Bullethead

Is that what you all call yourselves, or is that your language? Funny story. Shortly after 9/11, we got advised by DHS that terrorists might try to join our fire department as volunteers, so they could use one of our trucks as a secondary bomb to take out responders at an on-going incident. Not 2 days later, I got a phone call from a guy wanting volunteer, and he sounded like he had a very thick Arabic accent which I could barely understand. So I had the cops check him out. He turned out merely to be a South African .

What I thought most interesting was that one of the planes was a Siemens-Schukert D.I, or at least made to look like one :).

Only do scrambles if you're either very, very good, or if you're in a stallfighter. But as a general rule, never do them at all. They're completely unrealistic. When you get a scramble, the best bet is to advance time.

A.k.a. "Chucky's Revenge". I grooved on that myself. You'd be surprised. Mardi Gras is 16 Feb this year so the Carnival is already going. You can bet that whatever happens in the next few days will be dwarfed by what debauchery goes on Tuesday after next.

That was our usual state for a couple generations. I remember I got season tickets in 1973 I think it was, because I could prove I'd been to the only 2 games they'd won the year before, and no others. That was back when they played outdoors in Tulane Stadium, which was torn down shortly thereafter and they built the Superdome. That's a venue that's hosted many a Superbowl, but not for the home team. And a pretty good guy, too, even without the "original GI Joe" scar. Did you see that sport science show where he hit 10 out of 10 bullseyes at 20m with a football, easily beating olympic archers at the same range? Bourbon Street is in the heart of everybody. Never was any street in the world so aptly named. So just pour down 4-6 fingers of your favorite bourbon and you're there

Way back in my booze-addled brain, I seem to recall "Scramblin' Fran" winning one, but I could be halucinating. It's about time for them to kick in, after all. I've been drinking absinthe (for voodoo purposes only) since 1600 and the bottle's about dead. Well, at least you didn't lose 4 in a row like Buffalo and never been there before or since. THAT'S the definition of NOT QUITE. Pies Iesu domine, dona eis requiem The Viqueens really should have been de who dat beat dem Saints 2 weeks ago. They got 200+ more yards of offense, and despite all the turnovers were in position to win the game in regulation. But a 26-year old Favre would have thrown the game-losing intercetion long before the 40-year old version. What really killed them was the 12-men-in-the-huddle penalty (I can see this going right over the heads of all but googly bowlers) that forced the long-yardage intercepted throw that resulted in the game going to overtime. That was completely inexplicable from any rational POV, given the professionalism of the Vikes. But the coach and QB both said their radios went dead right then. Coincidence? If you've followed the Saints, formerly known as the "Ain'ts", this season, then you've seen many examples of divine intervention in their favor. I doubt this was in any way due to their name, given the well-documented indifference from that religious direction for nearly 1/2 a century. This year, I think they had voodoo on their side. I'm right now wearing a T-shirt covered with voodoo gris-gris motifs wrapped around the Saints' logo, designed and autographed by Saint's linebacker Jonathan Vilma, who is a Haitian. He was selling these shirts to raise money for earthquake releif. It's the only thing keeping my toes moderately chilly right now

New Orleans won by 14 wickets, not out. I think that's the correct translation

Thanks :). As to polys, I think it's considerably leaner than the more recent OBD planes. The struts are all just 6-sided with 5 segments, except for the front long one, which has a few more due to a notch for the crossbar. The main part of the wing is only 20 or so polys: 14 forming the airfoil shape that run from centerline to the outboard end, then 3 or 4 more each in the cut-outs for the aileron and over the cockpit. Smoothing groups are cool . The outer ends of the aileron and wingtip objects naturaly have more due to having to curve around the tip and taper in thickness while following the airfoil, but it's not that many. A recent OBD plane would have 3D ribs molded into the wing, all sorts of fittings and clevises where struts join wing, etc. I left all those off. I decided not to do 3D ribs more for aesthetic reasons than for polys. IMHO, while 3D ribs look good in the LOD100 model, they're not in other LODs and that causes a problem. The problem is, all LODs use the same texture, or at least a MIP of it. Anyway, if the LOD100 model has built-in ribs, then skinning it with 2D fake ribs on the texture looks like crap because it unrealisticaly exaggerates the ribs. But if you don't put rib shadows on the skin to make the LOD100 look good, then the wing is utterly flat and without ribs just a few yards away. So, IMHO, the better thing is to make the wing flat and do the ribs with the skin, so they look good at all LODs.

That doesn't sound like a lot of fun. Hope you have enough booze to last until the thaw. BTW, I hear such snowstorms usually result in local baby-booms. So be careful in there Who'd a thunk it.

