Bullethead

As I understand things from reading memoirs, the typical day on an RFC squadron went like this: 1. Pilot flies dawn patrol in a plane that was thoroughly tested and tweaked the previous afternoon and evening. It probably starts out pretty close to OK, but probably not perfect. 2. Assume the plane wasn't hit or pranged in the dawn patrol, but saw some action involving high G forces. These stretched the plane out of shape somewhat and spoiled its trim. The pilot notices this on his way home from the dawn patrol. 3. Upon RTB, the pilot tells the riggers that the plane is now pulling a bit to the right. There follows a series of test hops where the riggers tweak the plane, the pilot does a few circuits, repeat. This goes on until the plane is right again or it's time to fly the next mission. 4. Steps 2 and 3 are repeated after each mission the pilot flies that day (always assuming he takes no more damage than a few holes in the canvas or something else easily fixed). 5. After the last mission of the day, there follows an intensive series of test flights and tweaks as long as the light lasts and perhaps a bit beyond, to get the plane into the best possible shape for tomorrow's dawn patrol. Then everybody drinks until they pass out, grab a couple hours of sleep, and do it all again tomorrow. 6. If for some reason a pilot didn't have to test-fly his own plane between sorties (he didn't do a mission or his plane was too badly damaged to be ready for the next mission), he had to test-fly some other bird, such as one just returned from a major repair job in the depot. As I understand things, this was pretty much like making the 1st flight in a prototype fresh off the drawing boards, due to the thing being so badly out of trim. Many guys died doing this. Getting such a bird back into operational shape took most of the day, it seems. Anyway, that's the impression I get.

Yeah, that's quite a monster. I've had all those problems in one game or another, but not all at once . And folks wonder why skinners don't just give their templates away......

Welcome aboard! New guy buys the drinks . Templates? I haven't seen any. There aren't many skinners who just give them away, because doing the template is 99.9% of the work in making a skin. To do one right, it usually takes all your free time for a week--all weeknight evenings and all day on both days of the weekend. It usually requires about a gallon of Islay single malt to get a skinner to hand over his template :drinks_drunk: A Fee, did you say? Hmm, that's different--my favorite plane. Post a shot of your Fee skin and if I like it, I'll trade you my Fokker D.VII template for it .

Up at the top of this forum, under the Combat Ace logo, you'll see the word DOWNLOAD. Hit that, go to the OFF aircraft section, and you'll find quite a few of them, mostly from Stumpjumper.

I have a suggestion..... When all else fails, HIDE THE PROBLEM . I've only fiddle with this a little on my end, but combing that with what you're saying, I suspect it might not be possible to get a perfect match for the whole fuselage length. You'll probably be able to get it close enough in several places but the other places will never work out right. So say you've got the top of the fuselage as 1 piece, but can only match it here and there with separate pieces on the sides, which can't be made to match up with each other. What you do is, you match things up as well as possible say just behind the cockpit and in front of the tail. In between, you wrap a solid color band all around the fuselage as a personal marking. I've been known to resort to such dodges . Speaking of aggravations skinning D.VIIs, here's one that gave me fits for a while. I was trying to get the rib lines to match up on the lower surface of the horizontal tail and elevator, plus make them line up with the upper surface lines, but no matter what I did, it seemed to get worse. Then I finally hit on marking all the parts. No wonder I was having problems. The left elevator goes with the right stabilizer, and vice versa, plus the stabilizer is mirrored backwards. But as you see, I've got it sorted out now

From what I can tell, it's at least partially the usual distortion caused by a flat texture being applied to a curved surface. The texture used for a given piece has the same X-Y dimensions, but obviously has no Z dimension. This works fine as long as the surface you're texturing is pretty much flat, but when it's curved, the texture has to stretch in the Z direction to fit it onto the surface. The greater the angle between the plane of the texture and the surface of the model, the more stretching you get.

Thanks!

