Bullethead

First off, welcome aboard! New guys buys the drinks! I can't answer your TIR question because the oldest version I've ever had was #4. I suspect you can find that pretty cheap now that TIR5 is out. I see the prop disk just fine, so perhaps it's a v-card/driver/display settings thing? I have an nVidia 8800 of some sort. I've never bothered to find out 1 way or the other. OFF wingmen fly a HUGE traffic pattern, like into the next county, so it takes them like 10-15 minutes to make their approach. I don't have the patience to wait for them, so I just land as soon as I get home and end the mission with them disappearing into the distance.

Question.... Where is the center section of the wing? The caption of the photo says he suffered a "leading edge failure", but the leading is is all that's left. And it's intact, except on the starboard tip where it hit the ground. But all the rest of the upper wing structure between the ailerons is GONE. Anyway, it appears he lost a bit more than 1/2 his top wing area and the little bits that were left at each end and in between don't inspire confidence. So I'd say he EFFECTIVELY lost his upper wing, even if some of it was still attached.

Now we're talking . Look at the poor landing gear, though. Pretty impressive performance for mere bungie cords wrapped around the fixed and hinged parts of the axles. But then, rough landings impose loads several times the planes weight, and as a shock load, too, so it should be able to hold up 3x the weight as shown here. You can tell it's not happy about it, though

Cool pic, and it no doubt helped sell some E.Vs, but if you do the math, it's not that impressive. Outboard of the struts, there are only 8 men so say 1200 pounds give or take. The loaded weight of the plane was about 1300 pounds, so the wing should have been able to support another 32 men. Or, if you assume 1 wing only holds up 1/2 the weight, it should still have been able to hold up another 16 men. Too bad there wasn't room for them all

I never said the planes pulled 9Gs. I said the wings were, in some cases, strong enough to support 9x times the weight of the plane. The usual standard for everybody, from at least mid-1916 onwards seems to have been 5x times the airplane's weight, but some planes were rather stronger than necessary. When you designed a new airplane, one of the requirements before getting a production order was passing a static load test. They did this by putting a wing panel between sawhorses and piling sandbags on it until it either broke or held up the required amount of weight. And note that the was JUST the wing panel, without any of the struts and wires that normally braced it on the airplane. You can find many photos of this happening if you look hard enough. In some cases, even when it met requirements, they kept piling on sand until it broke just to know where the limit was. In other cases, if it reached the requirement, they put the plane into service as a regular production machine. That's about the only significant change in the process down to the present day--static test planes never fly these days.

Lost in all this complaining about how bad the snow is in DC, is this 1 very important piece of good news: Congress is no longer in session. That means your life, liberty, and money are safe for the time being

The wings were up to it, no problem. After all, they could support usually at least 5x, and sometimes up to 9x, the weight of the entire plane, beside which a few dozen pounds of thrust from an MG firing was nothing. The real problems were 1) lack of ammo stowage space, and 2) in accessiblility in flight. #1 precluded everything except the Lewis, which was the only magazine-fed MG with a large enough magazine to make it worthwhile. #2 was a major problem in WW1, where pilots demanded their MGs close enough to them to be able to try to clear the all-too-frequent jams. As a result of this, wing guns in WW1 were regarded as langiappe, always providing extra firepower to the fuselage guns and never being the only armament. There were quite a few WW1 planes with wing guns. Besides all the early Nupes, there were BE12s with as many as 3 Lewises and various nightfighters with a pair. The Austro-Hungarians lacked synchronizers even longer than the Brits so had Schwartzlose guns on the upper wing even into early 1918. But what you're talking about is guns out to the sides. That happened also. Sopwith Dolphins sometimes moved their 2 Lewis guns from the cockpit to out under the lower wings. SPADs in Corps de Armee squadrons (instead of Groupes de Combat) sometimes mounted Lewises on their inner interplane struts for ground attack work, and I believe this idea was used on several other planes as well.

Yeah, but that was a later innovation. With those, often the Bowden cable went through the back of the pistol grip and pulled the trigger itself from behind, rather than operating some moving part to push the trigger from the front. But originally, they had a bare cable fixed to the airframe. I'm still curious as to how they got the gun back up into its forward position.

