pagsab

A key feature of my reduced scale terrains is that my airfields are far smaller than in other SF2 terrains. One can even squeeze seaplane strips into river tiles, as shown below by my remodelled port and seaplane base of Mahon (Mao in Catalan) on Menorca. I have now also modelled Ibiza and Formentera, and I am about to leap further west to the mountainous cape south of Valencia, with a view perhaps to proceeding clockwise around the coast to Barcelona so as to open up this entire maritime arena for seaplane and landplane action by the time that my used copy of Herrera's book finally arrives from Madrid. Thence inland to Teruel and Zaragoza to link up with the land fronts and give me even wider settings for my SCW scenarios.

I was pleased to discover that I could rename my stand-ins to match the real aircraft simply by renaming the aircraft folder, the main ini file, and the full and short names at the start of that file, leaving everything else as is. This allowed me to create separate folders for my 'Dornier Wal' and 'CANT Z.501', and hence to amend the data files to make the former plane slower and to remove its tail gun (which on the Z.501 offers a handy stand-in for the real third gunner atop the engine nacelle). I used similar techniques to turn the Walrus not only into the Savoia S.62 but also into the smaller but similar-looking Italian Macchi M.41 single seat naval fighter, a few of which operated from Mallorca early in the war. I increased the Macchi's speed and engine power, removed the gunners, and turned the front gun into a fixed pilot-controlled HMG (instead of the actual 2 LMGs). To test my refinements, I set up a simple interception of a Republican 'Dornier Wal' by my 'Macchi' over the abortive Republican landing site at Portocristo. As the picture below shows, I did my best to apply standard realistic tactics from FE2 and to use the enemy craft's tail assembly to shield me from his dorsal gunner, with much greater success than in my previous dogfight. Having lamented only the other day the lack of models to simulate seaplane missions in the SCW, it is amazing what a little ingenuity and lateral thinking can achieve!

The single engined Walrus makes a good stand-in for the Savoia S.62 biplane flying boats which served both sides in the first year of the conflict, just as the Arado 95 can double up as the similar Heinkel 60 biplane floatplanes which were also trialled by the Condor Legion. However, as shown in Stratos's pictures above, other SCW seaplanes were significantly bigger, so I decided to look for available models which reflect this. The big parasol-winged Dornier 24 flying boat can stand in both for the earlier Dornier Wal and for Italy's CANT Z.501s which served for much longer than the Z.506. I could not find a big biplane floatplane to stand in for the Heinkel 59s, but the twin engined Fokker T.IV monoplane floatplane serves as a fair substitute in all other respects. I dropped the speeds of these stand-ins to accord better with the performance of the real aircraft, and I increased the vertical ContactPoints of the Do 24's landing gear from 0.9 to 1.1 to allow safe takeoffs and landings. The picture below shows a Republican 'Dornier Wal' over the small port of Mao, and a German 'He 59' over Palma harbour. These various substitutes allow me to me recreate flights by every significant SCW seaplane.

I already tried using your own very nice Espana map, which covers more of North Africa, but I decided in the end to go with the other HFD which does not suffer from longitudinal distortion and could be exactly halved to make rescaling less disruptive. I also considered basing my SCW games on FE2 rather than SF2 so as to have more detailed terrain (at the expense of harder mission editing), but the FE2 Golden Era section here on CA contains only some of the SCW planes, and I ran into difficulties importing more from SF2 models. I was pleased to find it easier to import FE2 planes to SF2, so the Golden Era models can hopefully bolster my evolving SF2 SCW playset if required. The bottom line is that, the more resources that are available from the incredible modding effort which has taken place over the past 2 decades, the easier it is for non-experts like me to 'stand on the shoulders of giants' and benefit from the incredible potential and flexibility of this wonderfully accessible sim. My dogfight illustrated above was exciting, but my complete sortie from leaving the water to crashing fatally back into it after the crippling damage to my tail assembly lasted only a few minutes. That is why I tend to prefer longer and less ahistorically bloody missions using my simple tweak to allow me to enjoy formation flying along the way. The picture below comes from an hour long mission which I just played recreating one of the many recce flights from Pollenca to monitor airfield construction at San Luis on Menorca. The field was too vulnerable to bombing to serve as anything more than a diversionary strip for damaged planes, but along with the nearby port of Mao it had significant AAA defences, as described in the article I referenced. My leader fell foul of these, and the picture shows me inspecting his damaged left wing and missing left elevator as we prepared to descend back down to Pollenca in the evening sunshine. Thankfully, both he and I landed safely after an atmospheric and enjoyable hour of virtual flight with just a taste of vicarious peril.

