Bullethead

Maybe in Europe, but in the US, you'll never find anything testosterone-inducing, let alone testosteron-containing, in any Micky D's product.

Funny how the Obamination not taken any flak at all for his mishandling of the relief for the massive flooding in the midwest this past summer, which did more damage to more people than Katrina did to New Orleans. It's also funny how Katrina did FAR more damage to Mississippi than New Orleans, but the state and local governments there had actually forced evactuations instead of letting their buses flood out unused, and then welcomed federal relief forces instead of blocking them at the state lines. Oh yeah, and they didn't then turn around and complain that they got no help, unlike the schmucks running Lousy Anna at the time. I think all you need to know about the absolute stupidity of those who elected the Obamination is to note that the same people also reelected the mayor of New Orleans after Katrina, despite him being the leading cause of all their problems back then. But of course, hardly anybody's heard of this because the liberal media doens't mention it. It seems to me that everybody on the Gulf Coast is in the barrel about once every 10-15 years. Otherwise, you just watch it happen to other folks and are glad it's not your turn, and perhaps curse that you didn't get any rain from the fringes of it to break your local drought.

Not "McTestosterone"?

All of us on the Gulf Coast are always wishing hurricanes on our neighbors every year. And most of the time, our wishes are granted. How do we live with ourselves?

I've been there many times. Its only claim to fame is that it's got a Sara Lee bakery there, which produces most of the pizza crusts used by Pizza Hut. I bet only 18-wheeler drivers know that

IIRC, 1.32 sought to let things run longer after a bad situation, but this was disabled in one of the subsequent patches due to not working right. So I figure the OBD guys will eventually get on this. They've already tried, which shows they pay attention to this gripe (which I share).

I've no doubt bitten off more than I can chew here, but at least I've stepped up to the plate. Gmax is free, the CFS3 SDK is free, and there are quite a few folks around here to ask for help. So if you want to see your favorite plane that ain't in OFF so far, go make it yourself. Or at least make a new skin for something in the game. There are free analogs of Photoshop out there, too. All it takes is time and practice. True, this is time you could spend flying instead of modding, but IMHO there aren't enough skinners yet and WAY too few plane-builders. So give it a try and see if you like it. If you don't, no harm done because while you were trying it out, you at least didn't kill your favorite pilot .

Damn, that's awesome! I'll have to fly that next Halloween

Nice AEG. I look forward to seeing it in the game.

Billy Bishop ain't in BHaH no more. I shot his ass down a few days ago

Bear in mind that Desert Storm was fought in the dead of winter, January and February. Deserts get COLD in the winter, AND wet. In fact, I have never been so shivering cold for so long before or since, and it really wasn't THAT cold on an absolute scale. We only had frost 2 or 3 times. HOWEVER, it rained on average 2 out of every 3 days (it was the wettest winter on record there), there was always AT LEAST a 15-knot wind blowing (usually stronger), and the ambient temperature during the day ranged from the low 30sF to the low 40sF, so the wind chill was always down close to 10^F, often lower. When you're in an uncovered hole in that weather, you never dry out, and even though it's not REALLY that cold, it just sucks the heat right out of you. Every swingin' Richard had walking pneumonia, but all the corpsmen had was patches for bulletholes, without a single cough drop. So, dead meat actually kept fairly well over there. I mean, there were MOUNTAINS (20-30' tall) of dead goats every few miles, all killed by anthrax shells. They'd gathered them up but never got around to burning them before the civilians evacuated the area thinking the Iraqis were going to keep heading south. That had happened back in like September when things were classic desert, so I guess they kinda mummified naturally. But then they got rained on a lot, so got pretty moldy, although the temperature was as if they were in a fridge. But to be honest, nobody'd had a bath since deploying (other than scrubbing off hurriedly AND washing all their clothes in 5 gallons of cold water, in the cold wind, every 2 weeks). For instance, I took my 1st real shower of 1991, with hot water and soap, on 13 March, the day after we rotated back to the rear. So we smelled pretty rank ourselves. Having a hunk of rotten meat around really didn't make a difference. As to pulling your leg, how about this.... The day they called the cease fire, I was just downwind of the Highway of Death (the freeway between Kuwait City and Basra). We'd killed like 20,000 guys there, and there they lay. We stayed there a couple of weeks. One morning, I climbed out of my hole to discover that during the night, a jackal had raided my case of MREs, which I'd left sitting just outside. But he'd left me a severed, rather burned, and somewhat chewed-on forearm, which he'd apparently been carrying when he happened across my stash. So I bent such fingers as remained into a bird and stuck the thing elbow-first into the sand beside my hole. And there it stayed until we left about a week later. My ossifers agreed with the sentiment so didn't bother me about it. In fact, some took photos of it.

But how many mechanics did a squadron have? I'd assume doing 1 engine in that time took 4 or 5 guys, first to remove it from the plane, and then to service various bits of it simultaneously, and finally to put it back. How many mechanics did a squadron have? Did a squadron have enough of them to put 4-5 on ever one of its aircraft simultaneously? I've never actually bothered to look up the ground TO&E of a WW1 RFC squadron--heretofore I've only been interested in how many airplanes and pilots it had on strength.

