Bullethead

Looks like you're off to a good start. I'll be making some more DFW skins for this.

I've volunteered to make some more KuK DFW skins for this project. It would be nice of folks who already have templates for various other planes could do KuK and/or Italian skins for them. There'd be a definite need for SPADs, various Nupes, Camels, Strutters, and perhaps even SE5s and Hannovers. I'm thinking that the SE5 is probably the closest match in flight characteristics to the Aviatik D.I and it would look cool in a hex paintjob ;).

I look forward to seeing it, Stump

Tbanks again.

Here ya go . If you'd like some more, keep talkin' ;). On Stumpjumper's stuff, I see various planes available here but I see no Italian landmass. Is that already there in the game or do you have to also get the map? But what I'm most interested in is things like the flight, damage, and sound models. In the README for "HPW Combined FM and AI EW Mod 2.2 for JSGME", I came across the following rather disconcerting note: I don't much like the sound of this. Is this something you have to do every single flight? And is this all worth the trouble? It would be nice to fly the Pfalz and Eindecker without them just falling out of the sky for now reason :)

Thanks Lou. Whatcha drinkin'? I know the Italian Front isn't a campaign thing, I was just wondering where to find it and how it works.

But how does that serve the interests of either the devs or the customers? This is insane. SimQH is totally inadequate in basic forum features, let alone the widely recognized moderation issues there. BTW, funny how this place won't let either of us type Sim Aitch Queue in the proper order. I edited my post several times trying to fix the apparent typo before I realized this forum wouldn't let me blaspheme by mentioning that other abominable place.

:deadhorse: :deadhorse: SimQH totally sucks compared to this place. No avatars, no reply to PMs asking to upload files, not even a friggin' "jump to new posts" button. What a friggin' dump. Can we PLEASE move back here? Please please please?

OK, I've finally decided to mod OFF. All this time, I've been doing it as-is except for skins. And the Hell of it is, I can't find the search function to see how everything fits together now, so I'd like to make sure I'm doing this right. As I understand things, you install JSGME first, then any mods that work with it. Then you install OFFbase (which actually calls itself OFFice when you download it). Then, when you run OFFbase, it will let you turn the various JSGME mods on and off as desired. Do I have this right? I'd also like to know where Lou got Stumpjumper's Italian front and how that works. Free drinks for those who help me

Amazing model, Elephant! Looks like Lt. Othmar Wolfan's ride. It was one of the unusual ones where the pilot actually had a small amount of forward visibility ;).

Ah yes, the infamous naval hex. That's what the model has, using colors hashed out at the Aerodrome with Dan San. I skinned the DFW and D.VII with that. As I understand things, naval hex was only 3 colors. If the hexagons were regular (and usually large), they were hand-painted. There is some evidence that there was a pre-printed version as well, using the same 3 colors more or less, but the hexagons were smaller and scewed slightly out of regularity by being stretched at an angle. However, on the fabric, all hexagons were the same size and shape. The pattern by itself above the model uses 5 colors. All the shapes are hexagons but all their sizes and shapes are different. I've seen that pattern before but I can't remember where. I don't think it's naval and it doesn't match the usual shapes of army lozenge patterns, either 4- or 5-color. Ah, finally we get to see the infamous purple triplane. That's pretty cool :). What were you drinking when you came up with that idea? Hehehe, that sounds hideous :)

@ Lou Yup, very much like that Nupe and various other fish-themed planes. Only cooler ;). @ JFM The worst skinning atrocity I ever committed, that actually got out in public, was for the MMOFS Aces High. It was for one of my squaddies who was a mailman and liked Hurricanes. Most folks thought it a very bad joke but my squaddie loved it. The kill marks under the cockpit are UPS logos....

@Widowmaker Yeah, no matter how I arranged the colors, I always ended up something looking more like a bristro tablecloth than a fish. So... after sleeping on this, I'm going to forget camo and go straight-out fish. In fact, I'm thinking of using the golden shades of your favorite carp with some tweeks to make the whole look more fishy. The Halberstadt fuselage is rather fish-shaped, which is what inspired me to try fish scale camo in the 1st place.