The CANT Z.506 and Arado 95 which are the only seaplanes included in the SCW conversion played only marginal roles in the real conflict. As a quick and dirty way of modelling more typical craft, I painted Nationalist and Republican markings on the Supermarine Walrus. The photo below shows my Italian plane coming a cropper in an exciting seaplane duel among the flak bursts over Pollenca bay. It took only a moment to create this clash in the SF2 mission editor and to exit the sim briefly to adjust the Republican plane's takeoff time so it would arrive just after my scramble from the base. Having to depend on my gunners rather than pilot-controlled weapons made for a novel and interesting dogfight experience.

Drool.... Though it would only make me sadder at having so few models available to simulate the clashes. It is wonderful how much information is now available freely on the web. I just found this detailed 2024 article about the aerial dimension of the SCW in Menorca: https://revistes.uab.cat/rubrica/article/view/v14-n29-de-salort-lopez/414-pdf-ca.

Yes, I am often simply rediscovering wheels invented by real experts like yourself. I could kick myself for not trying harder sooner to edit HFD bitmaps, though had I done so, I might have stuck with automatic terrain generation as well, and never been inspired to create the more flexible tilesets which are key to the success of my reduced scale hand-tiled terrains. Hand-tiling is a lot of work, but even small terrain vignettes can host fulfilling air combat missions in the pre-jet era. The picture below shows an obsolescent Nieuport 52 of the beleaguered Republican garrison on Menorca flying over its newly constructed base at San Luis while the pilot keeps a lookout for fascist bombers approaching from Mallorca on the horizon. It took me only a couple of hours this afternoon to add this new island and hence allow both sides to fly complete combat missions even before I model any of the Spanish mainland.

Yes, I read that He-59s also operated from the island. There is a recent article in Spanish by David Ginard on the Balearic Islands in this period, available at https://www.e-revistes.uji.es/index.php/millars/article/view/9371. I would love to have models of the He-59 and of other seaplanes of this era such as the Dornier Wal and Savoia S.62 as shown in Lopez's book, but unfortunately seaplane models for SF2 are much rarer than for land planes.

Since posting at https://combatace.com/forums/topic/101179-european-air-war-reborn/ my last update on my SF2 hand-tiling project, I have been playing several of my own boardgame conversions on air and naval combat, and then enjoying First Eagles 2 by manually tweaking mission files using location data from Gerwin's invaluable TFD editor so as to create my preferred short range real time wingman missions. This inspired me to progress to the classic planes of the 1930s, using SF2's built-in mission editor to make things easier. I have the SF2 Spanish Civil War conversion from 'another place', but the included 1:1 scale terrain seemed rather blurred and bland after the wonderfully detailed FE2 terrains, and it took forever for the slow planes to fly between the scattered airfields. Inevitably, I wondered whether I could use my hand-tiling techniques to create a reduced scale vignette as a more impressive and playable terrain background for the SCW planes. It soon became apparent that creating height maps manually as I had managed in the flat lands of northern Europe was hopelessly impractical in mountainous Spain. This prompted me to revisit Baltika's advice in https://combatace.com/forums/topic/80880-te-question-height-map-to-hfd/ regarding manipulation of HFD bitmaps exported from TK's terrain editor. My naïve earlier efforts to do so using Microsoft Paint had been wholly unsuccessful, but now I tried using GIMP, and found that I could scale down and overwrite the 2000 pixel square HFD bitmap from the SCW terrain as a 1000 pixel square bitmap which re-imported perfectly into a new blank 500 km terrain in the Third Wire editor. I cut the bitmap import height scale to 5 so as to halve elevations as well, thereby stopping the mountains becoming disproportionately steep. I later re-did the conversion using the Canvas Size tool in GIMP to add blank space around the reduced bitmap, expanding the new terrain to 700 km square and so stopping the hard-coded 80 km 'wall' in SF2 blocking access to features near the edge. It was obvious that standard SF2 tilesets intended for automatic terrain generation were far too ham-fisted for my reduced scale terrain, so I decided to re-use the bespoke high resolution tiles and TODs I had created for my NW Europe terrain project, based on Gepard's Battle of Britain tileset. By using Enhance – Adjust Color – Color Variations in my old copy of Photoshop Elements, I was able to redden my tiles and trees to give a more Mediterranean look, applying the Quick Selection tool beforehand to keep the blue water intact. I used Gerwin's editor to create a random background of my 8 Field tiles, and then I gradually placed coastal tiles and inland woods, moors and urban areas by flipping back and forth between TFD and HFD views while referring sideways to a big old-fashioned atlas of Spain and a laptop showing zoomable online satellite and elevation maps. It was then just a matter of pasting in the sea, and refining elevations to remove previous flattening and to fit with my own coastal tiles. As with my previous projects, I began with an island, in this case Mallorca which the Republicans abortively invaded in autumn 1936 and which then became a key base for Italian bombing of Republican ports and shipping. The maps below show that my reduced scale version of the island is at least as geographically accurate as that in the original SCW terrain on the left, despite having only a quarter as many tiles selected from just 54 variants instead of 124. Years ago in Toledo's military museum I bought a copy of Lopez's illustrated atlas of SCW aviation, and this has several images of the 'hidroaviones' based at locations like Pollenca bay in NE Mallorca. I could not resist modelling this seaplane base by placing a hidden offshore runway like that which I use in my small grass airfields (by commenting out the ModelName in the runway's TargetType entry). I already knew that standard land planes can fly (anachronistically) from coastal water, but I was dismayed to find that actual seaplanes moved at no more than a crawl even at full throttle. I almost gave up in frustration when multiple attempts to solve the problem by tweaking the Landing Gear entries at the end of the aircraft data files caused the seaplanes to explode instead! I finally realised after much confusing trial and error that the torpor seemed to go away when I changed my landing setting to Easy in gameplay options. The one data file tweak which is worth making if needed is to add the various lines relating to tail gear steering, since this allows both sea and land planes to taxi to the hangars for added immersion. The picture below shows my big CANT Z.506 Heron flying over Pollenca bay, with the coastal hangars just visible above the cockpit and the Tramuntana mountains looming in the background. Having refined my new techniques with Mallorca, I can now create a vignette of similar size to my 45 by 32 tile Kent and Pas de Calais terrain, this time covering the Avila-Toledo-Guadalajara triangle which includes the key battlegrounds around Madrid. Lopez's book has some very useful maps showing the dozen or so historical airfields in this area, and modelling these will allow a wide variety of short SCW missions to be flown using the vignette alone. Thereafter, my belated discovery of how to use GIMP to resize and reshape HFD bitmaps has very welcome implications for the future of my other hand-tiling projects in NW Europe and the Baltic. By differential rescaling I can now easily remove the longitudinal distortions which I find so off-putting in published terrains. Although some HFDs like EuroWW2 are disfigured by excessive flattening, correcting this is far easier than adding new HFD data manually as I had planned. Combining hand-tiling using bespoke tilesets with properly proportioned reduced scale HFDs from existing terrains offers a much more practical way forward for the gradual expansion of my various projects from the initial vignettes. Being able to take off and land in the seaplanes which were such an evocative feature of early aviation is only the icing on the cake! If anyone would like a more detailed step-by-step guide to any of the techniques I have discovered, please let me know and I will try to help. (Site rules preclude me posting my files, due to my routine cannibalisation of existing resources for my own private use.)