But always remember, God will "cut off all those who pisseth against the wall." It says so in the Bible--several times in fact, at least in the KJV. So OT1H, "piss" can't be a bad word because it's in the Bible. But OTOH, what exactly is God going to cut off?

I've always liked the underlying philosophy embodied in the DH5. ATTACK, ALWAYS ATTACK! The pilot's view is optimized for this, but ain't so good looking back over your shoulder at somebody swooping on your butt. So I intend to fly it that way

Hmmm..... When my unit came back to the rear and was packing up to go home, in our tent city there was an "Amnesty Box". This was where you could drop off all the illegal trophies you'd picked up but weren't allowed to take home. no questions asked. If you dumped the stuff during the amnesty period, it was like it never happened. The box was intended for things like AK-47s, grenades, etc. However, it ended up containing at least as many scalps, ears, entire heads, arms, and other body parts than weaponry. Savage enough for you?

During flight, the screenshot key is F3. When you hit it, you get a full-res .BMP file in your Documents/CFSWW1 Over Flander Fields folder. You can then edit it as you see fit. The Print Screen key is only needed outside of flight, like to take a pic of your logbook. And naturally, this isn't saved anywhere except to your clipboard, so you need to exit the game and paste from your clipboard to some graphical editor to save such a pic.

Here's the deal.... 99.9% of the work in making a skin is making the template. By that I mean getting all the ribs lined up top-and-bottom, all the control surfaces marked out, all the panel lines between pieces of plywood, all the stitching were sheets of fabric came together, all the 3D effects on flat surfaces, etc. Once you've got that, applying the actual paintjob is child's play. We have OBD's skins to use as starting points. But unless all you want to do is add a small personal device on an existing skin, or repaint some small area of it, then you have do everything from scratch. This is because all the OBD skins are 1 layer as we get them and you need 40-70 layers on average to make a skin of comparable quality. Besides, much as it pains me to say it, many OBD skins don't have the ribs lining up with each other on upper and lower surfaces, or with things like ailerons, so if that matters to you, you need to redo all the rib locations as well. If you have a life, this process usually takes 2-3 weeks. Only then can you being to apply your desired paintjob. However, once you've invested the requisite 2-3 weeks in making your template, you can apply a new paintjob to it in a few hours at most. What you're asking for is the intensive, non-fun labor of 2-3 weeks worth of free time by some skinner, so you can just slap on some paint. I doubt you'll find many skinners willing to just give their templates away for this purpose. I mean, if you consider such a template as the output of skilled labor, the market price would be several hundred dollars at least. Of course, being based on OBD outlines, no 3rd party skins are marketable, but the the investment of talent is still the same. So don't expect anybody to just give you a template. Make one of your own for some as-yet unskinned plane and trade it to somebody who has already made one for the plane you want to paint, if you can find a willing partner. Otherwise, just be a man and start from scratch like everybody else. I don't mean to sound harsh here, I'm just saying how life is in the big city. Real skinning is long, hard work, at least as far as making the template goes. So, if you want street cred as a skinner, you need to make your bones. Literally. BUT, all skinners are quite willing to offer tips and suggestions as you do so. Just don't expect them to do the work for you. Do it yourself, ask for help when you need it, and pretty soon you'll be a skinner yourself.

Looks better than my 1st attempt, which I did with the "Bitmap to Bullets" tutorial. I made no attempt at all to make it look airworthy in any way, shape, or form. BUT, the aerodynamics are completely separate from the 3D model, so I had it flying around in CFS3 like a Tempest .

If I was king of the world, I'd have just cut the offending member off at the roots. Then the lad could still be a productive member of society but would remember to behave himself all day, every day, due to having a tube up in there leading to a bag of piss in his coat pocket.

I believe the correct term is "pickle helmet", as in they had a pickled cucumber or perhaps a sausage stuck on a toothpick on top.

Well, the text on the tail and fuselage of that Dr.I is from Ernst Udet, but as for the rest....... Maybe you can get Fro to make it for you. He's made ton of Dr.I skins so it shouldn't take him too long.

Don't forget the lovely slime spewed on the airplane's outer surfaces . Nahum's comments, however, reminded me of my childhood, which I spent from age 8 to 18 flying model airplanes, U/C and then R/C. The 1-banger 2-cycle model engines were like rotaries in that they were lubed by castor oil, had total loss oil systems, and the oil came in mixed with the fuel. However, they burned nitromethane, which dissolves castor oil. In fact, when you bought fuel, you got a mix of castor oil and nitro in the same bottle, and there were several grades available with different ratios. So, at 1st glance you'd think this a blow against the immissibility argument. However, IIRC the fuel mix was always more than 1/2 castor oil even in the hottest racing fuels, and for the general "farting around" fuel I normally used I think it was like 7/8 castor oil. Thus, I'd assume the dilution of the castor oil by the nitro wasn't severe enough to inhibit the lubing properties enough to matter. Plus the engines were made of modern materials under modern quality control. In any case, I never had any problems with internal wear (or gunk build-up, for that matter) even when getting INSANE revs out of them, like about 20,000 RPM for a racing 0.051 in^3 . If you had the engine tuned correctly, very little of the castor oil burned or polymerized. Engines that were tuned too lean got all varnished inside and out, but otherwise you were OK there. However, all this castor oil spewed out the exhaust pipe so that the planes left thin contrails of it, and were absolutely dripping with it when they landed. And if you didn't clean it off ASAP, it would turn to shellac, not brown like varnish but clear although with hunks of dirt and pieces of grass stuck in it. And yes, it had a yummy smell

