Bullethead

Thanks. You been doing anything lately? I'm currently taking a break from pushing polys to learn how to texture things. I want to texture all the damn struts before I trim them to length. Texturing is painfully unintuitive but I have succeeded, after a fashion, in putting 1 piece of skin on 1 part. Now I need to figure out how to get that same piece of skin on a bunch of identical parts, which is something the tutorials don't seem to go into. BTW, thanks to all the lurkers for their interest. I can't believe a thread with barely 30 posts about an obscure plane being built by a complete n00b has garnered over 1500 views. I hope to repay your interest someday with something you might want to fly.

I think the SE5 and Brisfit are both more stable gunplatforms than the Pup, but the Pup's very stable for a rotary bird. HOWEVER, the absolute best gun platform is the Fee. You don't even have to line up with the target like a regular figher, just get in the general vicinity and your observer can get him with the swivel front gun

Tail feathers.... There's a small ventral fin but I'm going to do that as part of the tailskid when I get around to doing the landing gear.

Well, I dunno. Baseball seems to be a bastard child of cricket. There's basketball, but that's really just indoor soccer and of rather less interest to me than baseball. I think we invented tractor pulls, monster trucks, demolition derbies, figure-8 races, all the various frisbee games, quarters, "Hi Bob" and all its variations, snowboarding, and skateboarding.

Repeating myself because you seem to have missed it the 1st time. It actually shoots behind and left, compared to the Bristol's flightpath. The gun is mounted to fire level with the fuselage in the vertical plane, but at about a 35^ angle off the to the left in the horizontal plane. IOW, the bullets go between your wings and just outboard of the 9 o-clock position of your prop's disk. This type of mounting was called, aptly enough, the Strange mount. It was invented by Louis Strange after his near-death experience while trying to change the drum of a Lewis fixed to his upper wing, which he swore not to risk again. The Strange mounting was used in some numbers on many RFC planes of the period prior to the invention of the Foster mount. Anyway, the bottom line is, do not point the Bristol at your target. You have to fly on a parallel course at the enemy's 4 o'clock to have any real hope of hitting him. If you have TIR, just aim along the gun. If you don't, you'll have to hit F6 repeatedly until it cycles the POV to aiming down the gun. FYI, F6 cycles through a number of viewpoints inside the cockpit. The number and what they do vary from plane to plane, depending on the whims of whoever made the 3D model. All planes have a "flying" position and most have an "Iron Sight" position aiming down the gun barrel. There is also usually a view of the instrument panel, and perhaps of some of the instruments that are hard to see, such as the DFW's compass. Hitting F6 repeatedly moves your view through them all in order.

Quite so. Thanks Figured you'd like it.

I usually put 2 or 3 ounces of Irish or Scotch whisky in my Guiness . Rotgut, impure tequilas like Quervo are what get me into trouble . I prefer bashed neeps, but not by much . The worst part about mushy peas is that it looks just like wasabi, which I love, yet fails to deliver.

No real plane I've ever flown, nor any OFF plane except the D.II, has done this. Ground effect makes you float above the ground until you stall and fall from 5 feet up; it doesn't suck you down at all. The ONLY time I've been sucked down in real life was when the runway was on top of a hill with a valley just off the approach end. Then the wind would follow the contour of the hill down, thus creating a downdraft right at the threshold.

They're to hang your fuzzy dice on.

I think the D.II lives up to its name. Every time I land, when I'm still about 50 feet up and still going pretty fast, it suddenly noses steeply downwards with no warning. 1st time I flew it, this surprised me and I nearly crashed, but ended up just breaking the prop. Now I'm used to it can know exactly when it's going to happen, so I now land it smoothly. Is this just me, or doese everybody see this?

Who you callin' a "yank"? That's like calling a Lanc a Yorkie, or a Scot an Englishman I demand satisfaction. Go fly several careers with 20 Squadron in April 1917 and post up some good screenies from your adventures

I just found a cool book you don't have, but will surely want. I've been unable to put it down. Best part is, it's free: http://www.archive.org/details/spiderwebromance00pixsuoft The Spider Web is about the ASW operations of the RNAS Felixstowe flying boats, as told by the commander of the Felixstowe squadron. The narrative style is very good, plus it includes an insane amount of technical info on the various systems in use and how the boat operations worked. And they seem to have killed quite a few U-boats, more than I'd thought, plus a few Zeps. Not to mention flying in horrific weather off the water.

Perhaps your problem is that the gun does NOT fire straight ahead. It fires off at an angle to the side, to clear the prop. It's on the aptly named "Strange" gun mount .

