schwarzlose guns weren't working right. This implies that once the system got out of synch, it stayed that way, so if you kept shooting, you'd only do more damage. I think this was actually true with all synchronizers, not just Austrians, but was a rather more common problem with them. Anyway, the Austrians glued thin wires to their props. While these wires were intact, they formed a circuit that lit a lightbulb on the instrument panel. If this lightbulb ever stopped working, the pilot would assume the wire was broken by a bullet going through the prop, so would break off the action. It seems to have taken quite a few bullets to break a prop, so if you stopped shooting soon enough, you could still get home OK (provided the enemy let you).

Welcome aboard, Sparrowhawk! New guy buys the drinks If you want to go hard core with a paper map, you'll find a bunch of them for you in the Download section of this forum. Folks like Olham have spent a lot of time verifying them. If you want to do what most folks do, however, besides the M key to bring up the map, there's also the "Tactical" radar display available with SHF-T. On the map, you'll see your whole mission route. On the Tactical screen, you'll see a blue line from the center to the edge somewhere that shows your heading to the next waypoint on your route. As you reach each waypoint, the tactical display's blue line changes to point at the next waypoint. BUT, if you want to just go straight home without following the whole route, hit SHF-W repeatedly. This is the "Next Waypoint" command. Eventually, it'll stop at the last remaining waypoint, which is your home base. Then just follow the blue line right to it.

The only aircraft actually in the game as units are Zeppelins. All others are abstracted and just give you a chance to spot enemy ships. There's no air vs. ship combat.

Maybe they were taking turns shooting flares at ground crewmen out doing the morning FOD sweep of the runway, and the last guy just scored a hit? :)

The wheels are on very short struts under the lower wing. The tail skids are under the rudders, which themselves are under the fuselage booms. In this pic, however, the plane up on jacks and tied down to stakes in the background, to do engine thrust tests.

@Hauksbee That photo of a model isn't the Luftkreuzer, it's a 2-seater that was normal ewcept for the tumorous growth over the nose. That was for the observer, so he could shoot ahead over the prop due to the long-running Austrian problems with synchronization. In this plane, the pilot sat at normal fuselage level, immediately behind the observer's "fox hole", so had even worse forward visibility than usual in KuK planes. This Lloyd was one of several things competing for the same specification for a raised observer. Other companies kept the observer behind the pilot but raised him flush with the top wing. Although the pilot could then see ahead as well as normal (as in under the upper wing and behind the engine cylinders), he couldn't communicate with the observer, so even that idea was scrapped. The eventual solution was to mount a gun atop the upper wing, which was the standard Austrian 2-seater armament for the entire war. But the Austrians usually got fancy with this, enclosing the gun and its ammo in a large, streamlined pod, part of which served as an auxiliary fuel tank. BTW, it wasn't just the Austrians who were limited to firing within specific engine RPM bands. That applied to nearly every synchronization system ever used. You'll note that the German fighters also have the tachometer (engine RPM counter) top and center of the instrument panel, just below the gun sight. What made things difficult for the Austrians was the delayed blowback operation of their gun, which caused its ROF to be more variable than the recoil-operated systems used by everybody else. Having an irregular rate of fire is bad when you're trying to synchronize :)

I hope you enjoy it :)

This was the Lloyd prototype for the Austro-Hungarian requirement for a heavy bomber. Needless to say, it was a total fiasco and, as you might expect, nosed over on its first taxi test, after which it was scrapped. Geez, and the poor pilot say back even with the wing trailing edge, so had even less forward vision than in most KuK planes. Lloyd in general was full of bizarre ideas. Most of their own designs that saw production and service were in the 1914-1915 time, before anybody knew better. One characteristic feature of their planes was wings covered with thin veneer instead of fabric. This made for a very strong wing (numerous photos exist of Lloyds landed Hobbit-style with no apparent damage) but it was practically impossible to repair even minor holes in the field. Still, the highly varnished wing surfaces looked quite cool. Anyway, as a result of all the engineers wasting time on this and the "Luftkreuzer", Lloyd spent the latter 1/2 of the war building the designs of other companies.

