Bullethead

That's pretty much what I'm saying. I don't want to spend a cent of tax money on projects that deliver nothing more than the space equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest, which is all Apollo was and is all a Mars trip now would be. But if somebody wants to do it out of his own pocket, let him. OTOH, I have no objection to spending tax money on developing ways to move lots of stuff cheaply and frequently to LEO, and developing stuff to make it so people can survive better and longer in space and on low-gravity planets. Until we can solve those problems, expansion into space is impossible on anything approaching a useful scale in either numbers and duration. All this research can be done without going even as far as the Moon. The problem is, it will certainly take a long time to accomplish and it's not in the least bit sexy. Thus, the adventurous types grow impatient and the public loses interest and cuts the budget. Hence, the clamor for the publicity stunt of going to Mars now. However, regardless of what government-funded rocket scientists do, nothing of any real significance is going to happen in space until somebody in the private sector can turn a profit on it. That requires not only an economically significant public demand for a space-related product or service, but also a commercially viable means of supplying that demand. Right now, these conditions are met only in the satellite industry, which we here all use in several forms on a daily basis. For colonizing space, however, at present there is neither the demand nor the supply. Creating the supply is what I've been going on about, but that's useless if nobody wants to go. This is why I wish the embryonic private space tourism industry well. These folks are hitting both aspects of the problem. As they grow their businesses, they will necessarily develop better and cheaper ways of getting more people and stuff off the ground. Also, as they build space resorts, they will start making people want to live in space, not just visit it for the weekend. Hopefully by then, the government-funded research will have figured out a way to make that less unhealthy. I dunno. If there was a real (as in economically significant) demand for this stuff, it would have happened already. The private sector is more than capable of developing products and services to meet present and foreseen demands. Why do you think we have jet airliners at all? So if enough people really had a need for more advanced airplanes, we'd be seeing them overhead right now. IMHO, therefore, there is no need to inject radical change into the aircraft industry just for the sake of doing it. Consider supersonic airliners. Neither one that got off the drawing board was a private venture. They were, like most government projects, products for which there was no viable demand. They were the atmospheric equivalents of the Apollo program, something cool but impractical, done only for prestige, and justified with, "if you build it, they will come". IIRC, their creation even owed a lot to their governments' envy at not being 1st to the Moon. Had their been a genuine demand for such things, private industry would have done it before the governments, or would at least have joined the party shortly afterwards, and would still be flying such things today. As it was, the Soviet SST was soon cancelled as a white elephant, and it took decades of government subsidies before Concorde broke even. Private industry knows, from examples like this and from various flops of its own doing, that "if you build it, sometimes nobody comes." It also can't rely on deficit spending and printing its own money to make up for such extravagant failures. Thus, private industry isn't going to spend a lot of money on something speculative that carries a large risk of not paying off. This doesn't mean it's unimaginative, however. All the airplane companies have R&D departments thinking far ahead and sketching out proposals for all kinds of radical ideas. They were thinking of SSTs long before the governments got into the game, and in fact still are. Unlike governments, however, the private sector subjects these proposals to rigorous cost-benefit analyses, so only pursues those that will pay off under current and near-future conditions. However, it keeps all this stuff on the back burner, so that if conditions change, it will be able to exploit the new business opportunities.

