pagsab

My SCW and MTO projects have reinforced the importance of combining online and specialist hard copy research sources – neither alone is sufficient to provide the nuanced details one needs. I am increasingly concerned that my used copy of Herrera's SCW seaplane book has still not arrived from Madrid, but Howson's big 1990 Putnam reference work on 'Aircraft of the Spanish Civil War' did just get to me in Chile at last after a 2 month journey. Eagerly browsing its seaplane entries, I realised that my static Lohner conversion is wasted portraying the old Macchi M.18, which performed only liaison and training duties during the SCW. I hence souped up my M.18 conversion as shown below by boosting its speed and engine power and adding a rear gunner using the PilotBalkans2B figure. The resulting model looks much more like the Savoia-Marchetti S.62 than did my earlier stand-in of the Supermarine Walrus, despite sacrificing 3D guns, a spinning prop and visible damage. The sturdier Walrus will make a better stand-in for the Curtiss and Felixstowe flying boats in my planned WW1 North Sea project. I am meanwhile enjoying exploring the Sicilian coast in my favourite seaplane of all – the Regia Marina's single seat Macchi M.41 which I brought to life from Stephen1918's other static model. It is a shame that this 'Riva Aquarama of the skies' was replaced in 1938 by the ugly and fatally flawed IMAM Ro.44 floatplane. Howson's book also details how three Savoia S.55s (the type famous from Italo Balbo's mass long distance flights) played a minor role in the opening months of the SCW, but finding a stand-in for a big twin hull flying boat is asking too much even for me!

I just finished making the MTO equivalent of my reduced scale Straits of Dover terrain as showcased in https://combatace.com/forums/topic/101179-european-air-war-reborn/. As seen below, my latest effort has the same 45 by 32 tile layout, though it portrays a larger area of real terrain since each tile represents 5.1 km instead of the 3.3 km scale which I use in crowded NW Europe. Both terrains saw constant air combat across the straits from June 1940, with the Allies gradually gaining the upper hand until they finally ended the stand-off by amphibious invasion 3 or 4 years later. I used the same tiles and modelling techniques as in my SCW terrain, though with forests and scrubland generated only on tiles with an elevation range of 120 metres or more. The towns and cities represent all those with 30,000 or more inhabitants in the 1936 census (as shown in Wikimedia historical population data). Using rescaled HFDs and procedural tile selection made the process much quicker than my initial entirely manual efforts, and I have already begun retro-fitting these techniques to my NW Europe project. I can now fly complete Allied and Axis combat missions in both theatres, and an obvious next step is to expand my modelled areas to London and Catania respectively to give a broader range of bases and targets. With my SCW terrain also crying out for expansion, and with my current reading of White's gripping 1986 book on 'The Gotha Summer' constantly tempting me to create a WW1 variant of my evolving North Sea terrain, I am spoilt for choice as to which avenue to pursue first!

Yes, I noticed the famous forts from the classic siege described in Ernle Bradford's book. SF2 terrain making is always a balance between the desire for accuracy through bespoke tiles and TOD objects for individual features and the wish to keep tile and TOD variants as few and manageable as possible. I lean towards the latter priority, to the perhaps ridiculous extent of using just one tree clump model and two building models across my entire tileset! I keep these small to enhance the sense of speed when flying, since I find that some otherwise beautiful terrains have trees so big that low-flying planes seem to be moving in slow motion. Realistically sized troops and vehicles are very difficult to see in time to line up for a strafing run, but contrast helps a lot. One trick that I just discovered is to darken the texture file of vehicles to stop the camouflage working so well that they blend in completely with the ground. I limit shadows to maintain frame rates and avoid distracting shadow 'popping', so darkening target objects offers a useful substitute. Conversely, it is important to keep the contrast between TOD terrain objects and the tile background as low as possible so that one notices less when the objects pop into or out of viewing range.

Yes, you said you were working on your own MTO project. Your version of Valletta is significantly more detailed than my own, which is confined to a single re-purposed city river bend tile due to my scale reduction and my more flexible tile borders. I look forward to seeing more when your project is ready.

The WW2 Mediterranean conversions available for SF2 at 'another place' have similar full scale terrains to that in the SCW conversion, making my preferred complete sorties uncomfortably long. I hence decided to create a reduced scale hand-tiled terrain as for my Spanish playset, by shrinking the posted HFDs using Gimp and the Third Wire terrain editor. I applied differential rescaling in order to remove longitudinal distortion and to match the scale of my Spanish terrain, with each of my tiles representing just over 5 km instead of the nominal 2 km. As usual, I began with islands, and after using just 10 tiles to model mountainous Pantelleria, I used 28 tiles to simulate the most significant small island in air war history, namely Malta. The picture below shows an iconic Sea Gladiator over the Hal Far airfield and Kalafrana seaplane base. In the middle distance are Valletta's Grand Harbour and RAF Luqa with its concrete runways and taxiways painted directly onto the tile, while the Ta Kali airfield and the smaller island of Gozo may be glimpsed in the background. Even before going on to model Sicily, Tunisia or the Italian mainland, I can simulate a variety of real Allied combat sorties from 1940 to 1943 (including interception of Italian or German bombing raids and strikes against Italian maritime convoys) using just Malta and the surrounding sea. This step by step approach makes my increasingly proficient hand-tiling technique an entirely practical alternative to traditional SF2 terrains, especially now that my adaptation of existing HFDs makes distant mountains visible on the horizon from the outset.

