Bullethead

Using the Saitek software, you can set up your throttle handle to work like various types of of rotary engine control. What you do is tell it that the throttle is no longer a control axis but instead is set up in "banded" mode for keyboard entry. "Banded" mode is where you divide the range of motion of the throttle handle, joystick, rotary, etc., into however many segments (bands) you want (and they don't all have to be the same size). Then you assign different keyboard commands to each band, so that when the throttle handle moves into that position, it generates that keyboard output. You can also assign bands to have no output. Anyway, what you do is define bands to have the various keyboard commands that put the engine at specific power levels. NOTE, however, that this is just the theory, to give you the idea of how it works. In practice, you actually have to do things a bit differently because of how joystick buttons send constant streams of their keyboard characters if they're kept pressed down. When you put the throttle on banded mode, each band you create is in effect a new joystick buton, which acts like it's being pressed continuously as long as the throttle handle is in that position. This can lead to all sorts of problems both in and outside the game, so it's best to avoid it using null bands over most of the arc of travel. For example, suppose you want to set up the throttle as a 10%/100% "blip switch" for an early rotary. The best way would be sorta like this: |---------------------------Null-------------------------------|-10%-|----------Null----------|-100%-|-------------------------------------------Null------------------------------------| The idea here is that the bands with the actual commands are very, very narrow so the throttle handle will usually be in a null area not giving any commands. The commands are triggered like brief button presses as the handle moves across the narrow command bands moving from 1 null position to another. Adjust the size, spacing, and position in the arc of movement to your taste. Also note that you can "safety" your throttle by moving it all the way to either end, so that it won't be generating its output while the profile is loaded but you're not playing the game. I've never bothered to look, but if CFS3/OFF has more engine commands than 10% and 100%, you'd be able to do the above using several of the other commands to replicate the control over later rotaries.

Once upon a time, an F16 and a C5 were crossing paths on different taxiways. The F16 wasn't sure who had the right of way so asked ground control "What are the intentions of the C5?" The C5, listening in, raised it's nose and said, "I'm going to eat you!"

Hmmm, we're definitely seeing different things. To me, since 1.32, the SPAD XIII turns better than the Fokker D.VII at speeds of less than 100 knots (although not as good at higher speeds), about the same as the Alb D.V at all speeds, and not as good as the Dr.I at all speeds, except the for the odd occurance of the Dr.I being significantly faster than the SPAD. This is if I'm the German or the SPAD. I don't see any difference in what the AI can do and what I can do. Some AI pilots aren't very good (especially a lot of the late-war, high-numbered French and US squadrons) so they don't do things as well as they could. But against competent opponents, the SPAD turns as indicdated above. In 1918 as a German, the SPADs are usually higher and in superior numbers. At high altitude, the tend to dive through my flight and extend away. Then they zoom up and repeat the performance. At low altitudes, they get slow and they they try to turn. Given the above relative turn performance, this is a good idea except against the Dr.I, buit at such low altitudes, they really don't have much other choices.

This morning I made a fairly decent turkeytail knife out of that wonderful Georgetown flint. This started out as a large, raw cobble covered in chalky cortex, so first I "peeled" off that and then knocked a bunch of nice spalls of flint off, which I'll make other points out of later. I made this turkeytail out of the central piece I had left. All went well throughout, but when I was sitting there picking up the spalls to put them away for later, I dropped one. I reached down quickly to catch it so it wouldn't break, but it landed on my thigh (fortunately covered with thick leather) and rotated a bit to the side into the path of my descending hand. Thus, my hand came down hard on the sharp edge and because the other end was on my leg, the spall held still while my hand kept going. Net result: 3 stitches on the top outer edge of my right ring finger just behind the nail. The doctor was quite impressed with the cut, BTW, observing that it was just as neat as one made by a scalpel. But the bandage is making it hard to type... If you're into knapping, you WILL get cut periodically, but usually they're minor. This was my 1st good one, so I've reached another milestone in my career . Now imagine this happening to a somebody back in the Stone Age. It might have been life-threatening if the pantry was bare at the time.... And they didn't have safety glasses, either. But don't let this scare you off from a fun hobby. Remeber, knapping is "so easy a caveman could do it"

