Rick Rawlings

Good review! I heard that you could get the rearview mirror to show something other than shades of gray, but it has never worked for me! What slider do you adjust to get this to work!?! RR

Olham, try flying with 56 squadron in May, 1917. An early flight had 7 SE5a's against 12 DV's. I got lucky and managed to get behind one on the first pass and drop him in about a minute. I looked around to catch my bearings... there were NO other enemy planes around. Turned on my TAC to be sure, and nothing! They had all either been shot down or driven off! Good pilots with you in 56! RR

My wingmen in detached naval squadron 8 are all aces themselves, except for my poor wingie, Geoffrey Boyd, who got himself shot up and spent two weeks in the infirmary. I am amazed at how they go after the enemy. There have been several flights where I tried to stay on top of the fight and pick off the upper scouts, but by the time I found them, my boys were all over them and there were none left for me! There was a run there of about two weeks where I couldn't seem to get a plane of my own to shoot at and had some moments of Olham-style battle rage. Lucky for me, no additional enemies were around to take advantage of my recklessness. Sometimes, I will just hover above the fray when there is only one enemy scout left and padlock him and watch the rest of my flight kick him around. It is fascinating for me and also gaurentees I won't get collided with! RR

My pilots are DiD, but not Siggi DiDTM. Do you mean just for the kill board, or in general? RR

So since 1.26 I have been flying as Rick Rawlings in #40 squadron trying to get through Bloody April in one piece but never really lasting longer than 20 missions or so. So just to blow off steam, I started up one of my goofy pilots, a Scot named Dirk McGurt. I placed him in Detached Naval Squadron #2 in the fall of 1916 stationed at Vert Galant. I just finished his 40th mission! Apparently, a doofy name and a lighter approach are the key. Also, I think the winter of 1916 is a little lighter in the air than the spring of 1917. The fact that I am flying in an elite squad also seems to help. I started in November of 1916 and am flying on light mission frequency. It is now the end of January. I have flown 40 missions with 32 hours in the air and have 19 confirmed kills. He is at 100% realism and on dead is dead selection. For full disclosure, he did die once due to a graphic stutter that caught me on the take off roll and caused him to nose over, which seems to be always fatal, but that was his only re-start. He has seen the Neiuport give way to the Sopwith Pup, which, despite it's loving reputation, has me a flying wreck. That thing starts shuddering in a gentle dive and I am always worried that it will break up at any moment. As I approach April, I can only hope to survive till the camel. If anybody else feels like they are in a rut, try getting out of your usual squadron/plane/timeframe and see if that makes anything happen! Report back here with your successes, or, as I am sure I will soon, the eventual failures! RR

I know! It's an ATI dust devil that unfortunately shows up the same time every mission! I've managed to manage it by taking a good look around before I start to roll, seems to allow every thing to load in memory and minimizes problems on takeoff! RR

I don't believe it completely negates it, but it doesn't help your chances :) RR

Wait a minute, are you saying that you used to play OFF in 3rd person?!?!? Wow, that seems quite hard! RR

Well, at least they won't be able to tell what you are thinking! We always have to be on the lookout for them! shhhhh! rr

No, but my best German pilot so far was killed by the plane that they jumped out of. I follwed them into a climb and flamed them in my Albatross DII. They jumped out, I dove down and to the right; the abandoned, flaming crate turned over and fell...down and to the right. Flash of red, flash of black, I'm not allowed to say what happens after that, you just have to wait and find out :) RR

For me the funniest part is your wife saying "Twat", which is quite a bit further up the name calling list in the states than it is in England, apparently! RR

Actually, the two that jump out are the stow-aways. The reason that two seater was flying so passively is because there were two more people hidden down in the bowels of the plane trying to catch a ride to Paris. Little did they know that all they were hitching passage to was their deaths. The extra weight made the crate so un-manueverable that you had no problem shooting it down. As your bullets rattled around the fuselage, the hidden ones got scared and cried out. The pilot and gunner, realizing only too late their mortal error, grabbed the stow-aways and cast them to oblivion. If you look closely, you will still see the pilot and observer seated in their seats, grimly resigned to their fate. This sim goes even deeper than you imagined, my friend! RR