Maybe folks here are more pragmatic, but the rocket scientist community seems quite full of starry-eyed snakeoil salesmen. At least, they're the ones who get all the air time on TV, even if they're just a vocal minority. Still, as real rocket scientists, they obviously know that true space colonization isn't going to be possible in the foreseeable future, and that a trip to Mars in the near future won't do anything to change that. Yet they continue to talk as if a near-future Mars mission will in fact open the doors to immediate colonization of space, or somehow solve various serious problems here on Earth. At worst this is out-and-out lying, at best it's willful misrepresentation. The obvious question to ask is, why do they feel the need to mislead the public? The obvious answer is, because they think such rhetoric is necessary as a sales pitch to get the money. But if a Mars mission can't return the advertised benefits, why do it? The best answer to that I can see is that they want the glory for being the 1st to do it. After all, if it's possible, somebody will certainly do it fairly soon, and nobody remembers who came in 2nd place. OTOH, I can see how rocket scientists today, who are in their late-40s or older, must be fairly frustrated. They grew up watching the stepping-stone progress of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. These program no doubt are what attracted them to the field, and they entered it in full expectation of the same sort of trend continuing. But now here they are in today's situation, and no longer young. Those who haven't lost their enthusiams along the way, and who now know full well how long it takes to get a major program from drawing board to launch pad, must be thinking that if they don't start now, they'll retire without realizing the dreams that got them into the business in the 1st place. So again, they're pushing a Mars mission now for personal reasons, although perhaps not quite as selfish as the above. But maybe this is being too harsh. Maybe some of these guys honestly think that only a radical change of mission will shake the space program out of what they perceive to be stagnation in LEO with the ISS and shuttle. Some of them actually claim that as a motive, whether they really believe it or not. Personally, I think this is just another way of expressing the "my retirement clock is ticking" motive above. But even if they really believe that space exploration has stagnated, they're forgetting the sad fact that until we thoroughly conquer LEO, we can't go anywhere else in enough numbers to matter a hill of beans, and that going to Mars now isn't going to change that. The reason nobody's been back to the Moon in nearly 40 years is that we only went there for the artificial reason of political prestige. There was not then, and there is not now, any survival- or market-driven demand for Apollo's product, so once we planted the flag and the political ego was satisfied, Moon missions ended. Today, technology has advanced to the point where a trip to Mars, on the same insignificant scale as Apollo, is either possible or will be very soon. Thus, political prestige is again at stake, but there is still a lack of a true driving need for such a trip. Thus, once somebody proves it can be done, that'll be the end of it, just like the Moon missions ended. I daresay that 40 years from now, the great cry will be for being the 1st to get a few people to a Jovian moon, despite the fact that nobody's been back to Mars yet. And then to Titan after that, and so on. Meanwhile, the space developments of real importance will still be happening, slowly and unglamorously, in LEO, probably by the private sector.

I think you're missing my point, so I'll address your last point first. I'm not a boobird. I grew up reading hardcore science fiction, and I even write a little of it myself. I am all for human space travel. I want very much for us to colonize other planets, perhaps even go to another solar system someday. However, I look at the subject rather differently than the starry-eyed "on to Mars!" crowd. Those folks are snake-oil salesmen. They couch their arguments in such glorious prose that they've completely hidden the harsh reality of the substance behind a veil of symbolism. This is just so they can get funding to work on their pet project and get their names down in history as having been part of the 1st manned Mars mission. They KNOW that they're making all kinds of empy promises, but the average person doesn't know enough about space travel to realize this, so might actually vote to spend the money. Many laymen seem to think that just because we can put a half-dozen people in a short-term, completely unsustainable tincan on Mars, suddenly we're an interplanetary species. Now all of a sudden, they think everybody can go to Mars as a tourist or live there permanently if they want. Then Earth can offload some excess population and humanity will be able to survive a big meteor hitting Earth. But that's all BS. The very limit of our technology is putting, at great expense, a half-dozen people in a temporary tincan on Mars. And that is NOT going to change any time soon, for the simple reason of Earth's gravity. We might get very good at sending out handfuls of people, but we're never going to make any difference to Earth or humanity until we can move MILLIONS of people and all their stuff, and probably terraform Mars and/or Venus along the way. I predict that if we do send somebody to Mars in the near future, it will be many decades, probably a century or more, before anybody goes back there. Look at how long it's been since anybody's been to the Moon just next door. Having planted the flag and gotten into the history books, and the world now knowing how futile its hopes were for getting anything lasting out of the show, the starry-eyed rocket scientists will be forced back to doing something that might lead to practical benefits. So go ahead and vote for a Mars trip if it makes you feel good. But understand that it's a complete waste of time and money which would be better spent trying to solve the real problems of human space travel. Doubtful--astronauts need rather more legroom than airline passengers :). Besides, the shuttle's air supply won't let that many people breathe very long, so they'd have to be offloaded immediately into some huge facility that could support them all, which doens't yet exist. On top of that, colonists would have a lot of carry-on luggage to last them the many months the trip will take, plus numerous checked-in crates of household furnishings to set up their new homes. Not to mention all the supplies and spare parts they'd need. Unfortunately, using extraterrestrial materials to built spaceships in orbit doens't cheat gravity in the least. On top of this, you can't use extraterrestrial materials to bootstrap space colonization because to get them, you have to have already colonized space on a large scale. IOW, it's putting the cart before the horse. The reason for this is that only on Earth is there an industrial complex. Thus, if you build a big ship in Earth orbit, you just have to lift subassemblies to LEO. They still add up to the mass of the ship, but they're spread out in little packages and you don't have to lift them very high. OTOH, building a ship on the Moon will first required you to establish a permanent colony there. You'd have to establish mines, factories, and powerplants, all on a large industrial scale. Running and maintaining all that would require a large, self-sufficient, permanent population, with all its housing, utilities, food, air, etc. All the stuff necessary for that would have to be taken all the way to the Moon, which requires way more delta-V than just getting to LEO. And all that has to be done before you'd see a single spaceship part roll off the line. You can, of course, use a few electrochemical tricks to generate water, O2, and thus naturally LH/LOX rocket fuel on the Moon. And you can probably grow plants there, although raising cattle is probably impractical. However, EVERYTHING used in the Moon base, at least to get it started, and except perhaps building materials made of lunar rock, has to be carried up there. All the mining excavators, all the milling machines, all the circuitboard etchers, all the trucks to carry their products around, and all the spare parts for them, at least until the factories can make their own. And remember, this has to be on a vast scale, capable of producing huge, complex machines like interplanetary spacecraft in a reasonable amount of time. It's the issue of scale that most folks seem to be ignoring. Sure, we can toss a handful of people to another planet, at least temporarily, but actually colonizing the place is a whole 'nuther story. The effort required is akin to picking up an Earth city and physically moving it, and everything and everybody in it, all the way to another planet. And that's just not going to happen until we can make LEO effectively part of Earth's surface, which ain't gonna happen any time soon. Which brings us back to the point of human space travel. The starry-eyed types gloss over the issue of scale completely while spinning tales of colonizing planets. But there's no getting around the problem, and that's not likely to change any time soon. Thus, for the foreseeable future, we're talking about just a few handfuls of people. Maybe, with a lot of luck, some scientific breakthroughs, and a long enough time, these tiny seeds will grow up into large colonies. But note that this does absolutely nothing at all for anybody on Earth. Only a handful of people will have descendants on other planets, Earth will still be overpopulated, and a meteor is still likely to wipe everybody out, because without periodic support from home, the tiny colonies will surely die out. In all this discussion so far, we've barely touched on the devastating physiological effects of prolonged stints in space or in low gravity. This affects all human space travel, small-scale or large. Those eager to go to Mars today accept that even if they make it home, they probably won't be able to live normal lives and likely won't live much longer. So that's another big problem to overcome before we can get serious about migrating elsewhere.