And most of the players who scored the most points over their careers have been and always will be kickers.

I won't judge 1 UK beer against another--I leave that to the natives. But I do agree that the old Pendle Witch is an excellent brew.

For the same reason that rugby is a type of football. "Football" is a very generic term used for many different types of games. Most of them involve carrying the ball in your hands most of the time. The inability to use your hands is a recent innovation much frowned-on by traditionalists . Because the clock stops when they're showing commercials for beer and pick-up trucks. To punish those players for losing the ball. Footballs are perfectly round in cross-section. Soccer is the correct name for the specific version of football played under the association rules or whatever they call themselves. You know, the world cup and all that. It means that particular game and no other. OTOH, "football" has always been a very generic term encompassing everything from the US version to the Kirkwall Ba' Game in Orkney, and all points in between.

The MC at the beginning is Takeshi Kitano I believe, star of Takeshi's Castle. Certainly, the event in the vid is like something off that show. I've never seen the original Takeshi's Castle, but the US version, known as MCX was HILAROUS. It was just clips from the real show overdubbed in an extremely bawdy manner satirizing reality shows and sports at the same time, all with the knowledge that it had little to do with the original. I loved it .

I'm one of those people who'll eat anything once, so I had some of this...ONCE. Utterly ruined the taste of the rest of my pint of Newkie Brrrroon. Why come it is the Brits owned India and assorted spice islands for so long, yet never learned season food themselves?

As an old artilleryman, I've always preferred this one That's a good vid. Surprising as it may seem, there's a high school team in the DFW area of Texas that does the haka. Some years ago they had a Maori student who started it, and though he's graduated they still do it.

This is a question I'd like to know more about myself. But I have been able to piece some of it together, as a result of trying to make a new airplane for OFF. Here's how things seem to work to me (no doubt substantially wrong in a number of places....). First off, the "flight model" apparently consists of 2 main parts. First off, each type of airplane has a number of data files that define its physical and flight characteristics. IOW, you can change 1 plane's data without affecting any of the others. This is where all your reseached info goes. The 2nd part is in the CFS3 engine, which interprets the data files for the various airplanes and uses that to make the airplanes move. Changes to this part affect all airplanes. I'd imagine OBD can tweak this part to some extent, or work around it somehow, but by and large this is probably pretty constant. IOW, it will always interpret the airplane data in pretty much the same way. So..... The data files. The main one of these is the .AIR file, edited with the AirWrench program. This file is full of every real-world stat and performance figure you can imagine. It works kinda like a spreadsheet, in that if you change 1 value, it recalculates many of the others. Anyway, what you do is, you enter all sorts of the real-world values for the airplane into the various fields, it calculates others, and there you go. In theory, this system should result in an airplane that flies in the game just like it did in real life. After all, the aerodynamic data are the same for both. However, this isn't the case because the CFS3 engine's interpretation of these data varies somewhat from how planes fly in reality. In fact, there are some real-world things that are just impossible for the CFS3 engine to do, such as (I've heard) making the Dr.I do a flat turn. So at this point, you have to tweak the airplane's data away from realworld values to make it better match its real performance. For example, apparently one of the frequent things that needs tweaking is engine power, because even if you put in X hp at Y rpm, you don't get that in the game. I've heard it takes quite a lot of testing and tweaking just to get the speeds and climbs correct, let alone the handling characteristics. Eventually, you will reach a point of closest approximation to what the real plane could do, but can't get it anybetter. At the bottom line, therefore, you research the airplane and decide what its various physical and aerodynamic values were, based on which sources you like. You use that as a starting point in the game, then try to get those chosen values out of the plane by giving it different values as needed. This is a process I'm not looking forward to with my plane

Well, it actually snowed again in Lousy Anna's armpit. And it snowed HARD, and for a long time. It's still snowing now, in fact, but just barely. This was a strange storm. Yesterday, it got up to 39^F for most of the day with a constant drizzle mixed with sleet. Then about midnight last night, it started raining hard with sleet mixed in, eventually turning to freezing rain. All this put 1" of water on the ground. Then it started snowing about 0500 and it's expected to keep snowing until 1200 (1/2 hour from now). The temperature never got below 33^F at ground level, and the ground was covered with all this warmer water, so the snow was melting pretty fast. However, it was snowing so hard that it still accumulated up to about 2" at its maximum extent, which happened about 0800. Since then, it's warmed up a bit more, so the stuff is now melting faster than it's piling up and the ground is becoming visible again. Had it been colder on the ground, I bet we'd have accumulated 4-5". That would have been a personal record for me at this location. My sister lives in Dallas where it's been colder and this same storm gave her 12" of snow yesterday afternoon, a record for that area. Anyway, nothing anywhere near what the yankees are getting, but when put against the local norms, it's rather impressive. Plus, it's the 2nd time it's snowed this winter, where even once is a rarity.