Thanks Major Lee! As usual, my recent progress with my computer air gaming inspired me to flip back and model related engagements in my manual air designs, as shown in https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3715370/tip-and-run. As discussed in my video, it is great to have these two complementary ways of simulating classic air combat missions from different perspectives.

I am currently reading Chris Goss’s 2003 book on ‘Luftwaffe Fighter Bombers over Britain’, which is chock-full of mission reports which leave me itching to model the sorties on my new terrain. I found that by cutting waypoint altitudes manually in the mission file while in the process of cloning my own entry to create my wingman flights, I can get around the minimum heights in the SF2 mission editor and drop my colleagues to 500 feet, giving a much better sense of the wavetop and treetop altitudes common in fighter-bomber sorties. Strafing is fairly easy if targets can be identified in time, but pinpoint bombing is realistically hard without getting dangerously close to one’s own bomb bursts. The picture below shows our Whirlwinds as we at last outdistanced the coastal flak off Calais. For once I had managed to hit and sink our small target vessel, but at the cost of bomb fragments shredding my craft. With no height whatsoever in hand, the White Cliffs looked frighteningly far away...

I did too until a year ago, when I discovered how to achieve similar satisfaction from SF2. See my 3D air gaming video at https://www.youtube.com/@philipsabin1653 for a quick review of my own experiences.

