Bullethead

A.k.a. "Chucky's Revenge". I grooved on that myself. You'd be surprised. Mardi Gras is 16 Feb this year so the Carnival is already going. You can bet that whatever happens in the next few days will be dwarfed by what debauchery goes on Tuesday after next.

That was our usual state for a couple generations. I remember I got season tickets in 1973 I think it was, because I could prove I'd been to the only 2 games they'd won the year before, and no others. That was back when they played outdoors in Tulane Stadium, which was torn down shortly thereafter and they built the Superdome. That's a venue that's hosted many a Superbowl, but not for the home team. And a pretty good guy, too, even without the "original GI Joe" scar. Did you see that sport science show where he hit 10 out of 10 bullseyes at 20m with a football, easily beating olympic archers at the same range? Bourbon Street is in the heart of everybody. Never was any street in the world so aptly named. So just pour down 4-6 fingers of your favorite bourbon and you're there

Way back in my booze-addled brain, I seem to recall "Scramblin' Fran" winning one, but I could be halucinating. It's about time for them to kick in, after all. I've been drinking absinthe (for voodoo purposes only) since 1600 and the bottle's about dead. Well, at least you didn't lose 4 in a row like Buffalo and never been there before or since. THAT'S the definition of NOT QUITE. Pies Iesu domine, dona eis requiem The Viqueens really should have been de who dat beat dem Saints 2 weeks ago. They got 200+ more yards of offense, and despite all the turnovers were in position to win the game in regulation. But a 26-year old Favre would have thrown the game-losing intercetion long before the 40-year old version. What really killed them was the 12-men-in-the-huddle penalty (I can see this going right over the heads of all but googly bowlers) that forced the long-yardage intercepted throw that resulted in the game going to overtime. That was completely inexplicable from any rational POV, given the professionalism of the Vikes. But the coach and QB both said their radios went dead right then. Coincidence? If you've followed the Saints, formerly known as the "Ain'ts", this season, then you've seen many examples of divine intervention in their favor. I doubt this was in any way due to their name, given the well-documented indifference from that religious direction for nearly 1/2 a century. This year, I think they had voodoo on their side. I'm right now wearing a T-shirt covered with voodoo gris-gris motifs wrapped around the Saints' logo, designed and autographed by Saint's linebacker Jonathan Vilma, who is a Haitian. He was selling these shirts to raise money for earthquake releif. It's the only thing keeping my toes moderately chilly right now

New Orleans won by 14 wickets, not out. I think that's the correct translation

This IS completely meaningless to all outside the US, and nearly meaningless to all outside Lousy Anna, but the New Orleans Saints just won the NFL Superbowl, the championship game of US football. In all their 43 years of existence, they've only had a winning record MAYBE a half-dozen times, and it was foretold by voodoo queen Marie Labeau that Hell would freeze over before they ever even got in the Superbowl, let alone won it. Right now, I'm wearing 3 pairs of wool socks under my slippers, with my sweat pants overwrapping all. And my feet are STILL cold. Right now, Bourbon Street is a madhouse and everybody in Lousy Anna who isn't there is passed out drunk on an elevated platform to keep off the cold, cold ground. WHO DAT GON BEAT DEM SAINTS?!?!?!? (ask Olham for a translation)

Thanks :). As to polys, I think it's considerably leaner than the more recent OBD planes. The struts are all just 6-sided with 5 segments, except for the front long one, which has a few more due to a notch for the crossbar. The main part of the wing is only 20 or so polys: 14 forming the airfoil shape that run from centerline to the outboard end, then 3 or 4 more each in the cut-outs for the aileron and over the cockpit. Smoothing groups are cool . The outer ends of the aileron and wingtip objects naturaly have more due to having to curve around the tip and taper in thickness while following the airfoil, but it's not that many. A recent OBD plane would have 3D ribs molded into the wing, all sorts of fittings and clevises where struts join wing, etc. I left all those off. I decided not to do 3D ribs more for aesthetic reasons than for polys. IMHO, while 3D ribs look good in the LOD100 model, they're not in other LODs and that causes a problem. The problem is, all LODs use the same texture, or at least a MIP of it. Anyway, if the LOD100 model has built-in ribs, then skinning it with 2D fake ribs on the texture looks like crap because it unrealisticaly exaggerates the ribs. But if you don't put rib shadows on the skin to make the LOD100 look good, then the wing is utterly flat and without ribs just a few yards away. So, IMHO, the better thing is to make the wing flat and do the ribs with the skin, so they look good at all LODs.

