Rick Rawlings

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

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

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

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

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.

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

"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