Bullethead

I have a lot of collisions. They kill far more of my pilots than any other cause, including enemy fire. However, I also survive many collisions and kept on flying. The landings in such cases are tricky, however, and you can die that way even if you've flown home many miles after the collision. The screen going black immediately after a bad collision doesn't mean you're dead. That's just the baseline feature of CFS3. When the game determines that your plane is unflyable, it stops the whole 3D simulation and goes back to the menus, where a box pops up saying what happened to you: dead, hospitalized, or no harm done. It's possible, though rare, for this to say you lived even after the most horrific crash you can image. Anyway, this "exit on unflyable" thing is why you got the instant black screen after the collision even though your pilot was set immortal. This used to be a feature of OFF as well, until the most recent patch which disables the instant end of the flight. This is a workshop option and the default is keeping things as per CFS3. However, if you change it to the new feature, you can struggle with your controls all the way down. But back to surviving collisions themselves, regardless of how you have the above setting...... Many collisions are just minor bumps that will crumple up a wingtip or something. This sort of damage is considered "flyable" so the flight doesn't end even if you have it set so it will. Now you can attempt a landing. However, odds are, you'll probably crash. This is because you'll probably have to fly at high speed to keep control of the plane. When you touch the ground and start to slow down, the plane will often roll over on its side. This seems to be about 50/50 on being fatal. Otherwise, you'll have major damage and the plane is unflyable. Then it's just a question of how hard you hit the ground, if you have the game set not to immediately end the flight. I think the same sort of live or die determination goes on when you hit the ground this way as if the flight had ended immediately, however. Sometimes you survive, most often not.

Very interesting. I particularly liked the demonstration of how the Scarff ring worked. I see that the gun could pivot on it, which I wasn't sure of before. Also, the whole assembly could rotate very quickly and changing the elevation of the cross bar seems to have been fast, too.

Well, it's not my favorite, but I do enjoy it once in a while. Not a lot of choice in August 1917 . I'm rarely able to do that. I usually get bounced on ingress and have to dump my bombs to fight. Aiming the MG in TIR is a bit tricky. It seems like the point of aim is just below the center of the top edge of the windshield, but I've found that difficult to do in a swirling fight. Fortunately, it carries 1000 rounds(!) for its single gun, so you've got plenty to spare on misses. Given your tests, I think you're right. I haven't tested it to the extremes you have, but I've survived some very gnarly crashes without a scratch. I put that down to the plane's durability, but your examples show there's something not right.

Question..... Don't the rules now say that you can long transfer between bombers and fighters? I think all Germans from the 1st batch that did transfer have died over the last few days, so I don't think we'll be giving you this problem any more ..........

I've noticed that the German gunners in the vicinity of Reims almost always shoot at German planes. I therefore now try to avoid flying there.

I agree up to the point of you being too drunk to post. Moral relativism is the probably the 2nd greatest evil humanity has ever concocted. But I'd like to agree with you across the board, so let's pour some down

Thanks for all the help! That solves all my problems. I had not idea that "display subtree" thing was there. Guess I'll get back to work on the Type AI. I'd put it aside due to not knowing how to proceed.

They're supposed to be there and usually are for me.

You already can.

Lucky you . For future reference, I just used AirWrench to check the Strutter's glide properties in OFF. According to the .AIR file, it should have a max glide ratio of 7.26:1 at its best Vmax L/D speed of 61mph. IOW, from your altitude of approximately 1 mile up, you should be able to glide a bit over 7 miles horizontally. You might also want to read this page: http://www.auf.asn.au/emergencies/aircraft.html Interested students can look the glide values up for any other OFF planes. The read-only demo version of AirWrench is a free download, found here: http://www.mudpond.org/AirWrench_main.htm. Once you have it, launch it and go to your OBD Software\CFSWW1 Over Flanders Fields\aircraft folder. Click on any of the folders for the airplane you're interested in and open the .air file there. The glide ratio and best L/D speeds are displayed on the 2nd tab (Dimensions) right in the center, just above the big button that says "Estimate Control Surface Dimensions".