Where I live, there's a tree that has grabbed and destroyed several low-flying cars, ISYN! One of the busiest roads (LA 10) around here has 2 lanes with no shoulders at all, just steep drop-offs into the deep ditch on either side. That area can flood so the road is built up on a high bed and the dirt for that came from the ditches. It's like 10 feet from the level of the road to the bottom of the ditches, which are about 5 feet below the surrounding ground level. This road makes a fairly hard curve to the left just where a similar but less-busy road (LA 965) Ts into it from the right. This is out in the country so there are no street lights and most of the reflective paint has worn off the pavement. What happens is, idiots (usually drunk) driving too fast at night go off the curve of LA 10 and down into the ditch. The ditch is not only deep but pretty wide and U-shaped on the bottom. If it's rained a little, the grass in the ditch is very slick, so it functions like a bobsled chute, not slowing the car down at all. The car therefore follows curve of the road down in the ditch doing 60-80mph until reaches the LA 965's high bed. This roadbed is sloped about 45^ and the car goes up it like a ski jump ramp, catching BIG air. The car-eating tree is a large pine directly in the flightpath of the cars. It's about 50 feet on the other side of LA 965, which fans out at the intersection to about twice its normal width so cars can make turns easier. Thus, from where the cars go airborne on the near side of LA 965 until they hit the tree, it's about 100 feet. The cars impact about 20 feet above ground level, where the tree is about 3 feet thick, and then crash to earth. It's a "Dukes of Hazard" scene gone horribly wrong . The tree has a barkless patch about 8 feet tall, and its slightly bent there, but otherwise is unscathed after repeated impacts. The surrounding ground is littered with the rusting bones of all the cars that it's eaten: hoods, bumpers, doors, dashboards, broken windshields, etc. Back when I was a firefighter, I spent about 1 night every couple of years dealing with such wrecks. The worst part was that the car would go to pieces and the idiots would be tossed in all directions, sometimes being stuck in neighboring trees. Of course, those that survived were in no condition to tell us how many people had been in the car, so we'd have to spend hours combing around with flashlights looking for other victims, until we were about to get a count from the victims' families. Then we'd go back in daylight and take pictures and measurements, always somewhat amazed by it all. You can actually see this tree on Google Earth. I've attached a kmz of it.

