Hauksbee

It's a bit ironic that the thread that jump-started this Forum back to life dealt with the sad future prospects over at "Rise of Flight". Now suddenly we too must face the "End Times" for the Great, Glacial Dev's who have guided our (alternate digital) lives. Perhaps we can follow the example of Team Fusion and evolve our own modding group, which I'd suggest we call Team Frission. (frission=breathless excitement). It's worth a shot. And I did vote in favor of WOFF Gold. The least we can do is send the Dev's off with some beer money in their pockets. Will there be a follow-up project? I did not catch a hint of that in the link.

What caused the Germans to run short of Castor Oil? The Castor Bean plants is native to, and grows abundantly, around the Mediterranean and as fae east as India. When I lived in California, they were common as a decorative garden plant. I had several in my front yard and can testify to the fact that they are very easy to grow. Just stick a bean in the ground and forget about it. They can grow as tall as modest sized trees. Could Germany not have a native Castor Bean crop?

A couple of screenies downloaded from Cliffs of Dover Forum Gallery. . .

At first I was thinking that the Castor Bean plants I had growing near San Francisco were pretty hardy. They could make it through the winter and SF winters got down to the low 50's-high 40's. No snow though. My thoughts were that if they were that tough, they might do well in Germany from early Spring to late Autumn. Then I checked a map. Germany is considerably north of San Francisco. 'Whole different ball game. .

Not only fugly, but, being of the same vintage as E.III's and DH-2's, they probably fly like them too.

Where does Olham go to collect his satisfaction?

Let us hope that, by the end of this century, digital printing will be so good that that will not be a problem.

Aha! That explains (I think) the rudder action on the Me-109 seen in one of your other recent videos. The one where he touches down (you can see the splash of water as he runs through a puddle) and the rudder goes full left, then full left again and again.

It's great to see these planes still flying, and sad to realize that, in 1946, a person with a few extra dollars and a warehouse could have had as many as he wanted for a song. I'm sure that when the F-22 & F-35 replace all the A-10's, F-15's, F-16's, etc., the latter will all be scrapped. Except for a pitiful few that accidentally get over looked. Fifty years from now, dedicated aviation enthusiasts will band together to restore a rare bird to flying condition. It will be shown off at air shows in 2100 A.D., and the young will look upon it with envious eyes and say, "Wow! This is how it was done in the old days."

True. It had been raining and the field was muddy. The soil at Agincourt had a lot of clay in it. It produced the kind of mud that let you sink in deep and then suck the boot off your foot. Olivier's "Henry V" shows multiple cavalry charges with the French being scythed off their horses. In fact there was only one charge. That day, the bulk of French knighthood fought dismounted. They had been standing in formation all morning in the humid heat getting more and more impatient. After that first cavalry charge, there was a Viennese company of crossbow men is position to launch a few volleys at the English. (These could have done some real damage) But the French had had enough of waiting and pushed the Viennese out of the way and began marching through the mud, heading for the center of the English line. Here is where Henry stood with his knights. It's where men of quality could perform worthy feats of arms; where wealthy men could be taken prisoner and ransomed. Nobody wanted to engage with the loutish commoners on both wings. Soon they were all packed shoulder-to-shoulder where one could scarcely draw a sword, let alone swing it, knee-deep in mud that immobilized them, and if you lost your balance and fell, people walked over you and you drowned, Then the commoners on both wings closed in with sledgehammers and bayonette-length knives.

I'd have to disagree. The Fw-190 is perfect just the way it is. (If it ain't broke, don't fix it!) 'Ran into an interesting snippet of info about landing the Me-109: it was possible to lock its swiveling tail wheel in the straight-ahead position. When flying from rough forward operating bases, pilots would lock the wheel on final approach and set down in a perfect (hopefully) 3-point landing. Done properly, the 109 would keep to a straight line.

So...I guess it's up to you, Jim. Will you carry the taint of this doubtful lot with you? Either way, yes or no, you still buy the next round.

In this episode of "Battlefield Detectives" they succeed in casting serious doubt on the efficacy of the English longbow in facing down armored, mounted knights.

I agree. Olham has it.

Though I may be in danger of belaboring the point, here's another piece of your answer. The Nazi's loathed the whole of the modernist art movement, terming most of it "Degenerate Art". Hitler believed that people like Picasso and Braque (both Cubists) suffered from a birth defect and actually saw the world like their paintings. This art was obviously a corrupting influence to society and had to be cauterized out. "The portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer" was lumped into this category at first, but was saved a Nazi lawyer who had some artistic sense. It was re-titled "Woman In Gold" to disguise her Jewishness. Other Gustav Klimt works did not fare so well. Here's a Wiki paragraph on these three: "In 1894, Klimt was commissioned to create three paintings to decorate the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna. Not completed until the turn of the century, his three paintings, Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence were criticized for their radical themes and material, and were called "pornographic". Klimt had transformed traditional allegory and symbolism into a new language that was more overtly sexual and hence more disturbing to some. The public outcry came from all quarters—political, aesthetic and religious. As a result, the paintings were not displayed on the ceiling of the Great Hall. This would be the last public commission accepted by the artist. All three paintings were destroyed by retreating SS forces in May 1945." It was destruction for destruction's sake. .