I'd rather have the Dolphin myself. Not only did it see more action (and in squadron strength), but some of them had 4 guns

If the mission has 2 flights listed in the briefing, then both are on the mission. Sometimes this doesn't always work, especially if you warp. Then sometimes 1st flight is nowhere to be seen when you come out of warp. But usually they're right there. I think it's realistic. After all, the game doesn't include all the squadrons that were really at the front (especially 2-seaters). Thus, setting it to heavy makes up for the shortfall I think. But that's just MHO. I've never heard the devs say either way.

The higher you can hit the balloon, the better, because the real danger (apart from defending fighters) is AAMG fire. Those things always maim you if they don't kill, but fortunately have limited range, so the goal is to stay above them. Never make more than 2 passes on the same balloon--after the 2nd, it will be down in AAMG range.... I agree that the best attack profile is diving from fairly high while already on your egress heading. The hard part is spotting the balloon against the background while you're still far away enough to make major adjustments. To help with this, I maneuver to a point several miles behind the balloon, so that the line from there through the balloon points toward the closest friendly lines. Then I turn 90^ to this line and dive steeply while looking off to the side towards the balloon. As soon as I see the balloon above the horizon, I roll toward it and level out for the firing pass. I get to this starting point by taking an indirect approach. I cross the lines several miles away from the balloon then circle in behind it. I find this results in the balloon being higher when I attack than if I fly right over it on the way in. Also, sometimes I surprise the ground defenses and get away without being fired on at all. Of course, the above only works under 2 conditions: My flight has to be the only one on the mission, and there can't be any defending fighters. If the ace flight is on the mission, too, they go straight for the balloon so you have to follow them, all surprise is lost, and if they don't get the balloon themselves, they scare it so low that it's suicide to go for it yourself. So all in all, I find the above approach is mostly only useful for busting balloons of opportunity when my real mission is something else. One thing to keep in mind in all circumstances, however, is that ground fire often kills its own balloons. I find this extremely annoying because I go to all this risk AND technically succeed in the mission, but don't get to claim the balloon. It appears to me that the ground guns are all clustered very tightly around the balloon's base unit. Thus, the steeper your attack run, the more likely the balloon with get hit by ground fire. This is the main reason for my level approach.

Jesse James was a folk hero in his own time. That's why he was able to stay ahead of the law so long. Most of his neighbors sympathized with him so gave him all kinds of help. The whole war in that area had been nothing but protracted brigandage by both sides, so everybody who hadn't been killed had done some of the same things. Plus, the neighbors thought (rightly or wrongly) that most of his victims were yankee bankers, whom the blamed for all their troubles. Besides, the area was very clannish and he was related or connected to many locals. I was comparing Onoda to Jesse James because both were die-hards, both were brigands, and both were very popular with their people in their own lifetimes.

I consider it highly unlikely that I'll ever have anybody on this list, but I would like to see it as a source of inspiration, so I think it's a good idea.

Yup, . That's why there weren't many folks like Jesse James, but why those like him we celebrated as folk heroes.