I believe the top-wing Lewis was always fired mechanically via a cable. On the gun itself, there was a small gizmo bolted to the trigger guard. Inside this gizmo was some moving part with the cable attached on 1 end and the other end in contact with the trigger. Thus, a pull on the cable depressed the trigger and fired the gun. IIRC, they had a couple of different designs of gizmos but they all operated on this principle. At its lower end, the cable couldn't be attached to the joystick because that would make make the gun fire when you pulled the stick back. But they couldn't let it hang loose or the wind would blow it back. So it was fastened to the airframe, IIRC near the throttle. You can sometimes see it in cockpit photos. Anyway, it appears the usual drill was to let go of the throttle and push or pull forwards or backwards anywhere on the cable above its lower fastening, which resulted in a pulling action at the trigger gizmo. As for reloading the Lewis, in 1915-1916 the gun was in a fixed mounting so there was nothing for it but to stand up in the cockpit as shown in the video. This was seen as highly dangerous so a guy named Foster invented a sliding track to bring the gun to the pilot. This was fitted in later Nupes, the SE5, nightfighters, etc. The Foster mount was also operated by cables, but I'm not quite certain how they were rove. There was 1 cable for sure that unlocked the mechanism so the gun could slide, and there was quite certainly another cable that pulled the gun back up and forward to firing position. In many photos, you can see a 3rd cable attached to the butt of the Lewis, evidently for pulling it down and backwards. I'm pretty sure the slide latch consisted of a springloaded pin that stuck through holes in the slide track. If you didn't pull its cable, then the pin would push itself into any hole encountered. Thus, if there were multiple holes in the track, to lock the gun at intermediate positions, you'd have to keep this cable pulled the whole time you were sliding the gun, so that's 1 hand occupied full-time during movement. The main question to me is, how did they get the gun back up and forward? I figure the cable for this had to have gone to a reel, because when the gun was in firing position, there would have been several feet of this cable whipping around in your face otherwise. Also, Lewis guns weighed 20-odd pounds and you're trying both to lift it and move it forward against the slipstream. Thus, some sort of mechanical advantage seems necessary. So, this is just a guess, but I figure that getting the gun back up to its forward position involved flying along level with the stick between your knees. Then 1 hand kept the latch pin pulled back while the other cranked hard on the cable reel, winching the gun back into position. Of course, if there was only the 1 hole for the forward, level gun position, then you could fly with 1 hand while reeling with the other.

Schweet Where I live, we call those birds "duck hawks". That's because their most notable performances are this time of year when they swoop over your pond and get air-to-air kills on wood ducks. The ducks see him coming and all scramble, and he vulches one out of the herd. The hawk can't fly far carrying a bird as big as he is, but he's got enough momentum (usually) to make a controlled crash on the far bank. Wish I had a vid of that.

I have to agree with OvS.....

So who ended up with the booze for clearing your driveway? (EDIT) BTW, Love your license plate

It's so bad, some of it is bleeding over. It's supposed to snow or sleet here (AGAIN) tonight or tomorrow. Probably won't stick, or be very much if it does, but ANY around here is cause for alarm

I expect there will be a huge crop of new DC residents come November . So it can't be all bad being snowed in like that.

Glad to be of service. I assume you're making a model of it? Please post some pics when you get it far enough along.

How's this?

This IS completely meaningless to all outside the US, and nearly meaningless to all outside Lousy Anna, but the New Orleans Saints just won the NFL Superbowl, the championship game of US football. In all their 43 years of existence, they've only had a winning record MAYBE a half-dozen times, and it was foretold by voodoo queen Marie Labeau that Hell would freeze over before they ever even got in the Superbowl, let alone won it. Right now, I'm wearing 3 pairs of wool socks under my slippers, with my sweat pants overwrapping all. And my feet are STILL cold. Right now, Bourbon Street is a madhouse and everybody in Lousy Anna who isn't there is passed out drunk on an elevated platform to keep off the cold, cold ground. WHO DAT GON BEAT DEM SAINTS?!?!?!? (ask Olham for a translation)

Yeah, the whole underside of the seats and all the supporting poles were covered with rust, so the continual stamping going on above created a duststorm below. If you ever had to go down there, you never looked up or you'd get flecks of rust and broken glass in your eyes.