Ah, now you're speaking my language. I've been paid to make WW1 naval wargames, including a Jutland simulation, which is still AFAIK the only Jutland game to model not only every ship, shell, and torpedo fired, but also the whole year's campaign (in 1-year intervals) from 1 Jan 1915 to 31 Dec 1917, plus an expansion scenario pack for the 1914 battles involving Adm. von Spee. See here: http://stormpowered.stormeaglestudios.com/games/5776/index.asp (shameless plug). The Gefechtskehrswendung, like all naval maneuvers prior to short-range voice radio, was signaled by flags (day) or blinker light (night). In ships, there was always some number of signalmen whose sole job was watching other ships for incoming flag and light signals and making outgoing flag and light signals for their own ships. Thus, compared to planes, more odds of spotting what the commander wanted to do, but OTOH shell splinters frequently disabled signal halyards, blinker lights, and signalmen, so potato, po-tah-to. Anyway, in daylight, the signal system worked as follows: The formation commander would decide what to do and the flagship signalmen would haul up a group of flags saying what maneuver to perform. The other ships in the formation would haul up the same flag signal when they saw the flagship's and doing so indicating they'd received the order and were ready to comply. Once everybody was ready, the flagship would haul down the signal flags, which was the signal to start the maneuver. After that, all ships "danced their part in the show" on the pre-arranged understanding of what the maneuver signal required them to do based on their position in the formation. Dreadnoughts chugging along at 20 knots might seem pedestrian to us glorious flyboys but consider that each one of them contained enough people to staff a regiment or even a brigade of infantry and carried enough armor and firepower qualify as a major fortress on land. The only things that were any threat at all to them were others of their own kind and things capable of laying mines or launching torpedos. And you had dozens of these things steaming going flat out with all the coal smoke that entailed, in horrid North Sea weather, barely outside musket shot of each other, and with enough momentum behind them to sink both ships if somebody screwed up the maneuver. Thus, there was a premium on effective signaling. For a more thorough treatment of this subject than anybody here could possibly want, see The Rules of the Game by a guy named Gordon. But to return to Scheer... The Gefechtskehrswendung was an interesting maneuver because, due to the way ships turn, it was more like an airplane maneuver with individual units turning at different times. The maneuver actually started at the rear end of the line. Once the 2nd-to-last ship saw the last ship start to turn, she put her own helm over, and so on up the line to the leader. The RN was more into divisions of ships (as in flights of airplanes) doing things at the same time and the other ships in their divisions following the leader. Thus, the Grand Fleet usually steamed in parallel columns of divisions for ease of maneuvering on the approach to battle, all division leaders in line abreast and all division ships at the same spacing behind their leaders. These columns were spaced out about 1 ship's space further apart than the columns were long, so that the array of columns could form a single line of battle by having all division leaders turn the same amount in the same direction at the same time and all their division ships turning at the same spot when they got there. Again, everybody going the same speed.

Neat pic! Airplane formation maneuvers are very much like maneuvering formations of ships. Marching infantrymen can pivot in place but ships and airplanes require turn radii. And as with ships, airplane formation maneuvers are "equal speed", meaning all units start the same speed and maintain that speed throughout. Thus, IIRC most airplane formation maneuvers were based originally on naval maneuvers, but then folks realized that airplanes could pass above or below each other, so could do things impossible for ships. Still, in both cases, if you want to maintain the same overall formation while making a major change in direction, equal speed requires equal distance traveled, so it's always necessary for the left and right halves of the formation to switch places. All such precision formation maneuvers require 2 things. First, everybody needs to know what maneuver is going to happen. Second, there has to be a signal to start the maneuver, after which everybody in the formation does their thing based on what maneuver has been ordered. With troops, you have whistles, drums, and bugels. With ships, you have signal flags. With airplanes, you have flares. So I'm sure the signal to execute was done by a flare. Perhaps another flare was used beforehand to indicate what maneuver was desired. In OFF, few planes can carry flares and they have only a handful. But photos of WW1 planes reveal racks for dozens of them.

