Hasse Wind

Dej, that's a really good comic! There are many great pics there, but my favourite must be the dawn/dusk pic on page 10. Beautiful. Die Apokalyptischen Reiter, heh. :yes:

For me the immersion is the most important thing. It is achieved almost perfectly in OFF. The flight models, cockpits, paints, squadron insignias, ranks, names, aces and all the historical stuff that puts the game in the right context. And one mustn't forget the sounds - the engine sounds in particular are so amazing in OFF that I never tire to listen to them. (I'm probably going to get some permanent hearing damage soon with my headphones and those realistic engine sound volumes. ) When I play sims, I want to be made to believe that I'm really there in the sim's world. This can't be done if the details I mentioned above aren't implemented well in the sim. I love the feeling I get in OFF that I'm just a very, very small part in the large machine of war that dominated Europe in those fateful years of 1914-1918. This wouldn't be possible without the campaign mode we have in OFF. OFF has all the details that made RB3D great, and then some. I expect things will be even better in the future when we get new planes and that new medal system, and maybe even something completely new which we haven't even dreamed about yet.

Very good to know those improvements are being worked on. Your dedication continues to amaze me! Recently I've been flying (and dying) a lot for Germany, and the frequence I've been given missions deep behind the enemy lines (and ground attack missions even though I fly in Jastas) is bad for the immersion. I've noticed defensive Jastas are better in this because they tend to stay more behind friendly lines. If OFF can some day simulate this difference in the air war strategy between Germany and the Entente, it will make the sim even better than it already is. Good thing there's the option to choose alternative targets. And of course getting more two seaters is a much more important addition to the game, but if something can be done to this... :yes:

The difference in firepower is very noticeable when I go from flying as the Hun to flying as the Entente with their single synchronized MGs. The Spad VII is a great example - if it only had 2 guns, it would be one of my favourite fighters for the early 1917 period, but with only one gun it's no match for the Alb D.III (or even D.II) of the same era. The Nupes and Pups are so agile that the reduced firepower is less of a problem. Nimbleness (is that a word?) compensates it nicely.

I've sometimes seen three-winged versions of that fighter. Was it a special model perhaps?

Thanks for posting these pics, they are excellent! That seat sure looks comfortable...

I think Arminius would like it if we called him with his proper German name, Hermann. Olham, I don't think the Romans lost a fifth of their total strength at the battle of Teutoburger Wald, even though it was a terrible defeat and had historic consequences. As far as I know, the Imperial army under Augustus (who was the emperor during the battle) had at least 28 legions spread around the Empire. Recently I heard some news about the remains of some newly discovered battlefield in Germany that was dated to a much later period than it was generally thought the Romans had troops so deep in Germania, so it may be our history books are wrong and the Varusschlacht wasn't the end of Roman expansion in Germania. I can't remember from where I read about it, in some newspaper probably. When you think about, we have relatively few sources about ancient history, so I wouldn't be surprised if things were completely different in reality back then. We just don't know about it...

And often objects are taken from the dead because the living have a very practical use for them, like taking good boots from a deceased enemy to replace your own bad footwear. I see nothing wrong in such a practice. Besides, if the dead person comes back as a zombie, he needs no boots anyway.

Beautiful, Olham! I see you are beginning to understand why the white Pfalz are the most beautiful German scouts of WW1. The same colour suits the Albs well. :yes:

I don't usually do scramble missions if I have a good pilot going - for example my longest-living pilot ever (in Jasta 10) has never done any scrambles, because that would be suicide in the Pfalz which needs speed and altitude to have any chances against the late war Entente fighters. But there are some exceptions to my rule, mostly when I'm in a squadron equipped with Nieuport 17s. That scout gains altitude so quickly and is so deadly in turning battles that I don't have too much fear if the field is under attack by Eindeckers or Halbs. But I freely admit I'm always being stupid when I do this even with the Nupe, because it doesn't take many hits to bring that butterfly down (but hey, it can be so much fun!). I've lost one promising Nupe pilot in a scramble mission when I became stupidly reckless and attacked a big flight of Eindeckers. One of them hit my plane, I lost control and because I was so low I didn't have any time to try to make a safe landing or recover from the spin. I'd like to see someone try a scramble mission in the Quirk or the Fee, preferably against Alb D.IIIs.

Very interesting read, especially those original German reports. Does the book have any of Udet's own reports? Would be even more interesting to see how the German pilots themselves reported their kills.

Thanks for the story, Creaghorn. I've been planning for years to visit at least some of the battlefields of the Western front, but somehow I never end up actually putting those plans into action. Too little time and money, I guess. The Western front battlefields are well preserved in at least some areas and many monuments have been built there. The same can't be said about the Eastern front battlefields of WW1. I've found Google Earth to be a great tool to use for looking at old battlefields. The Verdun area for example has plenty of interesting pictures, and you can clearly see all the forts from satellite photos. It's great for searching airfields too.