I disagree. The dark streak on the fuselage side from the cockpit back is where the pilot habitually spits tobacco juice .

I am a "hunter" by temperment, preference, and long experience. This comes from MANY years in MMOFS games flying FW190s, P51s, and other such WW2 E-fighters. However, this poll is about OFF, so I put myself down as a "shooter". This is because I fly mostly for the Brits in Pups and Fees. As such, I only rarely get to pick my fights and study the situation before engaging. Instead, I usually find myself vastly outnumbered by faster enemies attacking from high above me. Then it's just sauve qui peut and Devil take the hindmost.

Thanks for the tip

I do, every day. In fact, I mentioned it in my 1st wall o' text several posts ago. Problem is, I really don't think it will work on the scale necessary to do what needs doing.

Again, for something the size of a car or small truck, carrying at most a half-dozen people, and it will still need some other method of getting off the ground, because it lacks the thrust to defeat gravity. Conventional rockets are slow because they have just barely enough delta-V to push their mass (including fuel for braking at the destination and then returning) out of Earth's gravity well. Then they have to coast the whole trip. But the fastest way to go between planets is to burn the whole way. The 1st half of the trip, you accelerate continuously and build up a lot of speed. Then you turn around and decelerate all through the 2nd half of the trip to slow down enough to stop at your destination. This is what ion engines to, but the problem is pulling it off with a useful payload. Ion engines, even this one, produce ridiculously small amounts of thrust. They have to, because that's the only way to make the fuel (or technically, the reaction mass) last long enough to burn the whole way there (and back, if you want to get home). In space, even a tiny amount of thrust can move a huge object, true enough. However, F = ma still applies. Thus, the only way to get a good acceleration out of a tiny thrust is if the mass is kept small, too, in proportion to the thrust. This rules out using ion engines for usefully large space liners, which again limits us to sending insignificant numbers of people off Earth. One of the things I continually chuckle at is that some folks think space is some pure, virgin territory and that radiation from a nuclear space engine would pollute it. In reality, space is saturated with horrible radiation put there by God Himself, so nothing us little humans put there would be a noticeable addition. The sky is full of completely unshielded nuclear reactors, called stars, many of which are much bigger than the sun, which itself is thousands of times bigger than this whole planet. Sure, it's worth pursuing. It can do many useful things. It's just not the answer to the real problem of getting more than an insignificant number of people off this rock. You cannot avoid launches from Earth, because every single thing we send to another planet has to start off on the ground. That's the people, everything they take with them, and the ship. Sure, you can build the ship in orbit, but you still have get the parts and materials up there. PLUS you also have to lift all the people and materials to build the orbital shipyard beforehand, keep it supplied while the ship is being built, and rotate shifts of dockyard workers up and down every month or so. This is why just getting to orbit is probably the biggest single hurdle on the way to the planets. Folks tend to take reaching orbit for granted these days, what with all the satellites we put there all the time. But these satellites are very small, and even so launching each one is hugely expensive. Think about how many full-price shuttle launches it would take to put even 100 people into orbit to board a hypothetical space liner to Mars, and how long the 1st ones up would have to wait until the last ones arrived. Now think about how that space liner came to be up there to begin with. So until we can find a cheap, reliable, and frequent way of getting huge numbers of people and megtons of materials into orbit, we're all stuck on Earth. We're talking changes of several orders of magnitude over the SUM of everything we've done before in space. THAT'S the real challenge of planetary colonization. I have no doubt that if we started today, in a few years we could put a handful of people on Mars and get them home, provided they don't kill each other somewhere along the way. They might even live long enough afterwards for the politicians to visit them in the ICU for a poignant photo-op. And I'm sure those of us footing the bill for it all would have a moment somewhere along the line when we thought it was pretty cool. It would be about the same feeling you get watching a YouTube video of some clever stunt, and would interest you about as long. Far better, IMHO, to spend the money instead on figuring out a cheap way to get massive quantities of stuff into orbit. Once we're there en masse, we can do all kinds of things. But until we can do that, manned space exploration is a complete waste of time and money IMHO.