I dunno. The 1st 2 pics look posed but the 3rd pic appears to be candid with everybody standing around randomly. But note how they're all looking at something off to the left. Then look ath the expressions on their faces. Some appear to be saying "HOLY CRAP!", others "DAMN, that must have hurt", and others have apparently just turned their heads to look at what's going on, as if it made a loud noise that startled them. So maybe somebody else just crashed out on the runway?

I decided to take a break from skinning and actually fly something. Naturally, I wanted to give my new random hex DFW a spin so I started a pilot in FFA 289b way over at the E end of the Western Front, where I've never flown before. 1st mission was boring, flying around in crappy weather, so I did another. Got something exciting, bombing an airfield! Yay! So there I was at 11000' crossing the lines. The weather was total crap, all snow and clouds with a solid layer of nasty about 13000' so my plan was to fly right under it, but the French had the same idea. Suddenly, a whole French squadron loomed out of the mirk directly ahead, going the other way. Our formations flew through each other before either of us could react but, fortunately, they were Sopwith B1s and weren't interested in us, so we went our separate ways. Shortly thereafter we turned on the Initial Point and started the 8-mile bomb run. From this point, we started taking continuous but light and inaccurate flak, almost all low. Only 1 was close enough to shake my plane but no harm done. Finally, the target airfield at Belfort came into the sight and down went the bombs. My flight managed to destroy 5 hangars, a truck, and an airplane on the ground, with several other planes probably damaged, and then we went home, climbing even closer to the cloudbase, which had risen a bit by now to about 13500'. We recrossed the lines just below that level and started our descent to our base at Sierwitz. When down to about 9000' a few miles short of the field, we saw flak bursting ahead at about our level. Soon we saw another enemy squadron, again single-seater Strutters, again coming at us head-on, apparently just through bombing our field. I signalled the attack and made a pass through the formation with all our gunners taking potshots in passing, then cranked around and gave chase to trailing flight of 3. I attacked the one on the right while my gunner blazed away at the one on the left. My shots struck home and my target started diving for the lines. I kept after him firing many bursts and getting many hits, but this pursuit took my gunner out of range of his target. My target was shedding pieces and trailing a thin stream of smoke. However, I'm not the best shot with the DFW's mearly blind gun, especially as the iron sights don't even line up on the target. Thus, I expended all 500 rounds and still the target kept flying, although getting lower and lower. By now we were about 500' up right over the front lines. Desperately, I flogged my machine as fast as it would go and eventually overhauled my quarry, allowing my gunner to get some broadside-on shots into him. The Sopwith turned away from me to avoid this fire and ended up heading back toward the German side of the lines. I did a pathetically weak high yo-yo to cut inside his turn again for another broadside gunner shot and finally the Strutter crashed in No-Man's-Land. Woohoo! So, back towards Sierwitz, gathering up my wingmen. And once again flak appeared, this time slightly higher at 4 o'clock. However, we never saw the planes and reached our base without further incident. It appeared undamaged although there were a few craters scattered about, too far apart to be a problem for landing. So, I was all set to fill in my claim form but NOOOOOOOO...... Instead, I got a brief glimpse of a CFS3 error message. Thus, while I had the replay of the mission and could see what all had happened, I never got a claim form and as far as the game is concerned, the mission never happened. My pilot still officially has only flown 1 mission, still has the same amount of hours from it, and no expenditures of ammo or bombs. AARRGGHH!!!! That was about my best DFW sortie ever and nothing to show for it except a couple of screenshots Here's one of them. This shows the cloud of dust kicked up as the Strutter finally hit the ground and broke to pieces. Nice-looking DFW, though...

@ Tamper: Thanks for the props! It was fun to fly and while I flew quite a few other missions yesterday with other pilots, that's the one I kept replaying in my head when I got in bed. But to me, killing something in a DFW is the 2nd hardest thing to do in OFF, right after keeping the Pfalz from going sideways into the ground. I've only ever done it once before. Thus, I was so excited about doing it again that it was extremely frustrating that the whole mission went into campaign limbo :(. Thanks. The yoyo was pathetic because, first, the DFW isn't intended to do it. And second and more importantly, it's damn hard to do ACM at all when you can't see up, down, or forward, AND are maneuvering for your gunner's benefit, not your own. So my move was pretty embarassing all told ;). Well, I've enjoyed my new paintjob and baptized it in blood, so I'll be content with that. Now I'm going to go back to fighters. DFWs are more of an ACM challenge than I want to face on a regular basis ;).