Posting what I have made would contravene the rules of the sites where I found the various mods which I have so shamelessly re-purposed. I only hope that some of the tweaks I have found or re-discovered may help others create their own niche counterparts of 'SSP1' as they enjoy the Third Wire sandbox in their own individual ways.

I decided to use puny Hotchkiss AA positions in my strafing missions, to reflect Stratos's point about the limited nature of the flak defences guarding the Republican coast. However, I still fell foul of the fearsome impact of close range automatic flak in the Third Wire sims. Even after cutting the LMGs' rate of fire by 80% while adding 'TracerLoading=1' to the GunBarrel section of the Hotchkiss's object data.ini to make every remaining round a tracer bullet, the machine guns routinely stopped my He 59's engines on my first or second pass. Cutting the Hotchkiss's Accuracy in its gun data.ini seemed to have no effect, while slashing its AmmoWt did the trick only at the unacceptable expense of making the tracer bullets so anaemic that they petered out almost at once. However, when I cut AmmoWt all the way to 0, something interesting occurred. The tracers returned in full force and their repeated impacts soon made my plane look like Swiss cheese, but even after taking a few hundred hits as the trial LMG gradually expended all of its 1000 rounds, my sacrificially circling Heinkel suffered no further ill effects. I eventually decided to accept this imperfect solution and to treat the constant hit sound effects as instead representing the crack of bullets passing close by. To stop me ignoring the enemy MGs now I knew that they were actually toothless, I resolved not to attack my mission targets until I had strafed and destroyed any defending MGs first. In my initial practice flight on the range, it took me all of my ammo just to take out the 2 tiny Hotchkiss teams as shown below, but soon my performance improved and I went on to blow up multiple trucks as before, even when flying at dawn to simulate the poor light over the real target as we sought to evade enemy fighter interception. We then flew a real dawn mission against enemy supply trucks east of Tarragona. When we reached the target area, it took me only 3 minutes to find and kill both LMG teams thanks to their tell-tale tracers, but then I became disoriented in the gloom and lost 2 minutes trying to relocate the trucks which I had seen clearly at the outset. Once one truck was finally burning, it provided a beacon which let me find and destroy 6 more before time and ammo ran out. I rejoined my circling leader as before despite long range heavy flak fire from Tarragona, and we eventually rounded the Tramuntana mountains and turned east past Palma to fly safely back across the island to Pollenca. Our complete sortie again took 80 minutes, but the techniques which I developed can also be used for much shorter strafing missions by He 51s and the like. I made my own MGs fully reliable so that mission failures will occur only due to my own lack of skill rather than through an unlucky gun jam or enemy MG hit. A striking and highly realistic aspect of these missions is the importance of practising on the range beforehand, to hone one's skills for the 'real thing'.

Our first long range He 59 combat mission from Pollenca targeted shipping in the Ebro estuary. We took off before dawn, and arrived when it was just light enough to see an enemy vessel. Thanks to our practice flights back at base, my nose gunner and I got 70% of our rounds on target while avoiding the twin perils of jamming the gun through too long a burst or getting too close to any explosion. We still had to fire 424 of our 485 rounds in repeated passes before the ship finally caught fire. I headed triumphantly east into the rising sun, rejoining my leader's plane just before he stopped circling and headed for home. The complete round trip took 80 minutes – longer than I prefer, but only half the time this mission would have taken on the original full scale Spanish terrain. The changing views were stunning as the sun gradually rose, and my flying skill and marksmanship were tested throughout. Overall, the mission vindicated my extensive preparations over the past few months, and I look forward to many more such immersive combat sorties as my Spanish project proceeds.

Hitting the bigger target of ships as in Wrench's film clip is easier still, and it is possible to get over half of one's rounds on target, but even the small trawlers and torpedoboote which I have imported from the Caporetto terrain need truly drastic cuts to their damage points if they are to be destroyed by strafing alone as shown below. Being able to choose the resilience (and damage graphics) one prefers is yet another illustration of the marvellous flexibility of the Third Wire sandbox.

As we discussed earlier in this thread, strafing was a key aerial contribution during the SCW. I set up a range on the southern peninsula of the Pollenca base, so as to practise this activity with my seaplanes. However, my gunners remained frustratingly inactive, even when presented with multiple nearby surface targets. I may eventually solve this problem, but in the meantime, I have devised a very satisfying workaround which lets me control pilot and nose gunner as a team. After backing up the plane's data.ini, I created a special variant in which I changed the nose gun to a fixed gun controlled by the joystick trigger. I then imitated the 'Schräge Musik' data from a Bf 110G by adding the line 'AimAngles=-15.0,-10.0,0.0', and I shifted the muzzle and light positions slightly by trial and error to accord with this tweaked angle. I then condensed the fire arcs in the nose gunner's entry to allow only this single angle of fire. As shown below, this let me fly my He 59 to achieve very effective strafing, with the gunner not blocking my view and with the downward tilt of the gun letting me 'walk' my bullets over the target without risking a crash as in single seaters. After very little practice, I destroyed 8 trucks in a single sortie before my ammo ran out. Using this technique, I should be able to simulate a complete dawn raid on the Republican coast by a pair of He 59s, with light flak to add to the challenge and with my leader given recon orders and programmed to loiter for a while so that I may rejoin him for the flight back to Pollenca.

