Hasse Wind

Thanks, Lou. That's some good advice. I'm currently flying a BE.2 in 1915 and have already completed quite a few missions, so this subject is very interesting for me now. It's much easier to find historical information about the fighter aces than any successful bomber pilots and observers. Definitely a bunch of unsung heroes. It's great that OFF gives us the opportunity to experience the air war also from their perspective. I can only hope bomber/recon careers will be even better in P4.

Lou, as you seem to know so much about the awards of WW1, can you tell anything about how non-fighter pilots got their medals? Their job was not to shoot down aircraft but to take recon photos, direct artillery fire, bomb targets etc. etc. so the number of downed enemies wouldn't be the best method for gauging success. And yet the work they did was more important to the war effort than getting kills in the air - the fighters were there mainly to prevent enemy bomber and recon pilots from doing their jobs and of course to protect their own 'heavies'. I'm just wondering how to simulate this in OFF. Should I use the number of flight hours in two-seaters to decide when to get awards, or maybe give them after many successful bombing runs or something. Your improved medals inspired me to seriously think about this.

Wow Lou, amazing work! Have a virtual beer or two. What a nightmare it must for the devs to get all this right in the new and improved P4 awards system...

Hah, Chimay! No such luck for the pilot I lost to the worst Worst Navigation Error ever, a really bad case of warping gone wrong that took my flight of French N.17's deep over the North Sea, where they ran out of fuel and ditched into the water. A French Great War version of Flight 19.

It would be interesting to hear what our resident computer gurus have to say on this subject. I'm often confused by the gazillion different models both manufacturers offer, and can't really say which one is the best.

I'm no expert on samurai history, but I imagine it's much the same with their history as with other medieval or ancient historical sources - much of them is crap, lies and exaggerations by the authors of the day. That's why it's usually so hard for modern researchers to determine the number of men that took part in a battle that was fought 1000 years ago, for example. The old historians were often more interested in telling a good story than preserving the facts about what actually happened in the period they were writing about. So if there was a battle that had 10 000 men fighting against each other, it was easy to add one zero and get a much more exciting story with 100 000 men at war. A great example is ancient Greece history and the Persian Wars - if you read the ancient Greek authors, you get the impression that a few brave Hellenic warriors fought against millions of Persians. Only in the 19th century did the new historians realize that such numbers were simply impossible for the ancient empires to arm and supply. One must always be critical about historical writing, especially if the text is centuries or even millennia old. And anything that is written during a war should be examined even more critically, as it's usually full of propaganda, subtle or not. A good example for this forum is the memoirs written during the Great War or shortly after it.

Now that's true art! Maybe the poilu is still so young that his beard growth is limited?

Joint problems are VERY common. If they weren't so common, I'd have much less work to do at the hospital. I expect my own right knee will have to be fixed in the future, as it suffers from an old injury and is not getting any better with age. Climbing down from the trees and starting to walk on two legs was a bad idea for the human species (it also makes hernias much more common than on other animals). Best wishes to your mother, Olham. We all know you'll take good care of her. And like Von Paulus said, you really need to buy a decent laptop. I have one that can be used to fly OFF, and it's not even particulary powerful or expensive. If you had one, you didn't have to stop your flying when you go away from home. It's a long war and we'll be here when you come back.

I read that as "all parties are executed" and was puzzled for a while. That's one (rather permanent) way of dealing with troublemakers.

When you do get the job, don't expect them to have any Snipes there. We don't want to see you become disappointed.

Fighters, bah! If you're looking for a real challenge, join a BE.2 squadron in 1917. Even the Fees have it easy compared to the Quirks. Who needs a gunner when you're flying a slow and clumsy two-seater with the climbing speed of a sloth?

You know those old engines were sometimes so unreliable, Olham. Maybe you have some engine trouble next time you are ordered on a lone patrol? You'd love to go up there and give everything for King and Country, but the damn engine fails you and you have to turn back halfway to the front. Just don't do it too often, otherwise the CO will become suspicious.

Good luck! Interviews can be so strange sometimes. I hope everything goes well for you.

And historically speaking, the RFC would have been in trouble without these French fighters. Before the Sopwith Pup, the British fighters were mostly crap. And the DH.2 was certainly no Spitfire...

You should take them seriously, always. Especially in 1916 they are absolutely deadly. When the N.17 comes into service in the summer of 1916, it eats German aircraft for breakfast. They really have nothing comparable until the Albatros D.II comes into service. There's the Halberstadt of course, but the Nupes are better. The N.17 is one of my favourite fighters.