I'm finally done with Austrian 2-seater skins. Here's the last, the unpainted DFW representing the most common "paint job" of the KuK air force, especially Brandenburg C.Is which this is supposed to be. I gave this one a nice, dark, varnish which appears to have been common with several Austrian airplane companies. Despite its apparent simplicity, this was actually a very fiddly skin to do. Paint covers up a lot of problems you're not even aware exist until you try to do without it :). So, the BH airplane factory now is out of work and all the employees will be sent to the front lines unless somebody places another order. Are there any other skins that need doing?

That's the result of the steeper downwards slope of the "round" nose fairing. Look at Elephant's 3rd pic very closely, the one that shows the noses of both planes. On the "normal" Alb in the background, the original truncated-cone nose fairing, between the spinner and the main fuselage, is painted a dark. If you mentally squeeze its front end down to the diameter of the prop shaft to make a "round" fairing out of it, you'll necessarily steepen the slope of its upper area, exposing more of the front of the engine.

The whole Austrian Albatros program obviously required a lot of communications and liaison with the Germans. In addition, OeFFAG was merely the airframe division of Austro-Daimler, which itself was a subsidiary of the German Daimler company, so inter-ally communications in this case were certainly better than the general rule. According to Grosz, Haddow, & Schiemer, the Austrian type of "round" nose was based on German wind tunnel experiments. Thus, the Germans would certainly have known of the idea and could easily have tested it themselves. After all, it was just swapping out 1 sheet metal fairing for another, not a big structural change. Alternatively, they could have simply acquired an Austrian nose fairing for testing, rather than building their own. The Germans did acquire various Austrian planes for testing, so why not some parts, too? Anyway, in studying the photo above, I can see no different at all between this fairing and those used as standard on late-153 and 253 OeFFAGs, even down to the pattern of screw holes holding it on (which is the same pattern used by the standard fairing). As to the date of the picture, the Austrians introduced the "round" nose as standard on the 2nd batch of Series 153 planes (airframes 112-211), ordered on 8 October 1917. For that to have happened, the wind tunnel tests would must have taken place at least a few months before then, to allow the Austrians time to learn of, acquire, and digest the data, decide to make the change, and retool the fairing production line. Thus, if this was a German-made experimental part (a 1-off, no production line), it could have been made at any time in the latter 1/2 of 1917. OTOH, if it was an Austrian part, it would probably have become available very late in 1917. I find this all quite intriguing. The plane itself is German, not Austrian, but the fairing is identical to the Austrian type. If the Germans had hand-made a custom, 1-off part for an experiment, I'd expect it to have look noticeably different from the Austrian production examples. So, I think we can rule that out. But this still leaves the question of who actually designed the part? Could it be that the Germans did all the engineering but decided not to use it while the Austrians did? Or did the Austrians design the part from German data, but the Germans didn't use it because of the "not invented here" syndrome (as with the OeFFAG wings)?

@Hauksbee There were a number of planes during and immediately after WW1 that had fixed, downward-firing MGs for strafing. Most were lash-ups created in the field but these inspired some purpose-built planes and gun systems. The idea seems to have fallen out of favor in the interwar years although IIRC there were a few field lash-ups again in WW2. In WW1, the idea had mixed results. Usually there were lots of guns (the average seems to have been around 6) and they were quite effective when the plane could find and attack a suitable target. However, installing these guns meant leaving the observer at home and this, plus the weight of the guns, ammo, and sometimes armor, made the strafers very vulnerable to enemy fighters. Thus, the purpose-built strafer ideas were mostly very large, twin-engined affairs able to carry all this stuff and some defensive gunners, too. And this seemed to have doomed the idea because the result was very expensive, complex to maintain, and useful only for a specialized purpose that might not always present itself.