That's like around here, where you can't turn over a furrow without a point or 2. But where I live, the vast majority are imports because there's no local rock except creek pebbles, the vast majority of which are too small to make anything but arrowheads. But considering the bow didn't show up here until about AD 1000 give or take, everthing before was a dart point or knife, although most folks call them "arrowheads". But knives and dart points are rather larger than arrowheads, as your collection shows. The Indians here actually used garfish scales for arrowheads due to a lack of rock. Before that, I suspect they used a lot of antler dart points, or just fire-hardened wood. Impressive collection you've got there. Those are real grocery-getters and you can see that most of the larger onces were resharpened a time or 2. They were made for utility, not ornamentation. It always makes me feel proud of my work to compare it to the bulk of authentic points. The Indians mostly made stuff that would kill dinner or the enemy and they weren't too concerned with aesthetics. Thus, most authentic ponts are rather "clunky", as in rather thick (for durability) and rough in outline (because a non-fancy point is quicker to make and kills just as well). If I was depending on my points to survive, I'd make them to the same standards. This is what I call a "grocery-getter". The problem is, when a chief died, the true artists amongst the Indians made BEAUTIFUL points to bury with him. And it's these things that modern knappers want to replicate, and modern collectors pay big bucks for, because they're difficult to make and look prettier. Never mid that they can't get groceries, or at least not many. It's friggin' HARD to make a thin point with a perfectly symmetrical flake pattern and an ideal shape and size all at once. That's why they buried such things with the chiefs, and also why such things are expensive on the market, and thus why modern knappers seek to make them. Everybody wants to turn a profit on their work and unless you can make funeral pieces, you'll only break even on what you spend for good knapping rock and tool replacement. I was referring to even the rules that protect camp sites. The problem is, if you find 1 point, then somebody will say it's a camp site, and the nazis in charge of such things can confiscate your property. Kinda the same as if you're so unlucky as to have an eagle nest on your land..... So, best thing is to say that you got all the stuff from your great-grandmother who brought them over in the 1800s from another state. I use hide glue for my hafting. Just boil down some scrap hide, sinew, and bone, and you get this concentrated protien that all gloms onto itself in a great polymer tangle. It stinks, but it's damn solid when it dries. It's water-soluable so you can just get it wet and put a new point in your shaft. Problem is, blood also dissolves it, so you need to coat all your finished haftings with beeswax to make it waterproof. And BTW, scorpions prefer death to capture. If you pin them down, they'll kill themselves with self-inflicted stings. So, it's a bit difficult to get them into the pot to boil alive as you do crayfish. If you can manage it, they taste good, but there's very little meat on them compared to a crayfish.

I pretty much agree, although I have a different opinion of Vista. Vista started out quite well for me out of the box and I've never had any problems with it. What's happened, however, is that all the patches for Vista to fix other people's (probably self-inflicted) problems have turned it into bloatware, so that Vista now runs about 1/2 as fast as it did originally, and is also less stable due to hogging more resources and different parts of the bloatware arguing over which owns what piece of memory. As a result, I'm now pretty tired of Vista and am also eagerly anticipating Win7. As I understand things, Vista was never intended originally for public release. It was like MS's test environment to develop features for future OS releases. However, once Gates took himself out of the loop, those left in charge saw the opportunity for a quick profit and released it as the new standard, and the rest is history. Win7, OTOH, was built for the public. I expect Win7 to be better than Vista in the long run, and probably better than XP SP2. However, I don't expect that immediately. So, what I'm going to do is install it on 1 of my soon-to-be 3 computers and let that one go through the growing pains. Once I find that acceptable, I'll put it on the others.

Minutes seem like hours Hours seem like days I sho ' wish my baby'd Change her evil ways Einstein taught us about time dilation. It happens not only in deep gravity wells and when near the speed of light, but also in very stressful situaiton such as combat. If you go nearly the speed of light, you can circumnavigate the universe in a few decades as you seei it, but it will be billions of years to everybody esle. Same thing in combat

Later models had multiple throttle positions, but as I understand things, none of there were every totally analog.

In the game, you can set various sliders to adjust volume levels for different types of sounds. In the Superpatch 1.32+, the default (as in realistic) slider levels are different from the original BHaH (see the sticky on 1.32 sounds above). But while the 1.32 settings allow you to hear more stuff over the motor than before, that's still pretty much all you hear if it's running at all. From reading WW1 pilot memoirs, it appears that they only heard the wind when their motor was completely off. Even idling engines were LOUD. Mufflers were almost unheard-of in WW1. A few night bombers had experimental versions, but everything else had either straight pipes (inlines) or nothing at all (rotaries). Ever been around an idling Harley with (illegal) straight pipes? And that's just 2 cylinders of lesser bore and stroke than most WW1 engines.