That doesn't sound like a lot of fun. Hope you have enough booze to last until the thaw. BTW, I hear such snowstorms usually result in local baby-booms. So be careful in there Who'd a thunk it.

Very interesting. South Africa isn't exactly the place I'd expect to see American slang painted on airliners. Given the gerat difficulty I have understanding most South Africans, I not sure they speak English down there . Anybody else old enough to remember Braniff Airlines? Back in the 60s, they put an end to the "plain plane" (the unpainted silver of the day) and started painting their planes all sorts of solid colors. They favored orange fuselages but had planes in just about every other color. Then in the 70s, they went totally psychodelic. They commissioned famous, weird artists to paint a number of planes--I think Picasso did one, and Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol at least were in their commericals. You can imagine how that looked--all sorts of clashing colors in a mix of jagged and curved blotches. Many other planes were repainted in random "camouflage" of pastel pinks, oranges, yellows, and green, having in common only the then-current hippy-style "peace dove" on the tail, although the color if it often varied. Anyway, you could tell it was a Braniff plane just from the weird colors even if you couldn't read the logo. The stewardesses all wore either hippy-inspired or space cadet-type uniforms, usually none of them looking alike on the same plane. Their whole program seemed to be party-oriented. I think some of the "Naughty Stewardesses" movies of the time were inspired by Braniff. YouTube's got a collection of old Braniff commercials: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=braniff+commercial&search_type=&aq=f. They even have may favorite, "The Air Strip", which shows off some stewardess fashion from before they went totally weird: BTW, me ol' gray-haired mother was a Delta stewardess back in the 50s. She was absolutely horrified by the Braniff stewardesses

A bit more progress.... Wing and strutus. <BR><BR>For a monoplane, this thing sure has a confusing tangle of struts. I had to scrounge a bunch of photos of the real thing and RC and plastic models to figure it out; 3-views just can't protray them in all their intricacy. I haven't trimmed any of them to length yet, so there's some Gmax overlapping in this pic that makes things even more confusing.<BR><BR>In case you can't tell, this thing's got a pair of long, angled struts from the lower fuselage to far out on the wing. At their midpoints they are connected by a horizontal rod and from there smaller struts angle back toward the center. Their top ends meet the tops of the outer N-shaped cabane struts. There are are inner cabane struts that lean inboard a little. In front is an inverted V and in the rear is just a lone vertical post. The blue thing threaded through the cabanes is a Nieuport-type aileron pushrod.

I fly for whichever side is the underdog, in terms of numbers and/or airplane performance. Thus, I fly for both sides at different times, depending on how the balance stands then. However, this has to be balanced against what's in the game. IMHO, the only part of the campaign that's "finished" is the Flanders area, and that only for 1917-1918. Earlier in time, there aren't but a few of the many types of planes then in use, even in Flanders. And the complete absence of French 2-seaters rules out both French and US careers, or German careers facing their parts of the front (most of its lenght). So, Flanders 1917-1918. I fly for the King in the 1st half of 1917, in a Fee or Pup (I'd fly the DH2 if I could keep out of unrecoverable spins). The other planes aren't "underdog" enough for me. I used to avoid the 2nd half of 1917 but now I have the DH5 then. The 1st few months of 1918 are fun in an Albatros D.V or a Pfalz. During the Kaiserschlacht battles, I fly a Camel or SE5, sometimes a Brisfit. Then, in the last months of the war, I fly the D.VII. While this is arguable the best all-around plane in the game, it's SO outnumbered that staying alive any length of time is a huge challenge.

You usually can't land at Wilhelmshaven. With the High Seas Fleet crowding the harbor, the place is usually totally obscured by an immense cloud of coal smoke

Yeah, these guns had a recoil system. That's what the smaller tubes are around and above the barrel. The usual system was an hydraulic cylinder 1 or more gas cylinders. The hydraulic cylinder slowed and stopped the recoil, during which the gas cylinders compressed. Then the gas cylinders returned the barrel forward to the firing position. But that's not really what I'd call "pneumatic". Maybe instead the French were using those early recoilless guns? I could see that being called "pneumatic" in the early days before "recoilless" had become the standard term, in that backwards air pressure is what balanced the recoil.