Orbiter is very much worth it. It teaches you a LOT about the realities of space travel, so you can actually consider yourself an amateur rocket scientist after a while. But don't let that scare you off; your computer does all the hard math. All you have to do is get a vague understanding of the concepts that the complicated math deals with. It also helps to research good launch windows for going where you want to go, because the game won't tell you. Orbiter could be classified more as a toy than a game. There is no combat, there is no score. It's just about driving a spaceship from point A to point B without crashing it, getting lost, running out of fuel, getting too hot, etc. But this is extremely fascinating. There are zillions of mods for it, ranging from real and imaginary spaceships to entirely different solar systems. With these mods, you can do every historical space shot (even unmanned probes), plus build futurisitic space stations piece-by-piece, etc. But don't overlook the MFD mods, which make interplanetary navigation, rendezvousing and docking, and landing so much easier than the stock instruments. Be warned, however, that Orbiter is a great shatterer of illusions. It will dash any hopes you have of ever seeing a substantial number of people even on the Moon, let alone further away. There are 2 types of adventurers: those who want adventures at least indirectly involving other people, and those who actively court death by exposure in the uninhabitable wastes. I'm in the 1st category. To me, adventure is experiencing the culture, food, booze, and women of foriegn lands, and perhaps getting into a fight or finding treasure there. You know, the swashbuckling stuff of ripping yarns. So in the past, I'd have been all over exploring the Americas or the South Seas, and these days I'd be happy to try to colonize the ocean floor. But no way in Hell would I have gone on a polar expedition . To me, manned space exploration is today's version of the polar expeditions of a century ago: a tiny group of masochistic lunatics going on a long, arduous journey to the far side of nowhere, which can achieve absolutely nothing of practical value. They get there, they plant a flag and take a photo, and maybe they get home again, suffering all the way, and have serious health problems for the rest of their shortened lifespans. All anybody else gets out of it is a multi-billion dollar photo they'll only look at when its anniversary comes around ever decade. Most wars, however, at least serve a practical purpose. You might not agree with that purpose, but you can't argue with its practicality. To those who want to go to Mars personally, I say this: Your goal is obviously to commit suicide in a spectacular and pointless manner. Therefore, take up one of today's many extreme sports. You can fund that out of your own pocket. In fact, the less money you spend on it, the sooner you'll find the horrible death you seek. Problem is, we do NOT have the capability to do this, nor will we in timespans measured in less than centuries. We simply cannot generate the necessary horsepower (or delta-V in rocket science terms). Anyone who says otherwise is either smoking crack or just wants to get a federal grant to pay his bills so he doesn't have to get a real job. It takes billions of dollars and the biggest rockets we can make to fling something the size of a car or small truck to the Moon or Mars and get it back. Forget going further away, at least if you want to return, and don't forget it'll take you a decade or more 1-way travel time. Anyway, all this huge expense will suffice to carry no more than a half-dozen people at once, and it can't be done very often due to the enormous cost. The net result is absolutely zero effect on Earth's population and insufficient people in space to prevent inbreeding at the tiny colonies we're able to establish, assuming they can survive the hazards of the trip and environment there. "Some kind of challenge like it" can be found MUCH closer to home. We occupy less than 25% of this planet's surface. What about spreading out here first? More people have been to the Moon than the deepest part of the ocean right here at home. Besides, people can't tell us anything about Mars that robots can't tell us already, or will be able to very soon. So you don't need people to answer "profound questions", and of course the answers (like if there is/was life on Mars) are of zero practical value. Also, does ANYBODY feel any compelling need for a sense of "self-worth as a species"? I sure don't. There are people I'm ashamed to call my close relatives, so why should I want to invent ties to all the other people in the world, many of whom are equally worthless? As mentioned above, the whole problem with human space travel is that it takes all our money and our best science to generate enough delta-V just barely to lift a half-dozen people once in a while, and move them so slowly that it takes most of year just to get to Mars. This is NOT going to change any time soon. Meaningful human space colonization will only be possible when it can be done on a scale comparable with the European immigration to the US in the late 1800s and early 1900s. That is, a large-scale migration. You need to move hundreds of people at once, with all their belongings and supplies, on a very frequent basis. You need a fleet of space "ocean liners", IOW, which are much faster than our current spacecraft. We're not even close to being able to do that. To make this a reality, we have to first find a way around the prodigious cost of getting stuff into orbit. Rockets ain't going to do that, but maybe a space elevator or something similar might work. Whatever it is, though, it must be capable of moving HUGE quantities of materials and people to orbit, where these space liners would be built, crewed, and loaded. Then the liners themselves will need a new type of engine far more efficient than anything we can make now, or even theorize about at present. I have no objection to doing things this way. If we can figure out how, it would be of great practical benefit. But only once we overcome these hurdles can we get serious about colonizing other planets. This is why I'm against going to Mars any time soon. Such a trip is just a pointless propaganda photo-op at present, just like going to the Moon was. Furthermore, it accomplishes NOTHING toward the practical goal of moving lots of people into space. The International Space Station, OTOH, is actually laying useful groundwork towards that practical goal, no matter how inefficiently, so I grudginly support it. True, it'll never leave low Earth orbit, but until we can occupy LEO on an industrial scale indefinitely, we're not going to go anywhere else in a meaningful way.

