Hasse Wind

Semicolon, the infamous claims killer!

I lost one pilot when my flight was warped deep behind enemy lines and then ran out of fuel. After that I've always kept the map on so I can keep an eye on the warp's process. Never had any problems after that. And fortunately the warp problems are very rare.

On some days you just can't win. The worst I've had in OFF was when I lost two very promising pilots on the same day, one after the other. I gave up flying for that day, as I had clearly angered some god of war or another. I'll always remember the death of my very first successful OFF pilot. He was flying the Pup in No 54, early 1917. I had gotten some kills confirmed already and everything seemed to be going just fine in that fateful patrol mission, when suddenly my Pup exloded. A direct hit by Archie! I was literally stunned for a while. What a sim!

It looks really bad down there, that's true. I hope everything goes well, or as well as possible under those awful conditions.

Welcome back. There's still an air war going on, so if you want to participate...

I never use auto trim, so I can't comment that, but warp can sometimes do strange things. That's why I always keep the flight map on when warping so that I can exit warp if something goes wrong (like getting off-course hundreds of kilometres and dying because the fuel runs out).

You could shoot down Einies with the T Model, if it was able to fly. For a two-seater challenge, join a BE.2 squadron in 1917 and go looking for a fight.

Possibly. And it's a very dangerous feeling to have, as I'm sure you've learned to know it the hard way in OFF!

Please try it - I find it really improves the immersion, though of course it can be argued that real life pilots have better visibility from the cockpit and using labels helps with the limitations of computer screens. But without labels things can be so much more exciting. Somebody may even surprise your flight occasionally. There's no better way to wake up during a boring mission when hostile tracers suddenly start flying around you.

Speaking of crazy maneuvers, they are often dangerous because it's so easy to lose your aircraft's energy while performing them. And some planes that seem to be very agile and are able to do quick maneuvers, like the Pfalz D.III, are deceptive for inexperienced pilots, because they have a habit of losing their energy very quickly. Quick stunts may save your pilot's life for a while, but when your plane has blown all its energy and you find yourself flying just over the treetops, surrounded by enemies, they won't help you anymore (unless the AI loses its ability to fight close to ground). It's very important to avoid such situations, and your tactic of switching targets in your Albatros when a Camel or some other nimble opponent is turning and rolling all over the sky is absolutely the correct one. But it's so easy to become fixated on a target and keep hunting it till the end, even if it's the wrong thing to do. I don't particularly enjoy flying the really nervous rotary fighters (Camels & Fokkers), but even they benefit greatly from maintaining altitude.

You all know the tactics depend on the aircraft type, and there are so many different choices for each situation that there's no point in trying to describe them all here. But I fly a lot of two-seaters, and I have learned to use some methods that help me to stay alive. If I'm flying a two-seater that's capable of flying really high (such as the DFW or the Hannover), the best defense is to climb as quickly as possible and maintain the altitude for as long as possible. Often combat can be avoided altogether with this method. WW1 aircraft are usually so underpowered that almost nobody can catch me if I'm staying high. If they climb quickly, I will be faster and outrun them. If they try to maintain higher speeds, they can't climb well. This limitation, ie. not being able to climb quickly and still maintain high speed, has saved my pilot's life more than once. If I'm attacked and can't avoid the situation, then I always try to maintain my flight's formation as tight as possible, and see that all the rear gunners have good fields of fire against the attackers. A tight defensive formation with 4-6 observer guns firing at the enemy is not easy to beat, especially for the AI pilots. But if it becomes impossible to maintain formation and enemy aircraft are coming from all sides, I break away and fight back. Many of the two-seaters can be surprisingly effective in dogfights. I've even managed to shoot down a Sopwith Tripe when flying a DFW. The rear gunner watches my back while I try to hit as many enemies as possible. When they are damaged, they are less dangerous, even if I don't manage to shoot them down. Then if I'm deep behind enemy lines, I try to gain some altitude, but if it won't work, it's best to gather speed by diving and try to reach friendly lines. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

"Je weniger die Leute wissen, wie Würste und Gesetze gemacht werden, desto besser schlafen sie!" - Otto von Bismarck

For a while I thought the pilot had been awarded a BMW. Is that expensive or cheap for such a set of medals? Just curious, I'm not planning to buy them - too expensive for me, and actually more than my Xmas bugdet for 2010.