VERY NICE!!! I espeically like the one with Sir Robin's minstrels attacking the giant killer rabbit

I take it you were flying a D.VII or Albatros before? The E.V is a pretty typical rotary bird IMHO. If you're proficient with the Dr.I, Camel, Pup, Nupes, etc., you should be able to fly it pretty much the same. One of the cool things about OFF is that the rotaries fly very differently from the inlines. You can see why people specialized in 1 or the other back in the day .

Hey, that's a neat trick. Thanks!

I look forward to seeing it. The Gmax commands you include in such things are always jaw-dropping. Anyway, I think the decking's done, FINALLY! As shown in the pic above, the cut as made was rather jagged, so it required a bunch of vertex and edge tweaking. Then I cut out the cockpit hole, and that required a lot more of the same, plus mucho playing with smoothing groups. I was unable to iron every wrinkle and shadow out completely from every angle, but I got it looking pretty good from almost all angles. While I'm sure the remainder is mostly my lack of skill, I do think there are some limitations of the medium here, trying to model complex shapes with just flat surfaces. So here's the finished product. As stated earlier, I still have to cut some notches for the feed chutes, but that won't happen until far down the road.

Thanks! Yup, that's the plan. The only way this engine will ever been seen is from external view, at very short range, with the motor off. The LOD versions will look like they're made out of Lego . For the blurred one, I was going to take my detailed engine texture and circle-blur it, then apply it to a solid disk of about 11 total polys. That's my project for the next time I get stuck on something with the main plane. And once I do that, about the only such project left will be the cockpits, which I'm not really looking forward to. Looking nice! If you ever need a 150-160hp Gnome, I'll trade ya for it

OK, I think I got the problem solved about the rear decking not cutting. It seems to have been a simple fix. I haven't gone all the way with it yet, so I can't say for sure, but it seems to be working pretty well so far. I just wanted to say this now to save Hairyspin some trouble, although if he's making a complex tutorial on a par with is last one, I'd like to see it anyway because it'll be sure to have some good info in it. The reason why cuts weren't working seems to be that the polys of the rear deck weren't planar. They all had 4 vertices that tapered in 2 dimensions from 1 poly to the next. Thus, Gmax didn't know where to cut them. So what I did was divide these polys into triangles, as you can see in the pic below. Voila--a nice, neat cut where the triangles cross each other. Something to keep in mind when trying to cut compound curves......

OK, please tell the admins

Why were they called "pneumatic guns"? AFAIK, this was the standard 37mm Hotchkiss designed in the late 1800s as an anti-torpedoboat weapon for battleships and cruisers. It was just a conventional naval gun of the then-new "quick-firing" type, firing conventional ammunition. There was a large stockpile of them available in WW1 because they'd been built in huge numbers for navies all over the world, but had become too small for their original job years before the war. This is the only true pneumatic gun I know of.

I say do it that way and be done. Some sort of organization, even if nonoptimal, would be far better than to the current complete lack thereof.

I liked the online translation better So what does "alles drin, alles dran" really mean? Nice pic. You have a real knack for getting great sunset glows on the planes.

I love free online translations. They remind me of all the Monty Python skits where some Eastern Euro tourist would come into a shop, pull out an English phrasebook, say something completely inappropriate, and get hauled off by the police. Here's a great example of what such translation "services" will do to you: http://translation2.paralink.com/ I have a feeling the real meaning is more along the lines of "If you can read this, you're a worthy adversary."

The admins are willing to set things up however we want, but they will only do it once, so we'd better be sure of what we want before we do it. When I put the poll up some months ago, there weren't but a handful of opinions raised, which I considered too small a fraction of the forum to be representative. Thus, I let the matter fizzle.

Yup, build everything 1:1 scale in Gmax. If the gun is 904mm long in real life, make it that long in Gmaz. If the plane is 8.34m long in real life, make it that long in Gmax. Then, when you merge the gun object into the airplane model file, both will be to the same scale.