Howdy Stumpy- Finally got CFS3mp working and was able to take a look at this. I love the visuals, especially how your whole cockpit lights up with a yellow flash when one goes off near you. The sounds are great, too. I don't know what these things really looked like but I assume you have a good idea and built them to what you know. It seems, however, that the 2 things are happening that should be directly connected but aren't. Or maybe 1 is the onion and the other is something else I don't know about. Here's what happens..... While I'm still a miles away from the balloon, I start being surrounded by what look like smaller, grayer Archie bursts. Some of these, but not all, spawn 2 bright yellow fireballs that arc up and fall down. Meanwhile, in the far distance around the balloon, I see a bunch of glowing green balls rising from the ground. These go up a couple thousand feet, heading in apparently random directions, and disappear, leaving no trace. Both these things continue to act separately all the way to the target. I continue to be surrounded by explosions and yellow fireballs from nowhere which are obviously aimed at me. Meanwhile there's a fountain of green balls erupting from the ground near the balloon that don't seem to be aimed at anything in particular. Are both these effects the onion? Are they supposed to be tied together, so that the green balls explode into yellow fireballs? Are the green balls supposed to be aimed in my direction? Are the explosions supposed to happen so far from the balloon? Or are these 2 things totally separate weapons?

OK Stump, I think I got it figured out. I read Sitting Duck MP tutorial and set CFS3mp and OFFManager to run in XP compatability mode. Now they seem to run, so I'm off to give the onions a look-see. BTW, how do you gracefully exit the game when you're running CFS3mp from itself? I couldn't find a way to do it just now and had to give it the 3-finger salute.

Very valuable intelligence, Creaghorn! Much appreciated by HQ. Given the dangerous conditions of your reconnaissance mission, I'm putting you in for a medal. I must say, however, that your girlfriend seems the best of the lot . I had no idea Croatia was such a pretty place, but the inanimate and 2-legged scenery. I've added it to my list of places I need to go before I die. And BTW, that's my kind of kitchen you've got there. When you can't tell at first whether it's for cooking or blacksmithing, you know you can do some good cooking there .

Welcome aboard! And especially welcome for knowing to buy us a round. I'll buy you one back for that .

Yup, I saw them. I've now got a collection of several dozen hexes of different shades and colors: some you made, some I made, some I found on the web. I can fit all these hexes together neatly to make the patterns, so I've got hundreds of combinations to try. There are several annoyances. Each 3D model (at least those I've played with so far) seems to have a different ambient light level, so the same colors don't look the same in the game on different airplanes. Also, say you make a combination of 3 colors and decide you like 1 of them but not the other 2. So you keep that one and try 2 others. When you do that, the color you kept no longer looks the same in the game, on the same plane, as it did with its previous 2 partners. And when you keep those 2 and change the 1 you originally kept, the 2 you kept no longer look the same. Plus, there's the sheer number of combinations. So, given all this, I've concluded that it's impossible to get naval colors to be "historically accurate". First off, nobody really knows what the real colors were, not even Dan-San, even for the pre-printed stuff. And even if you have a general idea, it's WAY too much work and frustration trying to get a good match. So I figure less than a 50% margin of error is unattainable. This ain't the case with army lozenge, which is very well-documented by comparison. Therefore, the only reasonable solution for naval hex is to make something that looks cool. If you can make something that looks cool, all else is gravy .

Yeah, there are several threads on that subject. In all of them, old Dan-San Abbott swears up and down there was never a "blue" version of naval camo, and he has the official orders specifying the real colors, plus a scrap of fabric to back up his position. He claims that the commonly used "blue" colors (such as on this model and what I used on my DFW skin) were the product of an artifact forger (IIRC named Giller) who made some fake scraps in those colors and a bunch of bogus documentation for them. Because they was no other info to modelers available at the time, they ran with it and thus a big misconception has become ingrained in the modeling consciousness. Or so Dan-San says. Too bad the "blue" version is such a pretty color scheme. I really like it, even if it has no historical justification Anyway, Dan-San's decribed the fabric scrap's colors in the completely useless Methuen nomenclature. What we need are RGB values. And even with the photo of the fabric scrap to work from, we all get different colors depending on which pixels we eyedropper or how far out we zoom when trying to get a general impression. And on top of that, because of differences in the 3D models and in-game lighting effects, what you make in PSP or Photoshop doesn't necessarily look the same in the game anyway. So..... I've determined that true accuracy is compltely unattainable on this subject. As such, I've set myself a set of guidelines for doing German naval skins. Feel free to ignore them completely . 1. Prior to April 1917, there apparently was no official naval paint scheme so you can paint naval planes however you want. 2. From April 1917 - April 1918, there was an official scheme with color but it was all hand-painted. I assume that each airplane factory and field unit mixed its own paint or used whatever was on hand, so there would be significant variation in colors, patterns, etc. I figure somebody might even have done a "blue" version in this era. But in general, the colors could at least arguably be called by the names in the official order, because when the pre-printed fabric came out later, it used the same names for the colors as before. Hand-painted hexagons were 150mm on the flats, symmetrical and regular. They were applied on top of the rib tapes and had no discontinuities for fabric edges. This is an extremely easy pattern to make when skinning . 3. After April 1918, the navy had a pre-printed fabric. This is what Dan-San's photo is of, so the colors should be at least arguably close to that photo (although as you can see, quite a lot of variation is possible). This pattern is a bit tricker to make because the hexagons are irregulare AND skewed at a 5^ angle, but it's still much easier than making an army lozenge pattern . You have to see Dan-San's diagram of how this was laid out to make it--can't explain it in words. Pre-printed hexagons lined up at the fabric edges making rows of double-wide hexes. The rib tapes would have gone on top of this pattern.