Out of curiosity, are there still any RAF squadrons remaining these days that were active already during the Great War? The British army at least has some of the oldest units in the whole world serving in its ranks, so I wouldn't be surprised if the RAF has similar traditions. Though nothing dating back to the 18th century, I'm sure! Have fun with your Quirk, Jim. I have an active RNAS bomber pilot flying the Strutter in 1916, but surviving long in the BE2c must be really hard compared to that.

We as OFF players can learn one important thing from Voss' final fight: lone wolf missions are a bad idea. Never go into combat without comrades to watch your back.

I don't think MvR would have got himself into such a situation in the first place, he was too much of a careful hunter who tried to choose his battles so that he always had a good chance to down somebody and then get away safely. But he also ran out of luck in the end. There's no denying that Voss was a remarkable pilot. If he had lived longer, he might well have shot down more planes than MvR. But how many of those hothead aces like Voss lived through the war? Not many... The Dr.I really sucks as an escape plane in Voss's situation, the Se.5as are much too fast.

I always aim for the pilot and observer when making diving attacks against Brisfits with my Pfalz. It helps a lot that the Pfalz must be one of the most stable gun platforms in OFF. Hard to imagine doing any sharpshooting in a Dr.I!

I've been using this DM for some time now and I honestly think it's a great improvement. The results I've been getting seem to me entirely realistic and believable. Thanks for making this mod of a mod!

The Brisfit is a tough opponent. I've shot down only 3 of them, all with my Pfalz D.IIIa pilot. The usual attack approach (below the observer's field of fire) against two seaters is much harder to do when facing Brisfits, because they are so fast that they can easily outrun the pursuer. I managed to shoot down those Brisfits by making quick diving attacks when they were flying below me. The rear gunners didn't have much time to shoot at my plane, but even then I was always damaged by their fire. Usually I tend to stay away from the Brisfits, because even if you do shoot one of them down, there's a big risk of getting your engine damaged in the middle of a fight. Before the patch changed the observer gun accuracy, Brisfits were absolutely deadly opponents. Now they are just extremely dangerous.

Those guys are tough, they won't let small things such as their own exploding and burning plane get in the way of their mission. Talk about motivation! I've never seen anything like that in my game, but once I lost a pilot because the warping went bonkers and teleported my Nieuport a couple of hundred kilometers from France to the North Sea. When coming out of the warp, it was so fun to notice there was almost no fuel left in my Nupe and the closest shore was behind German lines. All that was missing was a Bermuda triangle to swallow my flight of 4 planes! My pilot ended up as a POW. But I've never seen anything similar after that, and it was a few patches ago.

Phase 4 will have the Italian front included, right Pol? And then we get to fly that Austrian Albatros... Olham, I suspect the reason why the Germans didn't learn lessons from the Austrian Oeffag may well have something to do with arrogance. It wasn't at all uncommon among German military and political circles to despise the Austrians and everything they represented, so the guys at Albatros may have thought there's nothing we can't do better than our little cousins the Austrians.

Try www.verkkokauppa.com, they should sell them in Finland.

When you get the Trackir, you'll be left wondering how on earth did you manage to fly without it! It makes a world of difference in OFF and really improves your chances of survival and getting kills, plus it tremendously improves the immersion. :yes:

The Oeffag (Österreichische Flugzeugfabrik AG) Albatrosses were also used on the Italian front. For example the most successful Austrian ace, Godwin Brumowski (35 confirmed kills plus many others which were not confirmed, because the planes went down behind enemy lines) used the Oeffag Albatros. It was actually a better fighter than the German version, faster and more robust with stronger lower wings. Too bad for the pilots of the Luftstreitkräfte that the Germans didn't bother to learn lessons from the Austrian engineers. Maybe the D.V could have been a much better scout if the Oeffag improvements had been used in it. (Though it's a good enough scout for me in OFF, my most successful career pilot so far is using the D.V!)

I vote for the beer taps. Three different beers so the pilot can choose the right one for the occasion. (If you turn your head and look behind in the cockpit of the Eindecker in OFF you can see a tank there. Maybe its also full of beer.) It's interesting how difficult it can be today to try to guess what those things were for, when it must have been blatantly obvious to the pilots of the era. But you just don't see such apparatus in modern planes anymore, everything has changed so much since WW1.

I've often wondered the same thing about many other Entente fighters. But the reason for this must be that the Entente powers seem to have favored turn fighters over energy fighters most of the time, and planes such as the Nieuport and the Pup would have lost some of their speed and agility if they had had more than one gun. The French at least experimented with Nupe 17s with two guns, but they found out the plane became slower and clumsier and thus lost its best characteristics because of the extra weight of the second gun and its ammunition. I wonder how nimble the Dr.I would have been with only one gun...