Tweaking the Third Wire sims is not for the faint hearted, but the incredible work done by others over the years offers an irresistible foundation, and those precious moments when all one's own hard-learned tweaks eventually come together as shown in the photo below make everything worthwhile.

A limitation of my flyable versions of Stephen1918's static seaplanes has been my inability to animate the propellers – the best I have managed hitherto has been to repaint them in light grey to make them less conspicuous. However, to my delight, I have just discovered a simple way to make the props vanish after all. As shown in the picture below of a Macchi M.5 over the sparkling river delta west of Lignano, the result is almost as good as replacing the static props with the transparent prop animations from standard plane models. The technique also lets components of other aircraft be rendered invisible if the LOD hierarchy permits, allowing guns to be removed or wheels replaced with floats – a big help in redressing the shortage of seaplane models. For details, see https://combatace.com/forums/topic/101404-spain-and-seaplanes/.

My various attempts to hide the propellers of Stephen1918's static seaplanes had been frustratingly unsuccessful, but while browsing aircraft data.inis in search of possible solutions, I came across the following code used in the SM-79 to remove an unwanted pylon: [RemoveBit1] ModelNodename=Empty DestroyedNodeName=Pylon_L DetachWhenDestroyed=TRUE HasAeroCoefficients=FALSE With little hope of success, I added 'RemoveBit1' as a new final Component in the AircraftData section of my Macchi M.41's data.ini (cloned from the Fiat CR32), and pasted the above code into the file, replacing 'Pylon_L' with 'Prop'. I then fired up the sim, and to my delight the Macchi's static prop had vanished at long last – not quite as good as having it replaced by the transparent prop animations from other aircraft, but far better than the static light grey blades which is all I had managed hitherto. The same process worked in the Lohner L for FE2, but not for the Macchi M.5 or M.18. Mue's LOD viewer confirmed my suspicion that the parent craft which I had used for these Macchis also happened to use the name 'Prop' in their own superseded LODs. Fortunately, I knew from my Cockpit view experiments that one could change node names in the data.ini without obvious ill effects, so I altered the StaticPropNodeName in the Engine section of the data.inis from 'Prop' to 'Prop01'. To my great satisfaction, not only were the Macchis' static props now also invisible but the planes flew unaffected, using their arbitrarily renamed props which as far as the system knew were still very much intact. It was wonderful to do away with the visible propellers in my conversions of static seaplanes, but my eyes were already on bigger game. After using the LOD viewer to examine the Vimy LOD used by my He 59, I added 4 successive 'RemoveBit' entries to its data.ini, one each for 'Gear_F', 'Gear_R', 'Gear_L' and 'TailSkid'. I then appended '01' to the matching ModelNodeNames in the Landing Gears section of the data.ini, so that the gear would continue in virtual existence despite my destruction of their visible counterparts from the LOD file. As seen below, my change transformed my He 59 model from an obvious lash-up into an atmospheric approximation of the real 'Big Shoes' biplane floatplane as shown in Wrench's film clip. I used a similar process to remove the canopy from the Supermarine Walrus, making it a better stand-in for the open cockpit Savoia S.62 (especially when given more detailed crew figures and a less restrictive AI roll limit). Discovering this way to excise component graphics is a big help in my efforts to overcome the dearth of professionally made seaplane models.

That's a great clip. He 59s were also used for air-sea rescue work, and 12 of them landed troops on the Maas to take the main bridge at Rotterdam in 1940. It is a shame we don't have a better SF2 model than the lash-up which is all that I have been able to make. While searching the net just now, I came across a 12 year old video showing complete anti-shipping missions flown by Savoia S-62s using the Ultraspain mod for IL2. These look very like my own formation flights, except that they are multiplayer affairs rather than the offline single player experiences I enjoy myself. The video is here:

The montage below showing our return to Pollenca after a late afternoon version of the Menorca mission illustrates how my various tweaks complement the cornucopia of user add-ons for SF2 and FE2 to create exactly the flight experience I prefer. My ideal sortie involves the thrill of takeoff, half an hour or so of challenging close formation flying in one of many types of classic warplanes, an atmospheric backdrop of clouds, sunlight and high res terrain, just enough virtual peril to cause minor damage like that visible on my leader’s right wing, and a safe formation landing and short taxi to park alongside the static planes. This may not be as exciting as the usual succession of brief disembodied dogfights, but it is more representative of typical pilot experiences and lets me lose myself for a while in a complete virtual sortie from the days when combat flying involved aircrew rather than drones.