However you feel like spelling it, the Lufbery/Luffbery/Luffberry/Lufberry/Luftbeery Circle was a common tactic in WW1. It's a shame the AI doesn't do it in OFF. I'm thinking that it doesn't have to be THAT common for the AI. I'd use it only for 2-seaters that lack a try rear gun, like the Fee, the Quirk, and perhaps the 1-seat Strutter. The Fee is especially documented to have used the tactic on a daily basis with much success. By success, I mean staying alive until the Germans got bored and looked for easier prey. But enough about the AI. What I really want to talk about is how to use this tactic yourself, should you, like me, be a Fee-fetisher. If you've spent any time on Fees, you know the usual story. There you are leading 2 or 3 buddies, sputtering arthritically along at 5000 feet or less like some ancient dowager walking her covey of equally old and gimpy pugs. Still, the view ahead is magnificent and the unobstructed air hitting you square in the face is quite refreshing, which makes it all worthwhile. Then you look up and see about a dozen Albatri diving on you from way up there. If you've been in this position a few times, you're familiar with the usual result. You tell your wingmen to attack or cover you, your formation goes to pieces, all your buddies try vainly to run away and just die to rear attacks they don't bother dodging, and you end up (if you're lucky) making a forced landing just this side of the Lines and are in hospital for several weeks. After suffering through this countless times, however, I have hit upon the solution: the Lufbery Circle! I have always known Fees used this tactic extensively and I've often cursed there was no wingman command in OFF to make it happen. But now I have discovered a way! What you do is, you start turning fairly hard with 1 hand while pounding the RALLY wingman command continually with the other. This tells your wingmen to reform on you immediately, but they can't do it very well because you're turning. So what happens is, they get stuck following you, while you're following 1 of them. The result is an irregular, but effective, Lufbery Circle. This proves to be effective because you're all turning fairly hard, and the AI of most beastly Huns won't try to follow you. Meanwhile, however, all your gunners will shoot at any Huns who come too close. So what usually happens is, the Albatri pull out of their dives somewhat above you, mill around in confusion for a while, and then go pick on somebody else. Best case, they go after those brown-nosers in A Flight a few miles ahead of you. When they do that, you can follow them (always ready to resume the circle) and then blindside them when they get tangled up with the others. Or, if you're so inclined, you can go on about your business. This tactic doesn't always work. Sometimes your wingmen refuse to follow you around in a circle but wander around acting lost. Sometimes the circle doesn't deter the Huns and they blast you down from above anyway. But it works well enough most of the time for me to recommend it. My squadrons' losses have gone WAY down and kills somewhat up since I started using it. It's at least better than the other alternatives I've tried before The important thing to remember is to NEVER use any wingman command that gives your AI pilots freedom of choice, unless the situation is overwhelmingly in your favor, and even then be prepared for bitter disappointment. Left to themselves, AI Fee pilots almost always run away, which not only is futile but often fatal, plus it makes survival more difficult for you. Of course, this ONLY works if you're the flight leader. Anyway, that's my contribution to Air Combat Maneuvering. If anybody has some spare time and wants to give it a try, let me know how it works out. And if anybody has a better survival tactic for the Fee, by all means let me know.

In the heroic tradition handed down since the Sumerians, I like to pretend I'm giving a peptalk to my troops in B Flight before we go over the top. My standard speech goes something like this: "Right, lads. Today the squadron's doing another bloody OP to bloody Douai. As usual, it's certain some of us won't be coming back, so let's all work together to make sure those for the chop are in A Flight. Same drill as always; let A Flight draw the Huns, then we sweep in to save the day or not, as the situation warrants. See you all in the mess tonight, where we'll drink to the shades of the latest casualties in A Flight. Right? Right! Saddle up!"