It doesn't help me much, I'm afraid... When I try to run CFS3mp.exe, it crashes about a second after the OFF splash screen comes up. So, I ran OFF and picked MP off the main menu, and that crashes, too. I've never attempted to do anything in MP mode before. Is there something I need to do to make it work? Thanks.

As most of you all know, I'm mostly fly RFC in Bloody April. I used to think that was having the odds stacked against you. But then I tried the US 148th Aero. This AFAIK is the only US Camel squadron, and it spends most of its time near Dunkerque starting in mid-1918. By then, of course, the Camel is as obsolescent as the Pup in 1917, so there's that. Plus, you get a lot of ground-attack missions, which isn't surprising for that time, place, and airplane. So obviously things are going to be challenging--that's why I went there, even if the Camel's got 2 guns. What surprised me, however, was the sheer number of Huns! Weren't they about out of fuel by then? Weren't they elsewhere on the front, where the ground fighting was thickest? But my flight of 5 little Camels just got chased homewards by 12 Dr.Is and 4 D.VIIs, with another dozen Dr.Is providing top cover, PLUS several formations of Hun bombers going about their business in the vicinity. Never saw a friendly plane beyond my own wingmen. We couldn't out-run the D.VIIs and there were too many to ignore, so we had to turn at bay for them, thankfully on the deck right at a friendly balloon. But within seconds the Dr.Is arrived, which alone outnumbered us over 2-1 and who weren't scared by the AAMGs at all. Things didn't go well at all, needless to say. DAMN, that was fun, though. Tonight I've killed 3 148th pilots under roughly similar circumstances. I've never seen such a hot sector! Bloody April can't compare at all. I'll be doing this a lot, I think . BTW, why does 148th Aero have RAF roundels instead of US? Anyway, what are your favorite hot sectors? Anybody got anything more intense than this?

If Stumpy's got more than 1 in the hangar, I'd like to see it, too. Stumpy, you keep posting pics of these cool planes you've made but it seems like you've uploaded only a fraction of them. Why not put up the rest? Maybe. But I'm sure you'll beat me to it. You can't leave the Albatros alone . In the meantime, I figured out a way to make skewed naval pre-printed fabric, so I put your colors on it and it looks pretty good. I'll PM you a pic.

Very nice. That's helpful for the pre-printed stuff of 1918. Since you're doing an Albatros, I guess I'll do a D.VII this way. The problem is getting the 5^ skew in the pattern without hosing it all up. The skew function in PSP doesn't do a good job with the anti-aliasing, so I'm thinking I'll just draw 3 skewed hexes by hand and then paste copies of them all over :).

Very nice. Thanks! BTW, in the 1st video showing the unskinned plane, it looked like there was a twisted rubber band running down the fuselage, just like on the little models I used to fly when I was a kid

I dunno. Last year I got really pounded by Hurricane Gustav. And then here came Ike about a week behind, and the weathermen didn't have a clue where it was going. I was able to watch this fiasco because I had a generator to run my TV--didn't get shore power restored until about the time Ike arrived, and then Ike knocked it out again for a couple more days. Anyway, Ike totally foxed the weathermen. In the morning they'd say it was going to hit a certain place, but by evening they'd changed their minds, and they'd change their minds again the next morning. Their predicted impact area swung like a pendulum all across the Gulf of Mexico and halfway back. First it was going to stay in the Atlantic and go up the east coast of Florida. Then right up the middle of Florida, then up its west coast. Then it was going to hit Mobile AL, then New Orleans and me, then Lake Charles LA, then Galveston TX, then Corpus Christi TX, and finally Brownsville TX on the Mexican border. And then it started swinging back east again, until it finally sideswiped me and hit Galveston.