I shot the whole lower left wing off a Fee one time (it was hard to bring myself to fire on a Fee at all, but war is Hell ). Anyay, the wing came off and the crate tipped over into a vertical rolling spin. I figured it was done for and circled around to watch him crash. But unbelievably, the AI pilot got the thing back under control more or less. He stopped the spin and got it nearly level, but was stuck going around in big, slowly descending circles. It took him a long time, but he eventually crashed. I found this quite disturbing because it was almost exactly like a chilling quote from Cecil Lewis, which has haunted me for years. The only real difference is he was talking about a Parasol and this was a Fee:

Actually, they COULDN'T have a sump. With the whole motor spinning, all the oil is slung to the outer fringes. If it wasn't allowed to escape out the exhaust valve, it would soon not only oil up the plugs but fill the entire combustion chamber. Hence rotaries HAD to have a total loss oil system. As a result, they had to have a continuous flow of oil into the motor to replace what it was losing. But the only place the oil could come into the motor was through a hole in the center of the back, the same place the fuel had to come in. Thus, the unavoidable intermingling of fuel and oil and what I think is the unavoidable need to use a lubricant that wouldn't be dissolved by the fuel. But consider inline aero engines. Some of these were up to twice as powerful as any rotary in service and had the same concerns with daily availablity and reliability.

Yup, I found that one myself while researching this. He's the guy who says the US ran rotaries successfully on petroleum-based oils. Here's a contrasting view from folks with I think more specialized knowledge of lubricants: Chemestry and Technology of Lubricants, by R. M. Mortier, S. T. Orszulik. It's on page 266 if the link below doesn't take you right to it. These guys state that the reason for using castor oil was that it was insoluable in gasoline. http://books.google.com/books?id=gbBQ2pRRhRUC&pg=PA266&lpg=PA266&dq=castor+oil+rotary+engine&source=bl&ots=VQXgCR3uxd&sig=0UDoaz3QHv2YBogfQdHdywPQbrI&hl=en&ei=3Rr0Sub4Ooaj8AaRqLHzCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10&ved=0CCYQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=castor%20oil%20rotary%20engine&f=false Another article in favor of the immissibility theory: http://www.penriteoil.com/uk/techbulletins/V3_RiseandFallofCastor.pdf This article is mostly concerned with vintage race car engines and mentions rotaries only in passing (sometimes misnaming them radials). However, while going into all the properties of various types of oils, the author says that immissibility was the reason for using castor oil in rotaries. Note, however, that it says that castor oil DOES dissolve in alcohol. Very interesting. So as you see, the experts disagree (assuming all these guys are real experts ). From my lay POV, I think logic favors the argument that castor oil and gasoline don't mix. My thinking goes as follows: Back then, you had 2 types of lubricants available. Mineral oil (either from crude or coal) was available in Europe in reasonably sufficient quantities although its quality varied based on where it came from. Still, that available in Europe was good enough by the standards of the day for almost all applications whether on the ground or in the air. There was also castor oil, which was better in some ways and worse in others, but had rather limited availablity due to the plant itself favoring tropical habitats. Thus, Europe had to import it or make an ersatz like Voltol from coal or petroleum. From an economic standpoint, therefore, especially under wartime blockade conditions, you'd think that mineral oil would have been used in everything. However, it seems beyond doubt that European petroleum-based oils didn't work in rotaries. If they had, they would have been used. But instead the Germans had to make Voltol and apparently this wasn't particularly successful. Thus, the use of rotaries in Germany declined significantly and the Ausrians never had very many. Conversely, the Entente empires owned most of the world's castor-producing regions and ready access to the rest, so continued to use castor oil in rotaries on a large scale throughout the war. However, they don't seem to have used castor oil in other engines. So, if you take Nahum's position that castor oil was used in rotaries simply because it was a superior lubricant, why didn't the Entente use it in all its engines, ground and air? They had enough available to use it more than they did had they wanted to. And the Entente had to import most of its petroleum anyway, so importing castor oil was no greater burden on them. Thus, I am led to the conclusion that castor oil, despite its superior lubricating properties, was not the ideal lubricant for most engines. The obvious reason for this is the gunk and varnish it produces if retained in the motor, which requires frequent engine teardowns to remove, to the extent of making castor oil impractical for daily use. There must also have been some mechanical reason for rotaries requiring castor oil. The obvious answer there is that the oil had to come in with the fuel, and that castor oil doesn't dissolve in gasoline. And because the castor oil blew out of the engine at every stroke, the rate of sludge build-up was greatly reduced, meaning that rotary engines had to be torn down no more than usual. Or so it seems to me.