Hasse Wind

That's a real beauty you got there, Bullethead. Amazing. Looking at the works of art you guys regularly post here makes me feel like an ape-man, unable to draw even stick figures properly. Edit: OBD, you really need to add the Italian Front to OFF some day. The armies of Italy and Austria-Hungary that faced each other there for years certainly weren't the best on earth (and had some pretty terrible generals, even by WW1 standards), but the air war was definitely interesting with many plane types in service that never were on the Western Front. The map is already in CFS3, so all that's missing is the front and the squadrons.

That setup looks like something straight out of a Terminator movie. Nice.

Happy Fourth of July from me too. (Isn't it nice when those holidays happen to be on Sundays?)

Good suggestions, Bullethead. I'm sure the devs are listening and everything will be better in P4.

Like has already been mentioned, all two-seaters (except the Brisfit and the Roland C.II that fight back, but the latter only if flown by a capable, aggressive Staffel) in OFF behave rather calmly when attacked. It is something that I'd like to see improved in P4. You can try to reduce their huge losses by trying to fly your fighter more realistically, ie. stop attacking them if your plane gets hit a lot by the rear gunners. I did survive well over 50 hours in RFC 21 and all through the Bloody April flying the RE8, but it meant a lot of running away and getting shot to pieces by elite Jastas. Then I transferred my pilot to a Brisfit squadron and paid them back dearly. If the devs do change the Harry Tate's flight model to a more nightmarish version in P4 (I'm talking about nasty spins), then it will probably be even more fun. Edit: Wrong squadron.

Ah, so that's where the horrible vuvuzelas are come from. Thanks for enlightening us, Widowmaker. Sorry Morris, I tried very hard to learn to like the sound of the vuvuzela, but I just can't do it. In my ears, it still sounds almost as awful as it did in the first match. Must be a cultural thing that requires years of training to accept. But what a great Cup this has been! Spain vs Paraguay was a real thriller, Maradona's boys got their asses handed to them by "Jerries", and Ghana had a tragic ending against Uruguay. Great drama. So I bet the finale will be Germany vs Holland. Germany will most likely win, but of course nothing is certain in football.

I admire the work you guys are doing for improving immersion, but I personally don't require anything like those certificates to enhance my OFF experience. I'd only feel bad for going through all the trouble for a pilot who most likely won't survive very long in any case. I have only a couple pilots who've lived long (over 100 hours, my definition of a long life in OFF), and the backstories I've invented for them for roleplaying reasons don't require any Photoshopping skills, which I don't have at all, unlike you brilliant artists. But it's a really generous offer, so I hope some OFFers here put you to work "forging" certificates, Lou.

The wonders of technology!

If you guys had been prisoners of war, there's no doubt about who would have been chosen to forge all the official documents in order to fool the guards. "The Great Escape." Edit: Though I'm fairly sure Paintshop wasn't yet invented back then.

I was surprised to see Brazil lose to Holland. But the Dutch really earned their victory, so I can't complain. Now it's going to get really interesting. I hope Germany manages to beat Argentina, and maybe play against Holland in the final match.

The same model is used in OFF to represent both model. The D.I didn't differ from the D.II except for poorer visibility from the cockpit, that was the main improvement they made in D.II. Otherwise the planes had exactly the same performance, so the only thing your missing is bad upward visibility.

What's perhaps even more tragic about the Battle of the Somme is the fact that many people (not here obviously), if they have heard of the battle in the first place, seem to believe that July 1st, 1916 was the battle, and when that day's massacre was over, nothing worth mentioning happened later. And yet the fighting went on until November, 1916. Combined Entente and German casualties were over one million men. Edit: British tactics were awful at first, but their inexperienced "citizen army" did learn quickly and battle was good preparation for the future, when the day came to start pushing the German armies back. Germans lost a lot of their best, experienced troops while defending (they could ill afford such losses with their smaller reserves and resources), and the offensive at Somme helped the French armies fighting at Verdun by forcing Germans to concentrate their men elsewhere. But the price was terrible for everybody involved.

Hah, the perfect Prussian!

I hope you'll find it - I'm sure it looks great, just like something out of a bad Allied propaganda movie!

Not much to add to this that our fine gentlemen here haven't already said, but as a newbie, you can't go wrong with the Albatros D.II and the SE5a. Very easy planes to fly and extremely capable against every opponent of their time. The Fokker D.VII and the SPAD S.XIII are two of my personal favourites: the Fokker flys and fights like a dream, and the S.XIII is so tough and fast that you can completely dominate practically every situation - if you don't want to stay around and fight, no German plane can catch the SPAD. But these planes enter service at a time when the air war has become very dangerous, especially for Germany, so I wouldn't recommend them to beginners. But with the Albatros D.II you are quite superior against Entente fighters of late 1916, and with the SE5 in mid 1917 you are much faster and tougher than the German Albatrosses. For early war, the Bristol Scout is an easy fighter to fly and would completely outclass the Eindecker, except that it has a single Lewis gun pointing in such a weird direction that hitting anything at all is a small miracle. If you do manage to shoot down an enemy fighter with it, I recommend you start betting some big money for being such a lucky bastard. So in my opinion, the Nieuport 11 is the best early war (first half of 1916) Entente fighter and easily kills any Eindecker it encounters. But a beginner needs to be very careful with the early Nieuports, as their wings are quite fragile.

