Hauksbee

True. The British prepared in great detail. The Germans pinned all their hopes on the swift, pre-emptive attack which would catch the opposing forces on the ground. It had worked everywhere before, thus no reason to assume it wouldn't work again in England. That's why Göring dismissed the task with a wave of his hand and said that all he needed was four days of good weather.

Sniping? Well, OK. But stay clear of those massed dashes across No-Man's-Land into the enemy wire...

"Immersion" in a WWI flying sim is one thing. A brush with death and danger. But a little skill will get you through. But "immersion" in in a bloodbath & meat-grinder...? You'll be having nightmares. What's the average life expectancy in "Verdun"? Minutes?

http://www.netflix.com/watch/80036418?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C0%2C5b162e7896ac2277a5bd23015c4ea6e1bfd9a0e0%3A92cae6c5e4c6d63c9596f00c9ce2e9ba4df71e4a I hope I'm not repeating myself here but while we're on the subject, I've got another Netflix Instant for you. (at least, I don't remember reccommending it before). Simply called "Battle of Britain", (edit: "Battle of Britain: The Real Story) the theme is that, while Britain was certainly in a bit of a corner, things were not as dire as has been commonly reported. As few examples: (1) Squadron-for-squadron, the RAF and the Luftwaffe were seen as roughly equal. But Britain fielded 20 planes per squadron, while the Luftwaffe, only 12. After the first few weeks, German pilots wondered where all these British planes were coming from. (2) Moreover, Churchill put Lord Beaverbrook in charge aircraft production. Beaverbrook limited aircraft production to three bomber types and two fighters: Spitfire and Hurricane. Everything else was cancelled. Consequently, even at the lowest ebb, British squadrons never lacked for replacement airplanes. (3) Keith Park, commander of 11 Group in Kent (which bore the brunt) rotated his squadrons. A beat-up squadron in Kent would get pulled back to the interior to train new pilots. Those squadrons would get assigned to Scotland where things were quieter while they got operational experience and formed a reserve force to replace losses in Kent. The Germans had no such program. Units stayed in the line while their most experienced pilots were lost by attrition and new pilots got thrown in to the battle raw. (4) Every downed German pilot was initially housed in a rather nice country house just outside of London. Accommodations were civilized and the food better than what they expected. What they didn't know was that every corner of the house was bugged and every conversation recorded. That way, the British got a constant update on how the Germans saw the state of the war. If you can get Netflix, check it out.

Quite so, Olham. And Göring was a fighter pilot himself. It's one of the great mysteries how he allowed the bomber crews to talk him into it.

Whereupon Simon straps on his trusty Snipe and hurls himself into WOFF, with such panache and reckless daring, that the OBD computer code seizes up and declares an armistice!

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/12/the-spy-behind-the-plane-that-saved-britain.html A young man, Beverly Shenstone, (Canadian) goes to Germany in the 20's and gets a job with Junkers. After a few years, he moves on to Frankfurt and works with Alexander Lippish. The Lippish plant is described as "a Leonardo Da Vinci workshop". Eventually, he returns to England and gets hired at Supermarine. By now, Reginald Mitchell is recognized as a genius and has built the Supermarine Schneider Cup racers, but the day-to-day bread-and-butter work was seaplane design, pretty dull stuff after his work on the continent. When the Air Ministry put out a request for a new fighter (which would eventually become the Spitfire) Shenstone caught Mitchell's ear and explained what he had been doing in Germany...and the course of History shifted. . Shenstone was said to avoid the limelight. No photo of him exists at Supermarine. This is all I could find on the 'net.

Just watched a YouTube video on restoring WWII fighters. Where in WWII there was a shortage of metal workers, there was a plethora of skilled woodworkers building Hurricanes and Mosquitos. These days, it's just the reverse. All those skilled cabinet makers are gone and it's a real chore to restore a Hurricane.

I commend to your attention the film "My Boy, Jack". A sad film about John Kipling (Daniel Radcliffe) who desperately wanted to go to war to get out of the house and away from his father, Rudyard. But no service would have him because his eyesight was so bad that, today, he'd probably be declared legally blind. Rudyard, as Poet Laureate and chief cheerleader for the British Raj, sees this as perfectly normal that a boy would want shed his blood for 'King and Country" and pulls strings and throws all his influence into the attempt to find Jack an officer posting. It's an uphill struggle, but at last he finds an army unit that will take him. The Western Front is (of course) a death sentence for Jack, but still preferable to remaining under his father's thumb. The bitter irony is that at the same time Rudyard Kipling is serving on the Propaganda Board. Their task was to provide stirring posters and other advertisements to sell the war and make it look like a great adventure. They also were tasked with putting the best face on debacles and bloodbaths like The Somme. To do this, they were provided with military intelligence that detailed the incompetence and cock-ups that needed to be hushed up or explained away and at the same time, Rudyard, who now knows what a meat-grinder the Western Front has become, is button-holing all his friends to make Jack a part of it.