I started a new German pilot and was going to give him a personal paintjob for his Halberstadt D.II. I was thinking that maybe he was one of the tinkerers whose experiments later led to the lozenge camo, so I was trying to imagine an early, hand-painted sort of thing for that. It struck me that something with a look like fish scales using some of the colors available in 1916 might work, so I tinkered around with various permutations of this theme all afternoon. Damn, I need more absinthe. These are some of the worst ideas I've ever had. Check them out :).

I look forward to seeing it. And if you need any skins made for it, let me know :).

The course could be completed in less than 1/2 hour by such planes. They had no more fuel than that and skin-tight radiators only worked with fast air flowing over them. So it was start the engine, spend the minimum time making sure it was hitting on all cylinders, and then full speed ahead. Essentially a drag race of seaplanes.

Yup, that's the one. Simply an amazing machine, built solely to go REALLY FAST for a short period of time. Look at how practically the entire surface, even the struts, is radiator. That must have been the very Devil to plumb and keep from leaking. And what about filling the cooling system and getting all the air bubbles out? But all it had to do was keep the engine from overheating for a few minutes :)

I was just perusing Wings Pallete for new skin ideas and I came across this: http://img.wp.scn.ru/camms/ar/151/pics/9_8.jpg Tempting, very tempting.....

Damn, I feel an Otto Prohaska moment coming on.. Makes me want to stand up and sing "Gott Erhalte Franz den Kaiser" :).

I've been wondering the same thing :)

Great story! I really liked those Macchi racers, especially the later version with 2 engines in tandem. Also note how nearly the entire wing surface is radiator :)

No, we've got River Bend here. While I was there, they told me that Waterford was already down at the time (don't know why) so losing the 2nd plant would have caused a major blackout. It must have worked because they haven't called us back and the lights are still on :). NOTE: River Bend has its own water tanker for this and other jobs but for some reason it wasn't available. That's why they called us. Glad some of the rain made it up to where it was really needed. We had a big drought last year but solved that this year so really didn't need any of it. It's interesting how things work. Last year, we had a record-setting drought here ourselves but running through the middle of this desert was a record flood of the Mississippi River. The River was so high because the winter of 2010/11 was so long and cold. This year, we got enough spring rain to break the drought but the winter didn't really happen. So right now, I'm living in a wet, muggy jungle but the River is so low you can almost wade across it. It's 1-way traffic for barges right now and even then, they have to break the big barge tows up into single columns to get them through the narrow, shallow channel. Maybe this low water had something to do with the nuclear plant's pump losing prime. Anyway, while we got off pretty light in my area, things elsewhere are far from good. Things are especially bad in the several parishes along the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. First they got the storm surge from the lake, then they got like 10-20" of rain, and now they're getting all the run-off from up in Mississippi where they also like 15-25" of rain. Rivers are overflowing, dams are breaking, and people are still being evacuated there as we speak. There's also extensive flooding in La Place (SW corner of Lake Pontchartrain) and in the whole SE quadrant of Lousy Anna, some of which is also still getting worse even though the storm's been gone for a couple days now. Same sort of story in those places, plus the unintended consequences of all the levee construction done since Katrina. The levees mostly held up but they funneled the water into places still without levees, so conditions there were even worse than before. Another thing is that the storm surge was way higher than expected from the strength of the storm alone. Isaac was friggin' huge, totally filling the Gulf of Mexico, and it was moving very slowly. So, while its winds weren't capable of raising water very high in any one place, they were able to move it over a vast area and it kept coming for several days. Thus, when the water reached land, it just piled up and got much higher than folks had based their pre-storm evacuation decisions on. By the time this was realized, it was often too late to leave. So as I understand things, they're going to change how they predict storm surge as a result of this storm.

Very pretty machine, Olham!

From reading the article, it seems the bottles were designed to sink after a while, so they probably couldn't have gone very far from their launch point.