Very interesting. South Africa isn't exactly the place I'd expect to see American slang painted on airliners. Given the gerat difficulty I have understanding most South Africans, I not sure they speak English down there . Anybody else old enough to remember Braniff Airlines? Back in the 60s, they put an end to the "plain plane" (the unpainted silver of the day) and started painting their planes all sorts of solid colors. They favored orange fuselages but had planes in just about every other color. Then in the 70s, they went totally psychodelic. They commissioned famous, weird artists to paint a number of planes--I think Picasso did one, and Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol at least were in their commericals. You can imagine how that looked--all sorts of clashing colors in a mix of jagged and curved blotches. Many other planes were repainted in random "camouflage" of pastel pinks, oranges, yellows, and green, having in common only the then-current hippy-style "peace dove" on the tail, although the color if it often varied. Anyway, you could tell it was a Braniff plane just from the weird colors even if you couldn't read the logo. The stewardesses all wore either hippy-inspired or space cadet-type uniforms, usually none of them looking alike on the same plane. Their whole program seemed to be party-oriented. I think some of the "Naughty Stewardesses" movies of the time were inspired by Braniff. YouTube's got a collection of old Braniff commercials: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=braniff+commercial&search_type=&aq=f. They even have may favorite, "The Air Strip", which shows off some stewardess fashion from before they went totally weird: BTW, me ol' gray-haired mother was a Delta stewardess back in the 50s. She was absolutely horrified by the Braniff stewardesses

A bit more progress.... Wing and strutus. <BR><BR>For a monoplane, this thing sure has a confusing tangle of struts. I had to scrounge a bunch of photos of the real thing and RC and plastic models to figure it out; 3-views just can't protray them in all their intricacy. I haven't trimmed any of them to length yet, so there's some Gmax overlapping in this pic that makes things even more confusing.<BR><BR>In case you can't tell, this thing's got a pair of long, angled struts from the lower fuselage to far out on the wing. At their midpoints they are connected by a horizontal rod and from there smaller struts angle back toward the center. Their top ends meet the tops of the outer N-shaped cabane struts. There are are inner cabane struts that lean inboard a little. In front is an inverted V and in the rear is just a lone vertical post. The blue thing threaded through the cabanes is a Nieuport-type aileron pushrod.

I fly for whichever side is the underdog, in terms of numbers and/or airplane performance. Thus, I fly for both sides at different times, depending on how the balance stands then. However, this has to be balanced against what's in the game. IMHO, the only part of the campaign that's "finished" is the Flanders area, and that only for 1917-1918. Earlier in time, there aren't but a few of the many types of planes then in use, even in Flanders. And the complete absence of French 2-seaters rules out both French and US careers, or German careers facing their parts of the front (most of its lenght). So, Flanders 1917-1918. I fly for the King in the 1st half of 1917, in a Fee or Pup (I'd fly the DH2 if I could keep out of unrecoverable spins). The other planes aren't "underdog" enough for me. I used to avoid the 2nd half of 1917 but now I have the DH5 then. The 1st few months of 1918 are fun in an Albatros D.V or a Pfalz. During the Kaiserschlacht battles, I fly a Camel or SE5, sometimes a Brisfit. Then, in the last months of the war, I fly the D.VII. While this is arguable the best all-around plane in the game, it's SO outnumbered that staying alive any length of time is a huge challenge.

You usually can't land at Wilhelmshaven. With the High Seas Fleet crowding the harbor, the place is usually totally obscured by an immense cloud of coal smoke

Yeah, these guns had a recoil system. That's what the smaller tubes are around and above the barrel. The usual system was an hydraulic cylinder 1 or more gas cylinders. The hydraulic cylinder slowed and stopped the recoil, during which the gas cylinders compressed. Then the gas cylinders returned the barrel forward to the firing position. But that's not really what I'd call "pneumatic". Maybe instead the French were using those early recoilless guns? I could see that being called "pneumatic" in the early days before "recoilless" had become the standard term, in that backwards air pressure is what balanced the recoil.

VERY NICE!!! I espeically like the one with Sir Robin's minstrels attacking the giant killer rabbit

I take it you were flying a D.VII or Albatros before? The E.V is a pretty typical rotary bird IMHO. If you're proficient with the Dr.I, Camel, Pup, Nupes, etc., you should be able to fly it pretty much the same. One of the cool things about OFF is that the rotaries fly very differently from the inlines. You can see why people specialized in 1 or the other back in the day .

Hey, that's a neat trick. Thanks!