Hehe, I remember when XP came out. It totally, completely sucked for the 1st 6-12 months. Maybe those of you all who love XP so much today have forgotten that . It's always the same when a new OS comes out. The OS itself will have a number of bugs and few if any of the drivers intended for it will actually work well or at all. It thus always takes at least 6 months, often more, to get these problems sorted out. The early-adopters have all kinds of problems and a generally rotten time, but their sacrfices are what get the problems solved for those who wait. So, I salute all you early-adopters with Win7, and look forward to getting a good OS with good drivers sometime next year, about when I get a new computer. I drink to your bravery in exploring this new environment

I have my graphics maxed on everything except terrain. Even so, the color of Entente flak bursts is not usually white. Their color actualy depends on their distance away from me, how old the burst is, and perhaps the lighting conditions but I'm not sure on this last point. When Entente flak bursts close enough to my plane to hurt or at least scare me, it does indeed appear white, or rather a light gray with darker streaks in it. However, the further away it is, and the older the burst is, the darker it is. IOW, say a shel bursts close in front of me. It will apear white to start with but as I pass by it and it starts to disperse and fade away, it gets darker. If the burst initally appears about 100m away, it starts out looking dark gray. If it initially appears 200m or a lot further away, it appears nearly black. This covers all bursts in or near my flight's formation, or in the vicinity of a dogfight I'm in. BUT, when seen from many miles away, such as around planes too far away to see yet, it looks mostly white or light gray with a dark center. Check out my pic in post #334 of the "Reports from the Front" thread. http://forum.combatace.com/topic/37518-off-bhah-reports-from-the-front/page__view__findpost__p__351537 This pic was taken several miles on the Brit side of the lines on our way home--you can see the Front in the background. There are 2 presumably Entente flak bursts in this pic: at the very top edge above my wingmen and also just to the right of the top of my rudder. I assume these are Entente because of the location and also the small number of them--we'd been vert heavily archied on the German side and 1 of my wingmen died from it. The Entente Archie is firing at the Albatros following us, which can be seen in the distance under the curve in the smoke pouring from the rear RE8. As you can see, both bursts are dark gray. The upper burst is slightly closer, so is slightly lighter in color, while the burst the rudder is further away and nearly black. The general impression, therefore, is that Entente archie bursts look black to me if I'm in a fight, unles the bursts are very close. I don't have a pic of Entente bursts at a great distance, but they do look rather lighter than this and certainly lighter than German bursts at the same long range.

Why not just use the Saitek software. The current version works no problem for me.

I was wondering when he'd do that again. He'd already done it back before AH, when he was still doing WB.

Really? I'm surprised it's only 15. It's usually more. There is really no such thing as peace. It's just the name we give to the brief, anomalous intervals when there is no war involving us, no matter what horrors are happening to others elsewhere. But all such isolated periods of peace are fleeting because the reasons to fight never go away, and even if they take a siesta now and then there are always the extra reasons that civilization has invented. 100 years ago, most folks recognized this, and also that losing wars really sucks. Hence, the study of and preparation for war was regarded as not only normal but essential to the maintenance of civilization. However, after WW1 and WW2, this came to be regarded as "militarism" and was seen as the cause of these terrible conflicts. Thus, "enlightened" people blamed this "militarism" for causing the wars and all things military fell out of favor with the masses and their elected representatives. And thus the reason civilization is on a downswing and you didn't know there were 15 wars, give or take a few, going on right now.