If you want to fly it, check out the freeware sim Orbiter: http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/ It's not in the base download, but in mods you can find here: http://www.orbithangar.com/ The primary Orbiter forums is here, http://orbiter-forum.com/. Be warned, however, that it's INTENSELY political and dominated by a large cabal of willfully ignorant, rabidly left-wing, rabidly anti-US parties from elsewhere in the world. It often seems that their primary joy is trashing the US and pushing socialism, even in the so-called "on topic" threads. So enter at your own risk, and expect to suffer through many flame wars over politics to glean a few gems about actually playing the game. The Orbiter commune--er, I mean "community"--is the main reason I don't do Orbiter anymore. It really makes me appreciate this forum, where folks from all over the world and everywhere on the political spectrum, and whose ancestors undoubtedly killed each other in the very war this forum is about, can put all that aside and just talk airplanes and pretend to kill each other with no hard feelings. I drink to you all :drinks_drunk: But anyway, if you've got any interest in space travel, you really should give Orbiter a try. It'll REALLY give you an appreciation of what's possible and what isn't.

Apart from communications and weather satellites, what other use is there in going to space than military advantage? I can't think of any. If you want to see what Mars looks like, go to the Sonora and Mojave Deserts and look at them through a pair of orange-tinted shades. Voila, you're on Mars, only you can breathe the air, the gravity is Earth-normal, you didn't absorb a lethal dose of radiation getting there, and you don't have to live undergorund to avoid getting another lethal dose of radiation from being on the surface. Plus, there are all kinds of living things to study, water to drink, etc. And most importantly, when you get tired of it, you can jump in your car and within 10 minutes be at a comfortable motel with a decent restaurant, swimming pool, and the companionship of females you haven't been cooped up with for the past year. Folks say we need to colonize other planets, to ensure the survival of the species. That's total BS. For at least the next several centuries, we will never be able to move more than a handful of people to another planet even within this solar system. Thus, nobody I care about will go, and most likely none of your relatives or friends will go, either. So if your family doesn't survive, why should you spend zillions of dollars to let a very few other families, all chosen by the government, survive? Plus, given that those who go elsewhere will be effectively cut off from here, and living under very different conditions, they will necessarily become a separate species in short order. Thus, even if we do colonize some other planet, the human race as we know it won't survive if Earth is wiped out. It will be some new species that survives. So why should anybody care? Until and unless these problems are overcome (which ain't going to happen in our great-grandchildrens' lifetimes, if ever), sending people into space is utterly pointless, except as regards doing things in the Earth-Moon system. The above-mentioned communications and weather satellites are quite useful, so any human maintanence they need is more than justified. Likewise, putting a military base on the moon, which is the ultimate high ground as regards bombarding Earth, is also justifiable from certain POVs, and will certainly happen because it's too big a temptation. But as for human exploration beyond the Moon, what's the point? So what if it takes a human to see traces of life on Mars, Europa, or Titan? It won't make any difference in my life at all. Personally, I'd be greatly surprised if there WASN'T life, of bacterial level, on just about every rock in space--I figure the universe is chock full of pond scum. After all, it seems to be a natural property of organic molecules to organize themselves into fundamentals of life and self-replicating structures, and the universe is full of organic molecules even in interstellar space. But none of that makes any difference at all in my daily life. If probe finds life on Mars tomorrow, I'd just shrug it off as an expected development of absolutely no consequence. Sorry if this rains on some peoples' parades. But seriously, what can human space exploration beyond the moon offer, as a practical matter, to justify the huge expense? And come to that, what's the pay-off of going to the Moon? If you don't use it as a training ground for going further out, the only practical reason to go there is to build a military base from which to bombard Earth with impunity. Otherwise, it's just a waste of money, and personally I'd rather not look down the barrel of guns on the Moon. Thus, why send anybody to even the Moon?

Barnstorm- Sorry about your mother. My condolences. And thanks for the tip on Blue Max. I've got it programmed into my TV now.