I did not know that. Interesting. I was amused to see (near the end) that Bader's 'big wings' were given credit for winning the war. Not a word said about poor 11 Group down in Kent getting the snot beat out of them. Not a word said about how long it took to assemble those 'big wings'. Poor Jerry only had about 20 minutes over the target before heading home. 'Couldn't wait around forever. I would have liked to see more on the chemistry between Bader and Trafford Leigh-Mallory (great name, that) Between the two of them they gave Keith Park nightmares. Ah well, it's was Bader's film. I guess they had to shine the best light on him. Johny Johnstone had Kenyan dirt flown to Aden? (!)

Very nice. I guess it's safe to say that there are more Albitri flying these days than there are Spitfires.

It was said of Kaiser Wilhelm that, (edit: "his greatest fear was...") "somewhere in the world there was a quarrel going on that he could not be part of."

True. The "Low Countries" were traditionally the European highway for armies to move north/south. In the wake of the Napoleonic wars (1839) England strong-armed the rest of Europe into affirming the perpetual neutrality of Belgium (Treaty of London) Declaring this invasion route to be out-of-bounds was supposed to secure peace on the continent. It was the cornerstone of British foreign policy and they took it very seriously. When the Kaiser dismissed it as "a scrap of paper", there was no turning back.

The Lethal Soviet Night Witches – Russian Female Heroes Of The Air Few people would connect broomsticks, witches and crop-sprayers to a feared group of female Russian pilots. The women pilots were members of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment of World War II. Even today not many people know about these female pilots who did so much to support their male comrades by the accurate bombing of German troops. These women were usually aged 17 to 26 years of age used to fly on night-time bombing missions. When approaching their target, they would idle their engines and glide into their bombing points. This largely silent approach gave off a “whooshing” sound as they went by, causing the Germans to liken it to the sound of the broomsticks of witches and thus arose the name of “Nachthexen’ – Night Witches! These girl-pilots harassed the Germans to such an extent that they were both hated and feared by them. It was said that any German pilot who managed to bring down one of the planes of a Night Witch would automatically be awarded the Iron Cross. It is no wonder that these intrepid girl-pilots bore the name ‘Night Witches’ with pride! Stalin, after much lobbying by the renowned Russian woman pilot, Marina Raskova, finally allowed a group of females to be trained as bomber pilots and thus created three female units, one of which was the all female 588th Night Bombers Regiment. These female pilots were to be allowed to take the same roles as men who made Russia a very progressive nation. It was the only country at the time to allow women to take part in actual combat missions. Marina Raskova herself began training suitable candidates in flying and navigating and also as maintenance and ground crews. This training of girls as war pilots was seen by the majority of the men in the air force as being of little value, but it was not long before these girl-pilots were to prove their worth and bravery in no uncertain terms. In June of 1941, the German armies attacked Russia (Operation Barbarossa) and moved like lightning across the Russian plains catching Stalin and his armies by surprise. The Nazis devastated the Russian Military, took millions of prisoners and reached the outskirts of Moscow. The situation was critical. The Russians needed all possible manpower and were desperate for pilots and planes – the Germans had to be stopped, at whatever cost or Russia was doomed. The female pilots of the 588th Regiment faced this challenge head on. Their planes – the Policarpov Po-2 bi-panes – were made of plywood and canvas and had mostly been used as crop-dusters, or for training. These planes were small and light and able to carry only two bombs – one under each wing. The crew of two had to fly in an open cockpit, which meant they suffered from frozen feet and frostbite in winter. They were not helped by the fact that they were issued with unsuitable, hand-me-down male uniforms. They had no handguns, no space to carry parachutes and they had to rely on maps and compasses for navigation as they were not equipped with radar. Should they be hit by tracer bullets, their planes would turn into a ball of fire. In spite of these heavy odds these female pilots demonstrated their extreme bravery, often flying 8-10 bombing missions over enemy-held territory, night after night. As these planes were so small and light, the missions were very dangerous. The crews had to search for the German encampments from a very low altitude and so were easy targets, frequently coming back to base with their canvas-covered planes spattered with holes and ripped canvas from being shot up. Sometimes they made it back to base having been set on fire by tracer bullets, often they came home with wounded crew or even worse -they did not return at all. Raskova herself was killed in action. These little Polikarpov biplanes were able to fly very low which helped them to evade the German pilots and since the top speed of these bi-panes was less than the stalling speed of the Nazi planes they were able to manoeuvre more easily and with agility. These features thus formed the only defences the planes had. The Night Witches’ missions usually required that they flew to a nearby target, mostly behind enemy lines. They developed a strategy whereby three planes would fly in formation, and as they neared the target, two planes would fly so as to attract the German searchlights. These two would then fly off in opposite directions, twisting and weaving to avoid the anti-aircraft guns while the third plane would slip quietly through the darkness and drop its bomb load. Something similar would be repeated until all three planes had dropped their bombs before flying back to base where they would refuel, reload and then fly off on their next mission. During heavy fighting, there were as many as 40 planes flying per night. Almost every time these pilots had to fly through a wall of enemy fire. In all, the Night Witches flew approximately 30,000 missions and dropped 23,000 tons of bombs. This constant harassment night after night made the Germans hate the ‘Nachthexen’ even more. The tension was beginning to be felt. They suffered sleepless nights, they felt threatened and unsafe and were wearied by the constant need to be on the alert and to remain in defensive positions. While it caused German morale to fall. The cost to the 588th Night Bombers, was high, for they lost 30 of their pilots. A commander, Nadezha Popover, who completed 852 bombing missions for the Night Bombers, died on the 8th July 2013 at the age of 91. She was quoted as having said “we had a lot of clever, educated, girls “ and “we bombed, we killed, it was part of war.” The cleverness of the ‘Night Witches’ as much as their bravery accounted for their success. Nadezha was one of the 24 Night Witches who were recognized for their incredible determination and bravery against all the odds and who were given the ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ award. It was a fully deserved honour indeed!