You think that's magic? Try flying a Roland CII, switch to the gunner's seat and then wheel around to look at the cockpit! RR

You can try "o o o" which bails you out, never done it on the ground myself and only accidentally in the air Nobody really seems to shoot at you on the ground though, it seems to be hard for them to get a firing solution... RR

Yeah, realistic ground fire seems anything but... more like Annie Oakley trench fire! I keep it at normal after forced landings on three ground strikes in a row with just one pass over the trenches! I also wondered if the AA that explodes around enemy flights over our territory could ever miss and hit me. Well, it can. I took a near hit from my own AA a few weeks ago and was lucky to bring it down in one piece! My grandfather told me that they had night-time curfews in WWII and no allied planes were allowed to fly over after dark. He said that one night he heard the easily recognizable whine of a mustang passing overhead and then, much to his dismay, the sound and fury of a whole series of AA batteries lighting him up, so, unfortunately, friendly fire happens even in the air! RR

I can't edit my post but I will add that it is Dead is Dead selected, but most likely not all of Siggi DiDTM, I lost track of all those little settings. Also at 100% difficulty. RR

Hey, Mk2, coming off the SPAD, it is a twisty little bird! If you want to go more manueverable, slip into one of the Nieuport series. Just don't expect to survive many hits! The SE5a hits the magical midpoint of speed, manueverability and strength. It would have been awesome if my wingman hadn't dove through my 20 mission pilot... RR

1. Nieuport 17 2. RFC #40 3. 19 (Posthumous :) 4. 18 hrs I am so used to flying the N17 that anytime I try to fly a plane with two guns, I always shoot myself down in addition to the enemy! RR

Prior to 1.3 it was lined up with the seat and was actually very useful. I actually got a 56% accuracy on a campaign mission shooting down 3 Albatross DIIIs, which I have not even come close to on any other plane. Post patch, you just have to get used to the new hit point, somewhere alolng the lower edge of the sight it seems. I find the F6 view to be largely useless as it is too zoomed in. Overall the Neiuport series are great planes, although I might just be saying that since I have spent 90% of the time since I got this game in RFC #40! RR

Oh my God! Tell me about it! I swear the bounding box on the N17's Lewis gun is twice the size of everything else on my plane! At least 60% of the time that I am hit at all, the Lewis goes down and I have to bluff my way out of the flight! At least you got a good picture and lived to tell the tale, however! RR

Like Mk2 says, sometimes you live when you feel like you should have died, sometimes you die when you feel like you shoulda lived. Like you said, you had some control, so it's plausible that you brought it down in one piece but the experience was so traumatic that you blocked it out of conscious memory! One thing that I have noticed is that I never go to the hospital since 1.28 or so. I either die flat out or live flat out. So I always feel free to "put" myself in the hospital via manual time advance for a week or so if it seems appropriate. While this is absolutely the best flight sim I have ever owned, I certainly don't mind helping out to role play a little better! RR

I just started my first campaign in the N17 post 1.3 and noticed that the gunsight view in the cockpit is skewed down, as if my alter ego shrunk or someone lowered the seat 2 inches. The screenshots below show the difference. Was this intentional? or some sort of bug? The first notch of shift+enter unfortunately moves the seat too high, and it reverts to normal anytime you switch views anyway. Is this something that is easy to fix? Thanks! RR

Ok, I got it now. Thanks! RR

I've had a couple of careers with no enemy aircraft for many missions (no encounters before I quit). I believe it is a wierd, hard to reproduce bug. Try starting a new career. Just to be sure, I also did a clean install before I updated to 1.3 just to clean the crank-case, as it were. Hope that helps! RR

Hey Pol, thanks for the quick reply. I followed everything except the quote above. It seemed that before the 1.3 patch, I was looking straight down the sight and the bullets were hitting where I looked. Now, I have to aim a little high to get the tracers on target. Are you saying that the pre-patch version was just an illusion the way the sight was set up? I'm just not sure what you mean by previous N17 and current. Do you mean pre and post patch? Thanks again! RR