I described in previous threads how my interest in SF2 has been revived over the past year by discovering how to fly as a wingman, how to drop the 3D clouds to a more realistic altitude, and how to model small low-lying areas like the Baltic islands manually, without using the horizontally skewed elevation data provided by DEMs. My last thread showed how escaping the constraints of automatic terrain generation allowed me to construct a compact but flexible high resolution tileset based on the best of the wonderful artwork which other modders have created. As shown below, I have now completed the first stage of my associated project of gradually making my own manual tilemap for WW2 NW Europe. Besides avoiding horizontal distortion, this tilemap squeezes much more real land area into each tile than do other available terrains for the region. My manual modelling hence does not take impractically long, and I can fly entire wingman missions from takeoff to landing without unduly protracted transits. I am now ready to expand the modelled area gradually in all directions to allow longer missions than the brief cross-Channel hops possible already, as I build up my graphically far improved echo of the European Air War sim which I enjoyed so much 3 decades ago. I have made two main improvements since my last report. First, I decided to change horses again before it was too late by shifting to a new reference map made from a patchwork of screenshots from the online elevation maps at https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/, with the top contour locked at 1000 metres for consistency. As shown below, this makes it easier to select the base height of each tile, in conjunction with a zoomable live copy of the map alongside to show more precise contours. I have now standardised on 2 raised points on each tile, to create just the right amount of rolling terrain on all tiles except those showing watercourses, airfields or flat fenland or built-up areas. The road and rail lines on the reference map allow me to correlate with the live elevation map and with other zoomable live and satellite maps showing towns, airfields and vegetation. My second improvement has been to make my airfields many times smaller than the multi-tile monsters which dominate most SF2 terrains. As shown below in my representative selection of the several real airfields crammed behind Cap Gris Nez in 1940 to maximise the reach of the Bf 109, I now confine airfields to just the 4 central squares of their single 16 square tile. Not only does this make them look much less overscale on my reduced scale terrain, but it also allows the other 12 squares of the tile to slope up or down as shown here. By tracing runways diagonally rather than orthogonally, I keep them long enough to allow even 4 engine bombers to take off and land successfully if the data file constraint is removed. Deciding which of the many thousands of WW2 airfields to include on my terrain is hard (particularly in view of the many changes across this long conflict), but Henry Deng’s research collected at https://www.ww2.dk/lwairfields.html is of invaluable assistance, helping even to choose which side of each airfield to put my generic buildings. I have now switched my horizon distance setting back to ‘far’ since this makes my mass of small TOD objects look much better, at the cost of visibility on my reduced scale terrain being far greater than it would be in real life. I am currently using my new arena as a sandbox for a wide range of combat missions like those which I flew over published terrains as shown in my previous threads. The picture below shows our Whirlwind flight outbound past the radar masts and balloon barrage of Dover for a strafing run on Marquise in spring 1941. On my reduced scale terrain, the entire sortie from takeoff to landing back at Manston takes just 15 minutes. I have slashed the accuracy and warhead weight of low level flak so that such missions typically leave one friendly plane damaged, posing the added challenge of nursing the crippled craft back to base. I love the ability to tailor SF2 and its many mods to my personal preferences in this way, and having complete flexibility to shape my new NW Europe terrain adds greatly to my enjoyment of this classic sim. Eventually, I hope to return to the Baltic and to modify published artwork into a high resolution seasonal tileset with which to model the equally classic arena around Leningrad, as the kernel of another reduced scale manual terrain for aerial battles between Finland, Germany and the USSR.

Experimenting with different aircraft types led me to discover a whole new way of enjoying my evolving WW2 terrain. The ungainly Lysander rarely flew in formation, so I cannot enjoy cockpit and external views simultaneously, but I decided instead to see if I could recreate its characteristic hedge-hopping clandestine night missions taking agents and arms to support the French resistance. In my first attempt I could see nothing except my own instruments, but luckily I persevered and changed the date by 2 weeks. SF2 has a wonderfully accurate sky dome, and sure enough, the full moon now gave just enough illumination for me to glimpse fields and trees once my eyes adjusted. I added basic runway lights to the INI file of my grass airfields, and I set up a training mission from Ronaldsway in which I would fly at low level across the island to Jurby, land and take off from the simulated strip prepared by the Maquis (as shown below), and navigate back to base for another night landing. The half hour sortie involved some close calls, but using a combination of my instruments and glimpses of the ground, I managed to return safely. Successfully navigating my route and flying low enough to escape detection without crashing provided ample continuing challenges equivalent to my usual endeavour to maintain close formation, and I look forward to simulating real clandestine missions of this kind as my terrain modelling extends across the Channel into France.

As usual, I have been enjoying short formation flights around the island, while tuning my graphics to strike the best balance between appearance and frame rates. I set Terrain Texture and Ground Object Density to Unlimited, to get the full benefit of Gepard’s high resolution tiles and my numerous TOD objects. Horizon Distance, by contrast, should actually be set to Near for my reduced scale terrain, but I compromise on Normal to stop nearby ground objects fading away too soon. Even at this Horizon setting, I decided to model the closest promontories on the Galloway peninsula, since they appear distinctly in the distance. I set Shadows to Medium, since otherwise ground object shadows pop distractingly on and off. As shown below by the island’s two northern airfields, I have made two generic airfield types using stock SF2 buildings – one with grass runways, and a more developed type using the single tile runway overlay in airfield3.lod. Both look good from above and allow me to taxi back to the hangars after each sortie. Even these single tile airfields are significantly too large for my reduced scale terrain, but at least they are preferable to the multi-tile airfields which are the norm in SF2.