Yeah, they had all kinds of airplanes. By the latter part of 1917, Marinekorps Flandern had several squadrons each of land fighters and bombers, plus several seaplane squadrons of both fighters and bombers. And they were kept very busy. The Brits bombed Zeebrugge and Oostende nearly every day and night, so there were nearly continuous air battles over them. Plus the German planes flew across and bombed the nearer places in England many times, and of course there were many attacks by planes on both sides on shipping in the Channel and lower North Sea. The German naval pilots had some pretty high-tech stuff, too. They were so good at real-time arty spotting against moving targets that they gave the German shore batteries a much longer effective range than the RN's monitors. The Brits of course tried to counter this by sweeping the German spotters away and putting their own over Zeebrugge, which is one reason for all air battles. But the Germans seem to have usually had the better of this and thus kept the monitors too far away most times for them to do any real good. The coolest thing, however, was that the Germans invented a radio-controlled explosive motorboat. This was steered by an airplane and actually succeeded in hitting one of the monitors. Amazing. Marinekorps Flandern itself was an amazing organization. Besides airplanes, it included 2 divisions of naval infantry in the trenches, plus naval construction units to build all the shore batteries and port installations, plus the naval base crewmen, the shore battery gunners, and varying numbers of naval vessels from large torpedoboats/destroyers and submarines down to minesweeping launches. I recommend reading Wielding the Dagger: The Marinekorps Flandern and the German War Effort, 1914-1918, by Mark D. Karau. It's a fascinating book on a subject that's gotten little attention.

That's beautiful! I really like the overall effect . Especially with the hand-painted patterns, I really doubt there was any such thing as a standardized color. I'm sure each airplane factory mixed its paints differently, and God only knows what units in the field did. I'd be willing to bet that all naval airplanes were different colors and shades at least until the pre-printed pattern came out in 1918, and I'd assume there were manufacturing variations in that, too. Yup, that's going to be a bitch. Good luck with it.

So where are the screenshots of the beach babes and your AARs of your conquests? Oh yeah, welcome back. Did you bring us any good booze from home? Supplies are running low here at the front.

Welcome aboard, Southpaw, even if you've been here 3 weeks without me noticing. New guy buys the drinks . Even when they shoot back, IMHO using 2 guns is like Inigo Montoya fencing with his right hand--"over too quickly". This is why I mostly fly for the RFC in Bloody April. It's extremely unusual then to meet Hun 2-seaters; most fights are against superior numbers of higher enemy fighters that outclass yours in many important performance areas, plus have 2 guns to your 1. So your 1 gun has to do more work than their 2, and you really have to fly for your life. Other than this, flying Pfalzes in 1918 is also extremely challenging. I find it harder than flying a Fee in 1917, because at least the Fee can turn. The Pflaz doens't fly, it beats the air into submission like a helicopter. And like a helicopter, if you bank the Pfalz more than about 30^, it falls sideways out of the sky. It's not fast enough to outrun a SPAD XIII nor maneuverable enough to turn with an SE5, so you're on the short end no matter what you do. But the last 4 BE2s were the funniest. I was almost home and had 98 rounds of ammo left. Just as I was approaching my field, there they were. 4 helpless, unarmed 2-seaters flying just to the North of me. I had to try to get at least 1 or 2 with my remaining ammo. Knowing they won't shoot back helps, as I was able to fly right along side, kick the rudder to aim for their engines, and set them ablaze with a quick burst. I did this for the first 3, then saw my ammo counter: 6 rounds, 1 plane left. Why not? I pulled up as close as I could, aimed for the engine, and hit home with all 6. A second later a small flame emerged from the engine. Soon after the plane was engulfed in flames and my wife wanted to know what I was laughing at. I know - enjoy it while I can until armed 2-seaters and Nieuports start showing up.

I think it's based on distance from your plane, which is very long. The shooter and victim don't have to be "in your fight" or flight, either. For example, when I flew along watching a large land battle one day, the replay had messages like "entrenched troops XYZ struck by artillery shell" followed immediately by "entrenched troops XYZ destroyed". But when I was further from the action, I just saw "entrenched troops XYZ destroyed".

Welcome aboard! New guy buys the drinks! :drinks_drunk: You won't regret getting OFF--it's almost too immersive.