The MS Type AI had a humped upper fuselage decking somewhat like a Camel, but somewhat more complicated in shape. The rear end of, in fact, forces the face of the instrument panel. Even worse, there seem to have been 2 rather different versions of it, different on such important things as the positions of the guns and the cockpit cut-out shape, and it's hard to get a full set of looks at either version. But after scouring the web looking at build photos of plastic models, I've finally figured out what one of them looked like from all angles. So, that's the version I'm doing. Now the question is, how to do it? After cogitating over this for a long, long time, and using what I learned doing the cowling, I have finally come up with a plan. So, I have done the preparatory work but nothing permanent yet. Before taking the plunge, I'd like to run this plan by the experts to see if I'm on the right track. So here's the idea..... The basic idea is to use the Hell outta Booleans. In the pick below, I've set all the operands up so you can see how they'll work. Right now, they're all still separate objects and no cutting has been done. When all is said and done, the decking will be the top of the Fuselage object. It will have depressions in the top of it for the guns, and the hole for the cockpit will go partly through what used to be the decking and partly through the original fuselage. I propose to proceed as follows: 1. Make the Notch for the Gun Cooling Jacket Boolean cut the decking to match the jacket cookie cutter. Pause to fix redundant vertices. Reverse the process to Boolean cut the jacket cooking cuter to match the decking. Pause to fix redundant vertices. Delete the cut polys of the decking and the non-overlapping parts of the jacket cookie cutter, so that the notch is lined with fragments of what used to be the jacket cookie cutter. Convert the remains of the jacket cookie cutter into an editable mesh, flip the normals, attach to the decking, and weld vertices. 2. Make Notch for Gun Breech Same process as above but for the narrower, rectangular section of the gun. 3. Finish the Decking Clone and mirror the notched decking to the other side and join the halves, resulting in the mostly-finished decking shape. 4. Join the Decking to the Fuselage Boolean cut the decking to the fuselage, then the fuselage to the decking, dealing with excess vertices in between. Delete the lower part of the decking in side the fuselage, and the fuselage top under the decking, then attach and weld. The decking is now the fuselage upper surface. 5. Cut the Cockpit Hole 6. Play with Smoothing Groups 7. Finishing Touches After doing the above, I'm going to delete 1/2 the fuselage (decking and all) and build the tail, wings, wheels, and all their struts and wires. Once I've got that all done and mirror and weld the fuselage, I'll have some more notches to cut in the decking, for the MG feed chutes and cocking handles. These aren't symmetrical across the airplane's centerline. <P dir=ltr>That's the plan, but you now what they say about how long plans last . Is this a good way to go about it, or is there a better way? Thanks in advance.

I look forward to seeing it. The Gmax commands you include in such things are always jaw-dropping. Anyway, I think the decking's done, FINALLY! As shown in the pic above, the cut as made was rather jagged, so it required a bunch of vertex and edge tweaking. Then I cut out the cockpit hole, and that required a lot more of the same, plus mucho playing with smoothing groups. I was unable to iron every wrinkle and shadow out completely from every angle, but I got it looking pretty good from almost all angles. While I'm sure the remainder is mostly my lack of skill, I do think there are some limitations of the medium here, trying to model complex shapes with just flat surfaces. So here's the finished product. As stated earlier, I still have to cut some notches for the feed chutes, but that won't happen until far down the road.

Thanks! Yup, that's the plan. The only way this engine will ever been seen is from external view, at very short range, with the motor off. The LOD versions will look like they're made out of Lego . For the blurred one, I was going to take my detailed engine texture and circle-blur it, then apply it to a solid disk of about 11 total polys. That's my project for the next time I get stuck on something with the main plane. And once I do that, about the only such project left will be the cockpits, which I'm not really looking forward to. Looking nice! If you ever need a 150-160hp Gnome, I'll trade ya for it

OK, I think I got the problem solved about the rear decking not cutting. It seems to have been a simple fix. I haven't gone all the way with it yet, so I can't say for sure, but it seems to be working pretty well so far. I just wanted to say this now to save Hairyspin some trouble, although if he's making a complex tutorial on a par with is last one, I'd like to see it anyway because it'll be sure to have some good info in it. The reason why cuts weren't working seems to be that the polys of the rear deck weren't planar. They all had 4 vertices that tapered in 2 dimensions from 1 poly to the next. Thus, Gmax didn't know where to cut them. So what I did was divide these polys into triangles, as you can see in the pic below. Voila--a nice, neat cut where the triangles cross each other. Something to keep in mind when trying to cut compound curves......

OK, please tell the admins

Why were they called "pneumatic guns"? AFAIK, this was the standard 37mm Hotchkiss designed in the late 1800s as an anti-torpedoboat weapon for battleships and cruisers. It was just a conventional naval gun of the then-new "quick-firing" type, firing conventional ammunition. There was a large stockpile of them available in WW1 because they'd been built in huge numbers for navies all over the world, but had become too small for their original job years before the war. This is the only true pneumatic gun I know of.

I say do it that way and be done. Some sort of organization, even if nonoptimal, would be far better than to the current complete lack thereof.

I liked the online translation better So what does "alles drin, alles dran" really mean? Nice pic. You have a real knack for getting great sunset glows on the planes.