Well, Herr Kohl seems to like any food. Not exactly a small man, in any sense of the word.

I always try to keep an open mind when dealing with unfamiliar food. Looks can be deceiving. I've never had an opportunity to eat haggis, so I really can't say anything about its taste. Maybe it's really good at deceiving.

The Brisfit kills you dead.

The worst thing is that what happened to Olham can happen to anybody, and probably at every other site too. All it takes is some nasty piece of code that infects your computer. The Internet is a great thing, but unfortunately there are many scumbags out there who use their programming skills for doing harm. How twisted can one be to get satisfaction from such things?

Olham already explained the Slavonic aspect of Russia's attitude, and the fact that Russia didn't want the Austrians to keep expanding their empire in the Balkans. But there was also the aspect of religion. Serbia was and still is mostly an Orthodox Christian country, and Russia was traditionally the protector of the Orthodox Christian church, having inherited this role from the fallen Byzantine Empire. So the Russians felt very strongly for the Serbs, who were not only Slavs like them but also had the same religion. But Russia didn't really have anything material to gain from supporting Serbia. It was mostly a question of international prestige, Pan-Slavism and religion.

You're not the only barbarian, Olham. I'm one of them too. Now where's Conan? Thanks a lot for the translation, Flyby. They didn't teach that kind of English to us at school! By the way, church is Kirche in German.

It certainly played a part in the calculations of the general staffs. But they were well aware of the fact that Russia had started major reforms after the war against Japan, and they also understood that the circumstances in the Far East were very different from the European theatre of war. Russia was in a very difficult situation in the war against Japan, trying to support large-scale operations with very limited railroads of their Asian territories. It really was a logistical nightmare made worse by some thoroughly incompetent commanders. (One of them, General Kuropatkin, was even allowed to continue his failures in WW1.) But it was the Austro-Hungarian army which more seriously underestimated the Russian military might during the first weeks of the war. They paid the price in extremely heavy casualties and some loss of territory, which would have been even worse without German successes in East Prussia. If the Austrians didn't have German support, they would have lost the war against Russia. Regarding mobilization, Olham already described the situation. I'll only add the fact that mobilizing the mass armies of the early 20th century took time (our modern armies are quite small by comparison), and everything depended on the railroads. General staffs had prepared extremely detailed plans and timetables for mobilization, and there was very little room for delays and changes of any kind. So if there was a decision to mobilize fully, the plans had to be followed to the letter in order to prevent the system from collapsing into a complete chaos. Time was of the essence, especially for Germany 'sandwiched' between France and Russia. The Austro-Hungarian army actually suffered from such a chaos when their commanders couldn't decide where they should concentrate some of their troops. They didn't fully follow the plans they had made in pre-war days, and ended up moving whole divisions around the country uselessly before finally getting them to the front. A decision to mobilize couldn't be made lightly, but when it was made, it had to be executed quickly in order to guarantee success. For Germany it was absolutely necessary to quickly mobilize and start attacking, otherwise they would lose all their advantages. And if one of the powers mobilized, the others couldn't stand around waiting for diplomacy to work, because if it didn't, they would have lost too much precious time for successful operations. France and Germany had the best systems of mobilization and were able to concentrate their armies to their assigned sectors quickly and efficiently.

Is that supposed to be English? What have they done to it?