Yeah, soccer players and their theatrical fake injuries make me gag. But OTOH, if they didn't do that, then the game would have a negative entertainment value instead of just a zero . Geez, how did you survive 3 years of US rugby? I played some in college, too, and consider myself fortunate that the school soon banned it due to the appalling casualties. Nobody I played with had ever played rugby prior to college, but had all grown up playing US football. Thus, everybody ran and tackled as if they were wearing full football armor, so there were lots of head-on collisions often resulting in mutual destruction. I think the care you have to take when tackling in rugby is the main problem the sport has in catching on in the US. US kids grow up being coached continually that tackling that way is bad, so they find it very hard to adjust.

I don't smoke, but I do drink . Still, I see the prop disk sober or soused.

Actually, you can tell quite a lot from these pictures. It's clear that the central ribs failed at the rear side of the leading edge, which was a D-shaped assembly. The front spart formed the vertical part of the D, and it was planked from there to the actual leading edge. Every part of the ribs from there back is no longer attached to the airplane. The impact with the ground threw the remaining shreds of central upper fabric forward over the leading edge, so that it hung down in front. Had the rear parts of the central ribs still been attached to this fabric, they would have gone with it and would be seen either hanging over the front of the wing, or on the ground just in front of the plane. They certainly didn't go the other way and hang down behind the upper front spar, or you'd be able to see them through the gap between the upper and central wings. So where is all this missing structure, amounting to about 3/4 of the cord of most of the upper wing ribs, the upper rear spar, and upper trailing edge? The only possible explanation is that separated in flight just as LvR said. Then it came down by a different path to land a considerable distance away from the crash site. It looks to me more like a matter of luck. LvR suffered a rather different type of failure from the fatal crashes, which left him with a controllable airplane. The other guys' planes broke in different places and apparently what they had left was not controllable. OTOH, it's possible that the other guys might have had controllable airplanes but where KO'd or even killed by wreckage smacking them upside their heads or stabbing them in the chest. Here's Gontermann's wreck: http://www.pourlemerite.org/wwi/air/gontermannplane.gif At first glance this looks quite similar to like LvR's wreck, but note that the remaining piece of the upper wing is in fact the TRAILING EDGE lying upside down as it flipped forward on ground impact. See the aileron in the foreground? So Gontermann did indeed suffer a leading edge failure, unlike LvR. This probably resulted in very large assymetrial drag and lift due to different amounts of wing and wreckage remaining on both sides. And because Gontermann's failure occured well in front of the cockpit instead of essentially over it as with LvR, it's possible he took some wreckage in the face. Also note that Gontermann seems to have hit the ground at about the same angle and speed as LvR, given the similar positions of and damage to their fuselages. So assuming he was still alive when he hit the ground, he MIGHT have survived the impact. And OTOH, LvR might have been killed, too. So there's another bit of luck. At the bottom line, Gontermann MIGHT actually have been under a fair amount of control all the way to the ground, then died on impact, due to an unlucky bounce or being stabbed by a piece of wreckage. Here's Pastor's wreck: http://www.fokkerdr1.com/Dr1-121-17_02.jpg He seems to have hit the ground rather steeper and harder than either LvR or Gontermann, indicating either a much less controllable plane or that he was incapacitated before impact. Otherwise, though, his wreck is much more like Gontermann's than LvR's. Note that again, it's his trailing edge that remains. Anyway, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that all 3 of these guys were flying biplanes when they hit. All of their upper wings were effectively destroyed. Sure, none of them had come off completely, but what was left sure wasn't contributing to lift. And in the case of at least Pastor and probably Gontermann, the remains were doing more harm than good.

I dunno. I bet this can be defined in the various text and xml files that define the varous functions of the airplane in the game. After all, some planes in CFS3 had cannon in the nose, or cannon in the wings, or both I think. Tell you what... Right now I'm in the process of building an MS Type AI for OFF. When I get to this point, I'll see if I can set up 1 of its twin guns as an MG and the other as a cannon . To be honest, I haven't messed with this since programming my stick last year when I installed BHaH, so I think that all Vickers are cannons and all Lewis are machine guns, but don't hold me to that. What I'm really waiting for is to be able to fire the Lewis in the reloading position (hint, hint). I think all the Nupes had been fired the same way, so they were in the habit. Then somebody thought of Bowden cables which, as von Baur says, had been a while. Patented in 1896 in fact.