This is just the kind of modding P3 needs. Looking forward to your medal set, Lou. I have a BE.2 pilot active, so maybe some day, after he's achieved something, he'll be awarded one or two of those beauties.

Yes, the clouds do help. I've experienced it myself many times. But there doesn't seem to be that much difference between cloud settings of 3, 4 and 5. As long as you don't go below 3 it should be good.

Good point about the various languages of the Axis countries. I remembered the book that mentions the poor coding practices of the Luftwaffe. It's John Keegan's Intelligence in War. This is a short excerpt of what Mr Keegan says in his book: "The pattern of breaks was not random. The Gestapo seems, not unnaturally, to have taken great care; the German army and navy, which had long-established signal branches, made use of well-trained and experienced operators; the weakness lay most obviously with the Luftwaffe, a new service founded only in 1935. Its operators were probably younger and less experienced. A Luftwaffe key was the first to be broken by Bletchley, which thereafter broke almost all Luftwaffe keys intercepted, sometimes on the first day they were identified." According to Keegan, not a single Gestapo key was broken during the war. The achievements of the Poles in learning about the existence of Enigma and starting the first code breaking attempts against it are also described in the book. In WW1, there was no independent German air force, only branches of the army and navy, so the new Luftwaffe had no independent tradition of handling their codes themselves. I guess the basic problem the Germans had with the Enigma was that they believed it to be impossible to crack. It's easy to make mistakes when you underestimate the capabilities of your enemies. Fortunately the Nazi military machine so full of themselves that they were underestimating their opponents all the time.

And many of the careful aces, like MvR, died too. The air war became so dangerous in 1917-1918 that many of the most skilled pilots didn't survive of the war. Maybe it was even more dangerous to the famous aces, as everybody expected great things from them all the time, so the stress of battle was worse for them than for ordinary pilots.

Wodin, is that your Sith pilot? Where's the lightsabre? Olham, I wouldn't say 12 confirmed kills is little. It's actually quite a lot, if the pilot spent most of his time watching the backs of his less-experienced comrades. An admirable thing to do, indeed. My BE.2 pilot crossed the 50 hour mark recently. Not much of an achievement in 1915, though.

I remember reading that it was the Luftwaffe who had the worst discipline in coding. In fact some sloppy work by some Luftwaffe Enigma operators was crucial to the British for breaking the first truly important German messages in 1940. The Navy and the Army did their coding better, usually. Some Enigma messages were never cracked. Gestapo and the SS security service, SD, were paranoid about code security and it seems their operators were never allowed to take the easy way out. But then they usually had less traffic to handle than the major military branches (and less operators), so it was easier to maintain tighter security. The role of the codebreakers to the Allied war effort was absolutely decisive. And yet most people know nothing about them. Alan Turing, one of the brightest minds of history and a great mathematician, had a major role in cracking the Enigma codes, but after the war he was treated like a criminal and he ended up killing himself, just because he was homosexual. It wasn't until 2009 that the British government apologized for his treatment. Turing's work saved countless of lives, and his theories were important for the development of computer technology later in the century. Thanks for the link, Widowmaker. It was a fascinating read.

Ah, those engines are so wonderfully simple compared to what we have now. I can do almost nothing to my few years old Opel myself, there are so many computers and electronics and stuff that it's more like something out of Star Trek than a normal car. And all the repairs are ridiculously expensive.

I understand they must do business and keep developing new models, but I'm so satisfied with my TrackIR 4 that I haven't even thought about getting a newer model. I'm no expert, but it seems to me that the differences between 4 and 5 aren't that big in any case. Maybe 6 will bring something revolutionary with it, maybe not.

These look as good as ever. I hope recon/bomber pilots are not forgotten when giving out awards. Shooting down aircraft was not the only way one could do great service in the war. In P3, two-seater pilots are treated like fighter pilots. If things are better in P4, it would make the sim even better and more immersive than anything else out there.

The whole of Eastern Europe was nothing but a huge military camp during the Cold War. If WW3 had happened, it is most likely we wouldn't be here having this conversation. The Warsaw Pact had such massive military power in Europe that large parts of Western Europe would have been overrun. Without stronger American presence, the European NATO countries were simply too weak. But it would have taken some time to concentrate all the US military power into Europe. Weapons of mass destruction would have been needed to slow down the Reds, and that would have lead to a nuclear holocaust sooner or later. It would be great if you could find out more about that Jasta 11 pilot.