Nice work, Olham. You don't have a picture of yourself wearing a monocle and looking like some arrogant Junker from Ostpreussen? Now that would be perfect! That signature looks like Sütterlin-Schrift to me (I'm no expert though). But wasn't it introduced only during the war, so that a pilot who was born in 1895 would have learnt at school something different, most likely deutsche Kurrentschrift, which is very similar to Sütterlin, but is older? Just an idea to make it even more authentic-looking. Like I mentioned earlier, it's really amazing what you guys are able to do!

Great story, Widowmaker - thanks for sharing it. I don't cry easily, having gone through so much crap in my life, but I can understand the reactions of some of our regulars. It's tragic that you lost your mother when you were so young. One of my aunts died of lung cancer a few years ago, even though she had never smoked in her life, and it wasn't an easy way to go. Life is suffering, like Buddhism teaches us. But fortunately there are also some good things happening occasionally.

Well, at least playing OFF is a lot cheaper to the taxpayers than going to Moon to play with stones. Reading about the early days of aviation, it's amazing how easy it was to get one of those certificates compared to what is required of modern pilots. But air traffic wasn't much of a problem back then, you could fly peacefully pretty much everywhere without having to fear about crashing into some other aircraft, though the risk of crashing somewhere else was considerably higher than with modern aircraft.

Amazing what you guys are able to find from the net and then use it to your advantage in creating OFF pilots. (Somebody might think we're all crazy here for doing all this stuff - it's only a game, after all.)

The Snipe was great, but the plane that almost saw service in WW1 and would have caused some serious headache for the German air force was the Nieuport-Delage NiD 29. It was one of the best fighters of the 1920s, and would have completely outclassed the Fokker D.VII with its 300 hp engine. NiD 29 was the first plane to fly 320 km/h in level flight, but this happened only after the war was over. But it is like Olham said - great wars are decided by men and material, and Germany didn't have enough of them. The same thing happened in WW2. No matter how much the Nazis tried to increase their production through slave labour and everything, it still was nowhere near enough to outproduce the Allies, or even come close to them. And Germany of WW1 was in a less advantageous situation than Hitler was after he conquered much of Europe with all its resources.

Too bad FIFA continues to live in the late 19th century. Video is not exactly a new invention. But hey, if the system worked in the 1910's, why change anything? Those stupid situations are one of the reasons why I think ice hockey easily beats football as a sport (that, and the fact that even the most boring hockey match is usually ten times as exciting as the best football has to offer.) Anyway, England really sucked in this Cup. Germany earned their victory. I hope to see them in the finals. Argentina vs. Germany would be a nice way to end the Cup.

Bullethead, thanks for the link. Some really interesting stuff about copper. Olham, I don't know how to make arrowheads, but I could treat my wounds pretty well, if they weren't anything too serious and I had some needle and thread. But those old medical methods weren't really good at preserving lives compared to modern treatments. It's not that hard to suture a wound, especially if the wound is a neat cut and not very deep, but infections are what kill people. Injured people used to die like flies before medical professionals finally realized the importance of hygiene, and the next dramatic improvement was the introduction of antibiotics. Most people in developed countries don't realize just how fortunate they are to have modern medical treatment available. It wasn't that long ago when diseases and surgical operations we consider simple and mostly harmless were deadly serious. WW1 was really the first major war in history where medical professionals had a good chance of helping even seriously injured people, but even they were often helpless with infections. Getting wounded in a war before the 20th century was not a very good idea.

I wonder how the ozone layer was doing back in the Stone Age. And hey, those "primitives" were pretty good at fishing too, so maybe we aren't that deeply off-topic. Regarding trade in the Stone Age, I've read about some extensive trade routes that existed already back then, thousands of years ago. Stone was definitely one of the things that these traders, uh, traded. Some areas lacked the good stuff while others had it plenty... it's not hard to see where capitalism, that pesky thing, was born. At least they didn't have the stock market in the Neolithic period, nor lawyers and politicians.

A Paleolithic man shouldn't use copper for anything, Bullethead. Those are very nice pics. Now I'm definitely no archaelogist and know very little about Stone Age knives and spearheads and whatnots, but those definitely look pretty nice to me. And it wouldn't be fair to compare these modern items to the ones people made thousands of years ago. They lived in the wilderness and had all the time in the world to hone their skills as weaponmakers. They had to do so, if they wanted to survive as hunter-gatherers. So I don't think there's any need for anybody to feel bad about the items they make as a hobby in modern times. Boy, did we again go off-topic - from fishing to ozone layer to Stone Age weaponmaking.

The Aldis sight apparently can't be modeled correctly in OFF (thanks to CFS3), so it's not very useful currently. But maybe things will be different in P4? Would be nice to have realistic sights in every plane, if at all possible.