Back in my misspent youth, I was a biker and rode a Harley, also known as a "Milwaukee Vibrator" due to the irregular beat of its fork-and-blade V-twin motor (like a pie slice out of a rotary or radial). I eschewed such effeminate crutches as windshields, fairings, and backrests, taking the full bast of the wind in my exposed face and holding myself upright against its pressure. I wore aviator goggles, a leather jacket, and sometimes a scarf. I once had an old knucklehead with a total loss oil system, like with a rotary. I ate a lot of bugs plus the occasional bird and bat, and got pelted many times by rain and hail. When I came home from a ride, my cheeks below my goggles were stained with grime and soot, and I was deaf from the noise of the engine and wind. And sometimes I engaged in combat with 4-wheelers by tossing old sections of drive chain over my shoulder into their windshields, like the 1914 guys dropping bricks on each other. Does that count? The closest I've come to flying open-cockpit, however, was when I was taking lessons in a Traumahawk. It was a very hot, humid summer mid-afternoon (the worst part of the day) in Houston and the plane had been sitting out on the ramp all day with the sun beating in through the bubble canopy. As usual on such days, we didn't close the car-type doors on the cockpit until we were starting our take-off roll. Most times, once we got some airspeed and a few hundred feet of altitude, the outside air blowing straight in through the vents at 75 knots (our sustained climb speed) felt cool enough, but not today. So, about the time we got to 1000 feet, with us about to die of heat stroke, my instructor opened his door. He had to brace it open with both legs against the slipstream, but he managed to get it about 45^ forward. It got bent in the process and never sealed properly after that . Anyway, this expedient did provide some approximation of an open-cockpit experience. Hurricane-force winds swirled around inside the cockpit, creating a vortex of all loose objects inside. These clubbed us brutally a time or two until they got sucked out (and AFAIK didn't land on anything important), but the dirt and grit took longer to dissipate and, not having goggles on, much of this got in our eyes. This, however, was small potatoes compared to the aerodynamic effects. The open door acted like a big air brake, but only on 1 side of the plane. Blinking back tears from the grit in my eyes, I found I could maintain course with lots of rudder, but the drag of both kept us from maintaining altitude. So after a couple of minutes of this, by which time we were down to about 300 feet over a large pine forest, my instructor finally let the door close. Did I mention my instructor was crazy? He was from Amsterdam, so I called him the "Flying Dutchman"....

Actually, the vid's claim of 250,000,000 dead in wars in the last 100 years is a mark of progress. Conservatively estimated, 7,000,000,000 people lived during that time, so at most only 1 person in 28 died in wars in the last 100 years, or only 3.6% of the human population. Compare this with the current estimate of 1 person in every 3 or 4 dead in wars back before there was much in the way of civilization. You might want to read War Before Civilization, or Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest. There was never any such thing as a "peaceful savage". And when you consider that something like 80-90% of all the people who have ever lived are still alive today, the extreme casualty rates (over the then-average lifespan) was a lot more devastating to the total human population than what happens now. Face it. Humans are THE top predator that has ever evolved on this ecosystem. We're animals like all the others, and our ancestors spent a couple million years clubbing, stabbing, burning, and shooting their way to the top of the foodchain against the toughest competition Mother Nature could provide. That heritage doesn't just go away now that we've got roofs over our heads. 5000 years can't stand up to 2 million years, so civilization is just a thin layer of paint on the most ravenous beast Mother Nature ever spawned, and if you put any decent person in a bad enough situation, that beast will come out fangs first. Civilization is, however, something of a mixed blessing. While it has reduced the overall casualty rate, and even the frequency of wars, it has also created new, unnatural reasons to fight (such as religion). In addition, it has allowed for larger populations backed up by higher technology and industrial capacity, so that when wars do happen, they kill huge numbers of people. But the population has grown more than the wars have (so far...) so the net trend is fewer people now die in wars, or even serve in the military. Just look back 1 or 2 generations, depending on how young you are. EVERYBODY in my father's generation was a WW2 vet. They all either volunteered or got drafted, and they thought it no big deal to be drinking buddies with folks who were in famous battles, because it was practically ubiquitous. When I subbed for one of my father's poker buddies, I sat at a table with vets from North Africa, Guadalcanal, Okinawa, Normandy, the Bulge, and Market Garden. One of the house rules was that you couldn't play unless you'd killed 20 men. But looking around this forum today, folks who served in the military even in peacetime seem to be the minority, and those who've seen the elephant are an even lower number. So take that as a sign of progress

When this happens to me after a good sortie, I chalk it up as my pilot having a wet dream. When it happens on a sortie where I die, I chalk it up to my pilot having a nightmare. The important thing to remember here is that it works both ways. A crash at the end of a flight can both rob you of kills and hours, AND save you from horrible death. Also, regardless of the outcome, you as a player still get to keep the experience.