Another film maker to watch is "ATAG_Flare". .

Hood: There is a program in Windows already that will do it. It's called (not surprisingly), "Paint". You'll find it by clicking on the Windows logo at the far left bottom of your screen. (the "START" menu). Scroll down to "Accessories". "Paint" will be in that folder. If you think you'll be using it a lot, right-click on the Paint icon and (from the pop-up menu) select either "Pin to Start Menu" or, "Pin to Task Bar", and it will always be handy. Once you open Paint, just follow the bouncing ball shown below: .

Not in the BOC? Be'demmed, sir! I have the cure for that. Olham? Assemble the lads for a vote!

'Amen' to that. And there's no way to resolve it. ps: Good to see you again, Captain!

I posted a query over at Cliffs of Dover about whether they had a Gallery section. (I find their site very opaque and difficult to find what I'm looking for.) Here's the URL: http://theairtacticalassaultgroup.com/forum/showthread.php?t=16075 Olham: here's a screenie from CoD showing the whole canopy on the Me-109 breaking away/gone. .

Another outstanding film on the Holocaust, and the looting of art: "The Woman In Gold" It deals with the 'Portrait of Adele Bloch-Baur' by Gustav Klimt (1907) and the attempts by Adele's niece, Maria Altman, (played by Helen Mirren) to have it returned to her along with five other Klimt paintings. As one character in the film commented, "The portrait of Adele is Austria's Mona Lisa. There is no way they will ever allow it to leave the country". Talk about playing against a stacked deck! I highly recommend it. . .

...and 'Thank you', Olham. But, bear in mind that Boistrancourt (as we know it in WOFF) is all RAF_Lou's work. Nothing of mine is in there...yet. As I understand things from Lou, there are model libraries in WOFF/CFS3, and buildings and trees can be copied and pasted as needed. One other thing I want to build at Boistrancourt is the White Chateau and its Gate House. I have a file with about six very good photos of the chateau. My problem at the moment is establishing scale. .

Ahhh...that good P&W exhaust! No doubt, made you the man you are today. One of the things that has sustained me throughout the G-max ordeal is that there are some things that I've always wanted to build for OFF/WOFF. I've always wanted to mod the SE-5 and Nieuport fighters so the Lewis gun on the top wing will elevate to the 'reload' position and fire. Better to sneak up and under two-seaters. I've wanted to mod observation balloons with beau coup machine guns and flak so they are the hornets nests they were in real life. I'd like to mod, and animate, a balloon crew bailng out of the basket. Most of all, I want to build an elegant chateau for the BOC. This model will certainly require advanced texturing. But, if you're gonna dream...dream big. .

Yes...Boistrancourt. I'll give you a qualified 'yes' on that. It started out looking like a pretty easy, straight-forward task. It was anything but. I've been doing 3D modeling since the beginning (1994) And while I'm not ready to crank out a Pixar-quality video, I really felt I knew my way around. However; (without getting tediously technical) modeling for video games is a whole different breed of cat. Building the model itself is the same. After that it all goes off the rails. It's not that any one step is so difficult, it's that there are so many of them...mostly counter-intuitive to how things are done if one is simply making a video animation. I availed myself of many tutorials on-line. Sim Outhouse was a big help. The problem was always that a small step in mid-procedure would get left out and my model wouldn't work. I sent many non-starter models to RAF_Lou. When they didn't work, I'd go back to SimOH (or some other) and ask why things had gone awry. Sometimes I got an accurate answer, sometimes not. There was a lot of this back-and-forth, questions-and-answers, try-and-fail. Finally, sometime in August, it just wore me down. I told RAF_Lou that I had to back off for a bit. At the same time, I was gearing up to leave Massachusetts and move to Wisconsin. That is now done. My plan now is to post a Craig's List ad looking for someone who will sit down with me and walk me through the procedure of building a G-max model and importing it into the CFS3 engine. There about 14 video game companies around Madison, plus Univ. Wisconsin. I'm sure I can find some computer-literate person to mentor me. The models below are some test pieces. (1) the colored blocks are to be imported into the game to test the scale of adjacent objects. The red center block is 5 meters high, the yellow is 4, the purple is 3 the green is 2 and the blue is 1. (2) Seeing as so many of the WWI airfields were out in the countryside, I've started building some typical French farm buildings. The one below requires no textures. The colors are assigned to the geometry. So...the project is still alive, if struggling. I know that as soon as I can get one model built and installed, start to finish, the procedure will be simple ever after. It's just a matter of getting all those little details lined up together for the first time. .

America appreciates the thought, but it's too little, too late. By the way, thanks for the photos. I downloaded them all.