One thing that made a great European war practically inevitable was the fact that, as has been mentioned in this thread, Germany was surrounded by enemies. France desperately wanted revenge for her humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, Britain saw Germany as her worst competitor in naval affairs and was very concerned about the fact that German industrial production was growing faster than their own, and that Germany was able to devote huge resources into building a new powerful high seas fleet (which was very precious to Kaiser Wilhelm) in addition to maintaining a huge army on the continent. But what caused Germany the most concern was Imperial Russia. That country had for a long time been very poorly developed and lacking in modern industrial might, so even though their army had a huge amount of men, they were not seen to pose too much of a threat to the great industrial might of Germany. But all this was rapidly changing in the 1910's. Russia was the most quickly developing country in Europe at that time: every year they built more and more factories, new railroads and other improved infrastructure, and their armed forces benefited greatly from this development. The German General Staff estimated in the early 1910's that within a few years, and certainly by the 1920's, Russia would be able to field an army as powerful as Germany. So if there was going to be a European war, Germany had a better chance of winning it in 1914 than in 1920 or later. The German and Austrian general staffs actually underestimated the Russian threat. In August 1914, they were counting on a very slow Russian mobilization, when in fact the Russian army was able to concentrate its divisions to the border regions much more quickly than anybody believed - they probably surprised even themselves. If the majority of the highest-ranking generals commanding their principal armies in the west hadn't been rather incompetent, Russia would have been able to threaten Berlin in a serious way. They failed against the leadership of Hindenburg and Ludendorff (particularly the latter, who was indeed the top brain of the German army), but were repeatedly able to devastate the Austrian troops, who had even worse generals than the Russians, and whose men weren't really interested in defending the old Dual Monarchy anymore, especially when they realized just how bad their commanders were. So it can be argued that the situation in Europe in the early 1910's was so impossible that no matter the amount of diplomatic maneuvers (and these failed miserably in July 1914), there would have been a war sooner or later. Probably sooner. This is what naturally happens when countries see their neighbours more as enemies than friends. Many European nations were guilty of this in the early 20th century.

Good post, Olham. I've for a long time believed that a great war among the European powers was inevitable, if not in 1914 then certainly soon after that. The whole cultural and political atmosphere of the era somehow seems so twisted and so filled with militarism and national fanaticism that the powder keg would have caught fire sooner or later. Even the most democratic powers of the West were full of themselves and rattling their sabres everywhere. Add to that the apparently quite common idea among ordinary people that maybe war is not such a bad thing after all, and it certainly won't last long or cause that much suffering, just a few heroic deaths like one can see in old paintings or read about in adventure novels, and it's not really surprising that the world was plunged into a terrible industrial war. There were some farsighted and intelligent people, drawing from the experience of the wars of the late 19th century, who realized already in 1914 that the great war would be neither short nor easy, but they were definitely in the minority.

It's quite possible that the BE.2's and RE.8's were less expensive to manufacture than many of the better British two-seaters, like the excellent Airco DH.4. Plywood and canvas isn't that expensive, but engines are, and the better models usually had better and thus more expensive engines. As far as I know, the RAF also manufactured engines for their two-seaters. It's ridiculous that the BE.2 had a 90 hp engine while German two-seaters regularly had twice as much power, or even more in many cases. I wonder if the SE.5a would have been such a success with a 90 hp RAF engine?

I've often wondered about the decision-making processes of the British military aviation bosses of WW1 regarding their bombing and observation/recon aircraft. The BE.2's were good at first, but they were kept in front service for far too long. By 1917, they were flying coffins. And the aircraft intended as the Quirk's replacement, the RE.8, was simply horrible. It's not like there weren't better B/R aircraft available for the British, but the Royal Aircraft Factory seems to have dominated the business with their less than stellar designs. Yes, the SE.5 was brilliant - one of the best fighters of the war - but I imagine that wasn't much of a comfort to the two-seater men in their awfully obsolete or otherwise poor RAF planes. When one compares the RAF-made two-seaters to similar German designs, the difference in quality is stunning.