I lived in New Orleans in the early 70s and went to just about every Saints game back then, in Tulane Stadium. That place was built pretty much entirely out of metal scaffolding poles with diamond plate loosely attached with bolts. When 30,000 or so people stamped their feet in unison on that, which they did most of the game, it threatened to collapse, but it make the loudest noise ever heard at any sporting even not involving race cars . It also made it dangerous to go below for snacks or the bathroom because nuts and bolts were always shaking loose and dropping like bullets into the crowd below. What I remember most about that place, however, was that it sold beer in glass bottles the 1st year or 2 I was there. Most fans would have a large pile of dead soldiers between their feet by the end of the 1st quarter, which from that point on became missiles whenever they didn't like a play or the officiating (which, given how bad the Saints were, happened frequently). As a result, we usually sat high up behind the end zone to avoid the barrage. I remember looking down the length of the stands and seeing hundreds of beer bottles twinkling in the sun as they rained down towards the field. Many didn't make it and instead smacked fans lower down the stands in the backs of their heads, or exploded when hitting the metal stands. Casualties were always heavy amongst spectators, but I remember one game where 3 referrees got nailed and had to be carted off. That was a famous day long-remembered--normally they only got 1 . So eventually, they switched from bottled beer to draft. Instead of carrying a case of bottles up and down the stands, the vendors instead had small kegs on their backs. This only lasted 1 year, though, IIRC. The problem was, the vendors couldn't resist the urge to pour themselves 4-5 free beers per trip. They'd get so plastered they'd eventually sit down in the aisles, take their kegs off, and pass them down the aisles, never to be seen again. If you were lucky, a vendor would collapse within a row or 2 of you. If you were REALLY lucky, he wouldn't have fallen down too many times beforehand, so his beer wouldn't be totally foam. Because otherwise, you weren't likely to get any beer because once this happened, the keg would never get refilled. And this, my children, is why today sports fans all over the world have to sacrifice watching part of the game, go downstairs, and stand in long lines to go get their own Dixiecup of beer (slightly smaller AND more expensive every year), then spill 1/2 of it climbing back to their seats. It's all the fault of the New Orleans Saints . And all out in the open. There's none of that Las Vegas "what happens here stays here" crap. The true degenerates party in New Orleans and don't care if the world knows about it. The lack of that last inhibition ratchets the excesses up several more notches . I think it will be as they say of the 1960s: "It you remember the 60s, you weren't there." In the future, folks will be PRETTY SURE the Saints won, but there will always be some doubt and the whole month of February 2010 will be just a vague memory. I mean, this happened in the middle of Carnival, so everybody was already a week into a long bender and partying as hard as New Orleans normally does. Most folks don't remember normal Carnivals very well, and now they're partying even harder than usual. I'm wondering if they can keep it going for another week until Mardi Gras, or if they'll all have collapsed in exhaustion by then

Yinnah! Shot for the chips on that, Boet. Jislaaik, how did OFF ever happen with Winder tuning like this at the indabas? Ek se, it must have made the rest of the team dwaal. You should write stuff in the "Reports from the Front" thread this way

That's something I'd do only with the texture. WAY too many polys doing it 3D I'd think.

You can already do this. Problem is, it's only possible once you find 1 file by that person. When you do, there's a link to find other files by the same guy.

Billy Cannon is one of my closest neighbors--he lives about 1 mile away. I see him around town fairly often, especially at the barber shop.

I agree. They doped the fabric specifically to stretch it taut, so it wouldn't flail around and disintegrate. Thus, there was just a very subtle depression between the ribs and mostly all you saw was the tapes, unless the light was nearly parelle to the surface. That's another reason I decided not to do 3D ribs. Now on a fuselage like this one, with fabric stretched over stringers, you do get prominent lines there. That's why I didn't put smoothing groups on my fuselage, except longitudinally between the stringers. One of these days, I'll do a plane with a scalloped trailing edge. Then there's no choice but to slice up the wing.

The real Siemens-Schuckert D.I was virtually a stick-for-stick copy of the N.17. Apart from the German paintjob, the only visual differences were a Spandau instead of a Vickers and most of the front cowling cut away in pie slices. The plane in the film has those features. To me, it seems an odd choice if you're going to go to the trouble and expense of owning a WW1 airplane or reproduction. I can't really see anybody growing up wanting to own such a thing, considering its lack of celebrity. Maybe the owner really wanted a German plane, but all he could find at an affordable price was an N.17, so he made it look like the S-S D.I?