My favorite smuggling story is about the Italians in 1923 Schneider Cup race, which was held in America. This was during the Prohibition era when alcohol in all its forms was against the law. The Schneider Cup planes carried their fuel in the pontoons. The Italian team simply installed a fresh set of tanks (ones which had never seen gasoline) and filled them with red wine. .

Me neither. From what I gather from the article, he chose to work in complete anonymity.

World War I’s Iconic, Ironic Battle By PAUL JANKOWSKI French troops under shellfire during the Battle of Verdun. One hundred years ago, on Feb. 21, 1916, 1,200 German artillery pieces began firing on French positions around Verdun, the ancient fortress town on the Meuse River in eastern France. It was the middle of World War I , and the fighting all along the Western Front that ran between the Channel and the Alps had settled into a static confrontation of men, planes and guns — guns, above all. That day the Germans dropped a million shells onto the forts, forests and ravines around Verdun, and in the 10 months that followed, 60 million more would fall in the area. By then the French had stopped the German advance and even recovered most of the terrain they had lost, reduced by then to a lunar landscape bereft of vegetable or animal life. And 300,000 men had died. What exactly are we commemorating when we gather at the forts, shell-holes and monuments of the former battlefield? We like our battles to have a beginning and an end, to mark a moment and leave a meaning that posterity can grasp and visitors can celebrate — usually, a symbolic or strategic turning point, when one side loses the initiative and never regains it, as at Gettysburg or Stalingrad. We won’t find it at Verdun. The French won a great moral victory — the last, in fact, that their arms would ever achieve — but it did not significantly weaken one side more than the other, alter the strategic picture, or determine the outcome of the war. Verdun declines to boast such significance. There is little to celebrate, and we wander its hills today only as pilgrims to a site of immense suffering. On Sunday an expanded and renovated museum will reopen on the site of one of the ruined villages; later this year, President François Hollande and Chancellor Angela Merkel will inaugurate it officially, and add their names to the long list of dignitaries who came before them. They will say what President François Mitterrand and Chancellor Helmut Kohl said when they visited in 1984 and clasped hands before the great ossuary that holds the shattered remains of the dead — that this must never happen again, that this cannot happen again. They will speak of Europe. French heads of state here once spoke of national unity, of patriotism, of resistance, of heroism. Away from Verdun, authors and survivors wrote of all that and much more. Germans wrote of noble failure, of brave soldiers betrayed by a cynical or inept high command. Some spoke of it in cautionary terms, as a military folly to be avoided at all costs. Never again, wrote one of the architects of the German blitzkrieg of World War II, Heinz Guderian. “I do not want a second Verdun there,” Hitler said of Stalingrad in November 1942, as though to condemn in advance the protracted siege warfare that would cost him his entire Sixth Army. What, the visitor asks, is the meaning of what happened? Like all battlefields, Verdun is silent. Between an older narrative of heroism and a more recent one of pointless slaughter lies an ocean of ambiguity, mingling grandeur with absurdity. Through 1916 French and German losses kept climbing in a macabre pas de deux. Under a sky illuminated by shellfire, in ravines and on hillsides denuded of natural or man-made cover, huddled in what was left of their trenches, the French and Germans lived Verdun in the same way. They used the same words to describe it — “L’Enfer,” “Die Hölle von Verdun” — and spoke too of entering another world, severed from the one they had left behind, and pervaded perhaps by an evil presence. Yes, the French stopped the German offensive on the Meuse. But so what? To a historian 100 years later, Verdun does yield a meaning, in a way a darkly ironic one. Neither Erich von Falkenhayn, the chief of the German General Staff, nor his French counterpart, Joseph Joffre, had ever envisaged a climactic, decisive battle at Verdun. They had attacked and defended with their eyes elsewhere on the front, and had thought of the fight initially as secondary, as ancillary to their wider strategic goals. And then it became a primary affair, self-sustaining and endless. They had aspired to control it. Instead it had controlled them. In that sense Verdun truly was iconic, the symbolic battle of the Great War of 1914-18. Paul Jankowski, a professor of history at Brandeis University, is the author of “Verdun: The Longest Battle of the Great War.”

