Rick Rawlings

few more... These guys are as composed as the palace guards at Buckingham! Hey, look behind you! RR

A few things I had laying around: A bad day to be a hun part 1: A bad day to be a hun part 2 (after the scramble mission): Confirmed! RR

To be fair, you can spot small aircraft in real life much easier than you are able to in the game even on a large monitor at high resolution. Also, any cpu or gpu sluggishness can "smear" the ground and make it difficult to track. I always go through the motions of zooming in and scanning the skies using the number keys when dropped out of warp with an "enemies nearby" before turning the TAC on, and can often find them, but it can be more of an nuisance than the little bit of "extra real" feeling I get. Having the TAC on and set to 2 miles or 4 miles is a good compromise. RR

That was excellent. I have to try to get Freetrack up and running. Questions: 1. How do you not have an Aldis sight? 2. Wasn't it John Denver, not Bob Dylan, that was German :) RR

Jeez, EVERYBODY'S trying to steal your kills! I just saw this a while ago and snapped a pic, but I didn't get it on video! RR

I am pretty bloodthirsty as well. May main problem, though, is flying a Nieuport, I always feel I have to crawl up someone's butt before shooting them to conserve ammo. 70% of my deaths are due to collisions, either with the plane I just shot, my wingman trying to steal my kill, another plane that my wingman shot down right above my head or the ground that I hit after stalling to avoid all of the above. Not having Track IR and having to quickly cycle through padlock and snap views makes it much more of a pain. I just yesterday mangaed to finally acheive my goal of being "recruited" by 56 squadron and called up with the big boys at Vert Galant. With 15 mission in and 11 hours in the air, 8 confirmed kills and another 4 pending, I am hoping I can enjoy some more stand-off fights where my constant, constant fear of collision begins to settle down. I need to go on leave for my nerves! RR edit: Yay! I'm now a valued member!

Excellent Catch! Couple of thoughts: 1. I love how you used the force to manipulate the observer Lewis gun, very cool! 2. I turned down the enemy ground fire for exactly the reasons illustrated by your video. If you have it set to high, it seems that it sends Annie Oakley's entire family to every single trench on the German side! I mean, those guys are insane in the membrane! Normal ground fire seems much more believable. 3. You've done well, you deserve to treat yourself to a Camel campaign, or something with some friggin gunz! RR

In real life, of course, you could just lean over and look down the sights to get an approximation of where your shots will fall. The developers modeled this as well as they could with some of the F6 views. TIR will let you do just that and will probably help out alot. I'm not going to be one of those people who says just get close and don't aim, because that is a good way to run out of ammo. The N17 and SE5a have Aldis sights that work as advertised. Even in the Sopwith Tripe and N11, I have memorized where the rounds hit relative to the cross wires. If you want to have ammo for the homeward trip, I think it is necessary! RR

Yes, that would do. However, as a government agency, we cannot, of course, sanction the nonstandard spelling... RR, NTSB

Jeez, if you damn Europeans didn't get up so early! For future reference, you may want to try creating a new pilot in the squad you transferred into on the same day your messed up pilot is on. Then copy squad data from the good to the bad and see if that works. I always keep the same squad members; I guess we all transfer together :p That does seem to avoid most of the weirdness! RR

Hey... Welcome to the party. Turns out we aren't all crazy and OFF really does rock! There are a ton of improvements between the "out of the box" OFF and 1.28 and we're glad you found em! When the waypoint bug was squashed, that really opened up a new chapter and the damage model adjustments are icing on the cake. Now just remember to watch your six! RR

I believe it was actually because one of his wheels was painted blue and one painted orange. The iron oxide causes the orange paint, and thus that wheel, to be slightly heavier. Now, on a normal plane, this would not be a determining factor. However, coupled with the lack of vertical stabilizer on the DR.1 plus the amount of punishment that the craft had already sustained, this acted as an additional gyroscopic force that magnified the natural tendencies of the rotary engine to throw the plane out of balance and therefore we, at the NTSB, attribute this crash, some 90 years after the fact, to be due to the paint. Furthermore, Hauptmann Olham, we have determined that the most aerodynamically stable color for the Dr. 1 to be flat pink. So for future success over your enemies, we reccommend a nice, pink plane. Sincerely, RR, NTSB