Somewhere in Bloody April, my flight of 3 Pups was bounced by about twice our number of higher Albatri (as usual). In the midst of the ensuing white-knuckle brawl, I dodged a pass from my high 4, rolled into it, and discovered myself "canopy to canopy" (or goggles to goggles) with Bruno Lorzer and his broad black-and-white stripes. We did a rolling scissors in which I managed to gain more angles than position, but still enough for a snapshot on about the 3rd time around as our paths crossed at the bottom of the barrel. I fired about 6 rounds total and I figure at least 4 of them went into the cockpit from the top down. We were both headed down at the time I fired so I continued to pull up and on over for the next cycle. Bruno, however, continued on in a ballistic trajectory from where I'd hit him. He screamed vertically into the ground without twitching again from about 3000 feet up.

OK, I've gone back and put a text file into all my old uploads.

Makai! I am intensely envious--I always wanted to do that job. And it's an honor to converse occasionally with somebody exploring the real frontier.

Being inherently lazy, I'm glad I had the good sense to be born a native speaker of the current "universal" language. Still, I have learned the important parts of several other languages: how to curse, ask directions to bars, and order drinks . But seriously, I had to take a 2nd language in high school and naively chose German on the theory it would be easier do to supposedly being closer to English than the other options (French and Spanish). WRONG! German seems more alien to me than French or Spanish, and the relatively few points where there are apparent similarities are usually, on closer examination, red herrings. After years of effort, I've reached the point where I can read most German articles on technical subjects I'm familiar with (usually something combat-related) but no way I can write it myself or speak it, and I have trouble understanding spoken German. Learning Latin is actually much easier IMHO. Dutch, OTOH, strikes me as a close cousin of English. The Dutch try hard to disguise this by using bizarre spelling conventions, so that written Dutch looks almost as indecipherable as written Gaelic or Welsh, but once a Dutchman opens his mouth, I find him rather easy to understand.

Sounds very interesting.

Bravo! Sealab 2021 is correct! Here's your drink I'm pretty sure that's no longer on, although the DVDs are available. I've got them all

OK, I'm sold. Let's have a show of hands... Who thinks Catch 22 was: a) a comedy. b) a tragi-comedy. c) an accurate portrayal of what really happens behind the scenes in war, with all humor being of the gallows variety. I ask this because in my little war, my 1st sergeant went to prison for absconding with the regimental paychest just before our 1st payday and my supply sergeant when to prison for selling all our replacement boots to REMFs. Plus, I went to law school (oh, the irony) on the money I made from various blackmarket activities in the month between going back to the rear after the ceasefire and flying home.

As 1 1st-timer to another, I HIGHLY recommend doing something very simple as your cherry-popper. It doesn't even have to be WW1, because the objective is to learn both Gmax and what all goes into a model for OFF. Something from the 20s or 30s would work fine to teach you this stuff, and might be easier to make. Just remember, no matter how proud you are of your 1st model, you're going to think it sucks at least compared to your subsequent work, if not in general compared to the efforts by others that you've observed. This is to be expected because you don't know what you're doing yet. So don't worry what other folks have in work because odds are you won't want your 1st to see the light of day, because once (if) you finish it, you'll know you can do better next time, assuming you enjoyed the process enough to pursue this field. Thus, I advise you to save what you really want to make until such time as you feel yourself competent enough to do it justice. Start with something that has the simplest structure and fewest exposed details (such as engine parts) you can think of, but which still interests you in a vague way. In fact, pick 3 or 4 such things, because odds are you'll hit a snag somewhere along the line and won't know how to continue, so it's nice to have a few other things you can immediately pick up and carry on with. Every vertex moved teaches you something, and even simple airframes present advanced challenges. Also, try your hand at building up a library of detail parts. If your objective is to make OFF planes, you'll need a stockpile of Spandaus, Vickers, Lewises, Parabellums, Schwartzloses, Fiat-Revelis, Gnomes, Le Rhones, Mercedes, Clergets, not to mention Scarf rings, Aldis sights, pilot and observer figures for all nationalities, etc., ad nauseum. If you're stuck on your plane(s), work on one of these. I SINCERELY HOPE OBD will see fit to market an "SDK" of Gmax versions of all their aircrew, guns, gun mounts, engines, sights, etc. I'd be willing to pay for it, as I've mentioned before. But in the meantime, there's no real alternative except make your own....