I have, and do, but it makes very little sense to me. Gradual I understand a bit more of it, but only because I ask you and Stump quetions. For most planes, I'd say you're right here and OFF is wrong. I don't think the upper left wing could survive on most planes without the lower left wing, at least not for any length of time. I'm pretty sure this would have been possible in a Fokker D.VII, which really had cantilever wings--the interplane struts were just there to make the staff happy. Also, the Dr.I could lose it's whole upper wing but leave the lower 2 OK. That happened to MvR once. I think the SDK implies, as do some tutorials, that you can put a number after CFS3's favorite name and the game will treat that part the same as if it had the regular name. IOW, you can have L_Wing, L_Wing01, and L_Wing02, which might be your names for the upper, middle, and lower left wings of a triplane. It's basically the same thing as having Rudder and Rudder01 for twin-tailed planes. Or at least that's the impression I got. But as you know, I have just enough knowledge on this subject to shoot myself in the foot. But that's just for the wings themselves. That still leaves the question of what to name the wires and struts. I don't want to spend a lot of time experimenting and reinventing the wheel if the answer's already out there. Much as the experience would do me good, I just don't have the time for that. So can you tell me if you've ever given your own made-up names to parts of planes and just linked them in the hierarchy? If so, has that worked? If not, in what ways did it fail? If it fails, probably the only answer is to make the wires and struts part of the objects with CFS3-approved names, but it would make things a lot easier if they could have nonstandard names. I would dearly love to have this. As the models come in the SDK, they're not linked at all, so I find them essentially useless for instructional purpose. About all you can do is try to steal the pilot figure out of it. BTW, do you have the hierarchy for the ship and vehicle models, too? Damn, I hit submit too soon in my last, forgetting my manners. Hairyspin, thanks for the help!

All my top list (way more than 5) are all 2-seaters. We have more than enough scouts already, and while we need a few more British 2-seaters, the French have none of their own, so most of them are French, then German. All these planes were built in large numbers and played significant parts in their air forces in their day. In no particular order: Breguet 6 Breguet 14 A2 & B2 Breguet-Michelin BM 4 Caudron G.3 Caudron G.4 Caudron G.6 Dorand" AR 1 or AR 2 Farman F.40 Maurice Farman M.F. 11 Morane-Saulnier Type L Salmson 2 A2 Voisin 5/6 Voisin 8 LAR and LAB Albatros C-type (any) Halberstadt CL.II (if ConrandB doesn't beat OBD to it). LFG C-type (any) Rumpler C-type (any) Armstrong-Whitworth FK 8 De Haviland DH4

Or Barbarella with Jane Fonda :).

Interesting take on things. I completely agree with him that the US (and by that I mean FDR himself) deliberately provoked the Japanese into all that they did in late-1941 to early-1942. Roosevelt's embargoes left them no choice at all if they had any desire to continue to be an industrialized, modern nation. I don't think the Australians (the 2nd A in ABDA) or especially the Dutch had much, if any, desire for a war in their neighborhood, however. And I don't think the British liked the idea that much, either, due to the harm it would do their Pacific possessions and the addition of yet another front they had to cover. But they were willing to accept that as the price of getting the US in the war. After all, FDR's putting US destroyers in front of U-boat torpedoes for the past year hadn't done the trick and wasn't likely to in the future. But OTOH, what about everything that Japan had been doing the previous few years in China and Manchuria? That's what gave FDR his excuse to impose the sanctions. As with WW1, I don't think anybody involved in WW2 had completely clean hands. And of course Onoda is correct in his claim that the winners right the history, so that their hands look cleaner in retrospect than they were seen to be at the time. Personally, as a descendant of a long line of failed revolutionaries and unsuccessful rebels against hated oppressors, I have to admire Onoda's choice to hold out as long as humanly possible. He was never beaten and gave up on his own terms. It's therefore tempting to compare him to von Lettow-Vorbeck in German East Africa. However, let's face it. When you go beyond what Lettow did, as Onoda did, you become nothing but a bandit and terrorist. He wasn't fighting the armed forces of his national enemy, he was robbing peasants, killing them if they got in his way, and then fighting the police sent after him. So to me, the best analogy to Onoda is Jesse James.

My favorite funny Sci-Fi: Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension Brazil The Ice Pirates Spaceballs All the "Robot Chicken" spoofs of Star Wars. BTW, I saw The Book of Eli yesterday. It's kinda so-so. Good on action, VERY short on dialog (due to all the action) although it does have 1 line that I found hilarious, and somewhat shaky on premise.