Historicity isn't The Dawn Patrol's strongest point. The intro text at the beginning says it's 1916, but you see Brit fighters with synchronized guns. Not only that, but most of them have *2* such guns, PLUS a 3rd gun on the upper wing . I do agree that the Brit planes in the movie are N.28s, no doubt because the US had a fair number of them available cheap at the time. As to what they're supposed to represent, who knows? They look to me like some type of Great Lakes, but I could easily be wrong. Anyway, I've never much cared about such problems. They're no worse, really, than using more or less modified AT-6s for Zeros, SBDs, and FW-190s, or Bf-108s for Bf-109s, in WW2 movies.

I'm not sure I understand what you're talking about here. AFAIK, you die from suffering fatal injuries, either from enemy fire or hitting the ground too hard. There's nothing in the game that just kills you for no good reason. When you run into enemy flights, it's because that's where they were destined to be. All the AI squadrons based all over the map are carrying out their missions same as your squadron is, so there's a good chance you'll run into 1 or more of them as you fly around. However, what you meet is a combination of many factors: Where your mission takes you and the time of your flight. How much you deviate from your planned path due to combat or avoiding bad situations. Where the AI squadrons are set to go that day and the times of their flights. How much the AI squadrons deviate from their itenerary due to combat. Thus, sometimes you meet little or no enemy activity, sometimes it seems like the whole enemy airforce is deliberately hunting you. That's the fortunes of war.

Wow, that's hardcore. What most folks do when they're forced down is hit ESC once on the ground to bring up the main menu, then hit End Mission. It's assumed that your squadron will send a truck out to disassemble the plane after the enemy leaves . Yes. It has to be a pretty gentle crash, though, such as dragging a wingtip, or perhaps bellying in after you've lost your landing gear. Stalling and pancaking from more than about 15' up seems to be pretty fatal, though.

Yes, sometimes the hangers-on do exceed expectations :). You weren't surprised, were you? Their B Flight leader was a man much like yourself, no doubt

Join the club . And trust me, it only gets worse until late 1917, maybe early 1918, depending on where you are and what squadron you fly for. But anyway, once you can turn the tables on the Huns after suffering through being on the short end of the stick, it's sweet :).

That often works well. If the leader is crippled, it can take a while for the rest to sort themselves out, which effectively breaks up the whole formation. But sometimes you find yourself flying into a lead hailstorm. Thus, I usually go for somebody closer to the edge of the formation.

There's no shame in being named for a badger. As I was wandering through Missouri one day, I came upon a badger and a skunk fighting. I have no idea what started it, and it was most unusual. Instead of being a contest of who could act the baddest and intimidate the other, this was a fight to the death. I just sat and watched, and neither noticed me. The badger won a pyrhic victory. Besides countless other wounds, he lost his front right leg at the shoulder and bled to death shortly thereafter, not to mention probably being blind from the skunk emptying its magazine right in his face. But the biggest remaining piece of the skunk was about 2" long. I drink to that badger's shade, and the skunk's, too. Both were real warriors :drinks_drunk:

Bear in mind that my advice was for 2-seaters, especially 2-seaters without rear gunners. When my Fee squadrons switch to flying Brisfits, I tell my wingmen to attack and let nature take its course, same as I do when flying scouts. More often than not, or just occasionally? I hate those A Flight bastards. Always sucking up to the Major, never looking back at whatever Hell has in store for us B Flight types and, should they somehow end up in the same dogfight as us anyway, their claims for the same Huns always take precedence over ours, even if they never got a shot off . So every chance I get, I use them as stalking horses, and shed no tears when any of them go down. That includes any of my erstwhile droogs who stepped up to fill a vacancy in A Flight, because as soon as they leave my B Flight, they start putting on A Flight airs

For a scout pilot, a single 2-seater (unless it's a Brisfit) is no problem; you just have to have patience to avoid the gunner. However, when they're in formation, they cover each other so even while you're in your target's blindspot, the others can get you. The whole trick therefore is to break up the formation, or at least cut your chosen victim out of the herd. As others have mentioned, the best way to do this is a head-on initial attack that cripples his engine. Not only does this make him fall out of formation, but makes maneuvering carefully around his gunner afterwards that much easier. I must object, however, to Ohlam's characterization of Fees as easy prey. I do rather well in them personally, and now that I've figured out how to lead them in battle, so do my AI wingmen .

That didn't strike me as unusual, although I salute the wordsmithing . I mean, when I was in the service, we were taught all kinds of rhymes to help us remember important tactical things. Didn't you have that when you were in the army? It's like civilians these days saying "Snitches get stitches", etc.