My theory is that it is based on damage or potential damage compared to the state of the player. ( I would hope that they can run out of ammo, it's just hard to measure). It is rare for them to break off. I have only seen it 4 times conclusively in hundreds of missions. Yesterday, I was in an N17 and had to quit the flight early when the kids woke up. (Very realistic, I assure you) So I dove down and headed for the nearest aliied aerodrome to land at. On the way, I passed under a flight of Albatross, two of which dove down to engage me. As they were faster than me, they gained over time. I was just about to turn around to wipe them from the face of the Earth when we crossed the front lines and the flack started going off around them. Looking ove my shoulder, I saw them break off and head for home. I padlocked one and when I landed a few minutes later, I F4ed to him and he was deep on the East side of the lines heading for home. So they do give up, just not as realistically and frequently as we might like. That's why the little "fly close to the ground and they can't see you" cheat is nice in that it helps smooth things out a bit.

"Hey Bob, meet me by the aerodrome near the bend in the river." "Dang it Bill, how in tarnation am I ever gonna know which bend you...oh." RR

You can lower the Lewis gun on it's mount but this is only for visual purposes. The Dev's give you all your ammo up front. Hard coded into the CF3 engine, I think. I believe it is Shift-C or Ctrl-C. The N17 is a great plane, so is the N11 if you go earlier. There are a few rough edges but this is an awesome sim, definitely worth the price of admission! RR

I am far too busy to respond to this thread! RR

I thought his greatest fear was that someone would years later name a cheap microwavable pizza after him and then depict him with a cheesy moustache on the cover... RR

That's what I suspected. What you were describing is EXACTLY what was happening to just about everybody before 1.26. Get the 1.28 patch and things will be much more dicey for your enemies. (and you, too, but then, you shouldn't let anybody get on your six anyway!) :yes:

That's about right. Most of my shots that do any damage are within 50 yards (meters). Check your hit percentage at the end of the mission. My best in a practical dogfight situation is in the low 40%. I average in the mid 30%'s. If you are hitting him with twin Spandaus at that range with a decent hit percentage, he should go down. I do get the message that they have gone down later quite a bit, but a fair share of them hit the deck pretty quickly. You can also check which patch you have, I have not had as many flame with the 1.28, but they do break up more and spin out more. RR

double post weirdness

I've been flying Nieuports almost exclusively since patch 1.25. I finally got into an SE5a the other day and had an Albert Ball moment. "Meh" I said. I can see why he thought it was a dud. The N 11 and 17 series are great planes. Fragile, but you definitely feel like you can take on the world! Until you get shot down. Or your wing fails. Or your wingman fails and collides with you. Or the wind kills you. Or your computer crashes. RR

If nothing else, your wingmen are bullet soaks for your enemies. They will continue to duke it out while you run for the hills. If they help you to survive in this way, you will have the opportunity for hundreds of kills over the course of the war. Don't begrudge them a few stolen kills here and there :) RR

I don't believe it was a developer decision. I think it is just the way the engine handles static targets. They are in a different class than aircraft and cannot be easily worked into the kill system. At least that is what I remeber from what I read somewhere :) RR

Presumably, this could also be used to switch from an observer role to a fighter pilot role just like many of the real aces did. That's what I'm going to try once my current pilot dies and I test the whole transfer thing out a little bit. Someone with some basic programming skills could probably set up a little app for us that could do this without too much fuss, unless it introduces bugs later on that I haven't encountered yet. RR

Hey Olham, you could start in a defensive squadron and then transfer later if this is what you wanted to do. To transfer, you open up your pilot dossier under the campaigns folder. You will notice that the squadron name is very plainly listed in only a couple of places. Swap these out for the new squadron name (you can get this from starting a new pilot in the squad you want.) Then just make sure the current date is one for which the sqaudron is in service. If not you can change the (i believe it is the top) date in the dossier to the earliest one for that squad. Then save the pilot. I have tried this and it does not seem to mess anything up, but, as always when changing files, make sure you have copied your pilot to another folder for safe keeping just in case I don't know what I am talking about! I was planning to do this for when I eventually get to May of 1917 so that Rick Rawlings can be "recruited" to #56 squadron from #40. Hope that helps! RR