Welcome aboard, Javito! New guy buys the drinks . I think Rickity is correct--the various patches have tamed the once-fearsome clouds. When OFF originally came out, you'd get sucked away like Dorothy and Toto just getting near the things, but now you can fly through most of them with no problem. There's usually a bit of turbulence insdie, but generally it's no worse than outside. On stormy days, though, that turbulence can knock you off level and without an artificial horizon, you sometimes don't know you've gotten into the Deadman's Spiral until you come out the bottom of the cloud. Before the patches, though, I had a real adventure. I was going upwards at over 5000fpm with zero forward airspeed while inverted and slightly nose down . Glad that sort of thing doesn't happen anymore.

WTG Reddog! Looks good

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. This pic was taken no more than 1-2 seconds after the flak burst at the end of the Nupe's smoke trail. My plane (the Alb) is easily 2-3 as far from the flak burst as from the Nupe, because I was shooting at him at fairly close range when the shell burst. From my cockpit, the Nupe looked big enough to fill the whole gap between my upper and lower wings. In fact, I thought I'd shot him down as was taking this picture to prove it when I noticed the flack burst. No wonder he looked like he'd suddenly exploded . Anyway, you can see we've left the burst far behind already. So just how far away is it? I moved the POV around and yes, the upper end of the smoke trail was indeed stuck through the side of the flak burst, so they're in the same place. Judging from other burning planes I've followed, smoke trails start out about as wide as the horizontal stabilizer's span but quickly grow to about the width of the wingspan. I reckon the upper end of the Nupe's trail has dispersed to about that width in this pic. The flak burst is already 3-4 times that wide, already about the size of a hangar. Picture a parked plane sitting in front of a hangar. Ain't its wingspan about the same proportionate size to the adjacent hangar as the smoke trail is to the flak burst? So anyway, it looks like a good 1-2 seconds travel time away from the burst, IMHO.

Siggi- I don't know why you're having trouble overtaking flak bursts. To me, they remain at fixed points in the sky and all planes move by them at the speed you'd expect. Next time you have the chance, fly along for a while parallel with and beside an enemy formation that's being shelled. Just watch how fast the enemy planes leave flak bursts behind. While you're at it, compare the size of the bursts to the size of their planes. It's easier to tell what's going on this way than it is when you're being shot at, because it's hard to judge the distance to and size of flak bursts hanging in the air nearby without something else to offer a sense of scale. Unless, of course, the burst is VERY close, but often then you don't get a good look at it because your screen goes black . I have no way of knowing for sure, but it seems to me that flak bursts are pretty large objects. When they first appear, they seem about the size of an airplane, but grow very quickly to several times that size before fading out. That makes them about apparently about the same size as a hangar before they fade out. Just a guess on my part, but I think I'm in the ballpark here. Seems reasonable to me based on what I've seen of real shell bursts. Now go fly over your airfield while holding your left hand up to the monitor. Fly high enough so that the airfield's hangars appear about the same size as your thumb nail. Now note how fast the hangar moves across the screen. Doesn't that seem to be about the same speed at which flak bursts of the same size move across the screen? All I can say is, when flak has burst very close to me, I've zipped right by it at 100 knots just like I'd expect. For instance, last night, I actually got hit. The burst was right over my head so close that some of the orange fire and black streaks of shrapnel were visible at the top edge of my screen and there was smoke between my eyes and the instrument panel. Somehow, my plane wasn't seriously damaged. In the instant it took me to turn my head around to check how badly I was smoking and if the tail was still attached, I'd already left the burst about 50 yards behind. This didn't surprise me, though, because I had always thought flak bursts were large and immobile. What did surprise me was the lack of serious damage. But then I thought about, and decided it was fairly realistic. When shells burst, their fragments just add a horizontal component to the forward motion they already had from the shell's flight. The center of mass of the cloud of shrapnel continues to follow the same path as the original shell. Thus, when flak shells explode, most of the fragments continue moving upwards in an expanding cone. This shell burst just over my head, so I was out of the way of most of the fragments. I have no idea if OFF models such fragment patterns, or maybe I just got a "lucky die roll" on the "combat results table". But it was still pretty cool either way