'Was watching a Netflix series on famous feuds in history, (i.e., William Randolph Hearst vs Joseph Pulitzer : newspapers, Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates : computers) and there was a section on the Wright Brothers vs Glenn Curtiss. It was pretty sloppy scholarship, but some interesting film footage. At one point the narrator says that the Wrights were not the first, or only, to try flying. There were others, but the big stumbling block was control of the aircraft; at which point they show a clip that has a glider zooming in from the right, pulls up steeply into a loop and at the top, the plane goes in one direction, and the pilot in another. It was a very dramatic clip but it was not Wright era (or pre-Wright) It looks to me to be a 'Primary Glider' type that was common in flying clubs in 1930's Germany. .

Will the look of things change?

Very nice. It reminds me of flying gliders in State College (a university town in Pennsylvania). In the mid-sixties a few local pilots decided to form a Glider Club. (There was a smallish grass field in town) I joined and flew for two summers. We all trained on a Schweizer 222. It look a lot like the SG38 except that it had a full fuselage, canopy, and carried two. The Student sat in front. We launched with a winch: a huge Oldsmobile engine on a two-wheeled trailer and a big spool of cable. Reel out the cable, clip it on to the glider, wave a flag, and the winch operator would engage the clutch, and off you go! About one third of the way down the field, the center-wheel would lift off and the pilot would haul the stick back sharply and start to climb. In the first one third of the ascent, the angle between you and the winch is pretty flat and you accelerate (and climb) briskly. But the higher you get, the angle increases until, at the end, you're directly above the winch which is pulling you down more than than forward. That's the release point. During that last third of the ascent, the wings would be protesting mightily. They'd be making "wobble-wobble-wobble" sounds called "oil-canning". It was unnerving until you got used to it. Still, I was always happy to pull the release knob and get quit of the cable.

'Love the rivers. I never got down too close to any river in my flying, and when seen from altitude, I could never understand why the rivers had a white border on each bank. It always looked like pollution; a white, foaming, sudsy deposit from a chemical plant upstream. With your changes, I see the effect of shallow water near shore. Much more realistic. Well done. Where I see rocks along the shoreline, is that just a texture applied, or is there a bump map too? .

Piece o' cake. I'll walk you through it.

Sounds like you've got a lot ahead of you. Keep me posted. 'Found this picture of a chateau at Roucourt, France. Is this what you want to build? If so, it will be a very simple model. .

OK, I guess you can forget about the book. With YouTube, and Sim Out-House and me, you can get all your questions answered. I always found those big, fat, bibles frustrating anyway. They are always packed with information that can answer any question except the one that has me baffled at the moment. I did work with Blender for a while, but it must have been 10 years ago, or so. It's an 'open architecture' program like Linux; anyone who can write code can modify it as they see fit. Like SoftImage, Maya and 3D StudioMax, it has a steep learning curve. And because it changes so often as new capabilities are written for it, there's no authoritative manual published for it, or, not when I tried it. That may have changed by now, but it still would be a tough program for a beginner. Have you joined Sim Out-House yet?

I checked amazon.com for G-Max Bibles. It seems the price has gone up. ( now $16.00+ for a used copy) As I recall, mine was less than 10 cents. (plus $3.75 postage) Here's the URL: http://www.amazon.com/gmax-Bible-Kelly-L-Murdock/dp/0764537571/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1456769727&sr=1-1&keywords=The+gmax+Bible Yes, I will continue building the Chateau. I'm pretty sure there's one at Boistrancourt now. (I haven't flown out of there in quite a while now) Lou told me that he constructed Boistrancourt by duplicating buildings already in the WOFF Scenery libraries. Buildings are very easy to make. Most every building is just a series of cubes patched together. The model can be built at any size and scaled up and down. After you export the model into the game, its size cannot be changed. You have to go back to the original G-Max document, alter the size there, then re-export it. There is a way to set scale in G-Max. First, you go to Preferences and specify meters. CSF3 wants everything in meters. Then there's a way to specify that each square on the grid in each modeling window equals 1 meter. I'm still a bit hazy of that. SOH told me, but was a bit unclear. I'll go back to my last posting and review their reply. Here's the historical Chateau at Boistrancourt, and your chateau drawing superimposed upon it.