Hasse Wind

Olham: I wasn't comparing WW1 fighters to their WW2 counterparts as such, I only meant that aircraft with a heavier armament are able to down their opponents much more quickly than old crates with a max armament of a couple of MGs and are thus much better as energy fighters. In my opinion, turn fighters excel in a WW1 environment, but that's just my opinion and I'm sure all the Spad aces here disagree with me. themightysrc: Hopefully my Jasta 10 will get their new Fokkers sometime before the summer of 1918. Don't really know about new aircraft for *OFF*, but I hope they're coming too.

32 kills is a lot, I hope one day one of my pilots lives long enough to achieve such numbers. And 17 kills while flying the Eindecker... wow! I've tried that old monoplane a couple of times, but I didn't like it one bit. But I just love those nimble & quick Entente fighters, like the Pup and the Nieuport series. With them I've gotten the most kills. I've learned to dislike the Pfalz D.III in my Jasta 10 campaign, fortunately we should be getting some new planes soon. I've always preferred turn fighters over energy fighters, especially in WW1 sims, because zoom & boom is not that easy a tactic when the aircraft are weakly armed - you just can't get kills in a Spad or Albatros as easily as when flying something that is armed to the teeth with MGs and 20 or 30 mm guns, like FW 190 or Me 262 of WW2 fame!

1. Sopwith Pup and Nieuport 17 (Can't say with which I've flown more, but I love them both!) 2. RFC 54 (Esc 26 and Jasta 10 soon close behind) 3. 12 4. 25 h 5. DiD 6. 120/130% (changed to reduce the lethality of AAA)

Yep, the fighting is definitely very hard now (as if it wasn't earlier!). Best to apply for a desk job behind the lines if you want to make sure your favourite pilot(s) live through the war. Maybe work as the guy who gets to confirm all those claims...

I've learned the hard way that two-seaters can be VERY dangerous opponents. Well, except the Quirks... Often it doesn't take many hits from the observer's MG to damage the attacking aircraft so badly that it has to stop it's attack - I've noticed the engine in Albatross is particularly vulnerable to damage, or maybe I've just been very unlucky.

Thanks for posting those keywords Siggi! I've had several kills confirmed for multiple pilots, but I've never been exactly certain what is it that makes this claim reporting "tick"... As for time, I've usually used something like 8:45 AM or 12:55 PM and have definitely gotten confirmed kills that way, but I'm not at all sure how English-speaking people most commonly write the time. Some extra documentation wouldn't hurt OFF at all, and would certainly make it easier for new people to adapt to this excellent simulation (I speak from personal experience, as I've never played any of the earlier phases). Still, I very much like writing my claims reports. It's one of the things that separates OFF from other simulations in a very positive sense of the word.

Nice to see someone else is bothered by this! I wonder if it would be possible to somehow mod OFF so that the Jagdstaffeln would only get missions they used to fly historically. Fortunately there is the option to select an alternate target, which I always do when I'm asked to fly long distances behind enemy lines, but even that doesn't always help. OFF would be even more historically accurate if this modification were made to it. A great game made even better...

Excellent support! Thanks!

Don't forget the Halberstadt D. series, the pride of the German aircraft industry...

And I thought I was the only who uses the Pfalz in 1918! There's one thing the plane is very good at: diving. My tactics have been very careful and my pilot is still alive after several missions, he even has a couple of kills waiting for confirmation. I NEVER enter into any kind of turning contest with nimble Entente fighters when flying the Pfalz. I once tried to catch a Camel and it almost caused the death of Leutnant Bergmann, my pilot. Pfalz won't lose its wings in dive like the Albatros too easily does. Use that to your advantage, and when you don't have the advantage, resist the temptation and don't fight, fly back home and live to fight another day for the Kaiser! (And hope you'll get the D.VII ASAP...)

Brave men... I've always thought they could make a great action movie about Frank Luke. But it wouldn't be a long movie...

Hey, thanks for posting this. Seems to contain plenty of interesting info... have to bookmark it!

You have quite the treasure in those letters, take good care of them! (Keep them away from too warm or cold and humid conditions.) My grandfathers and their fathers served in the army during the world wars, but they didn't leave behind very many written documents, at least I haven't found much. There's no point in paying anybody for translations though - you can do it yourself! Wikipedia is a good place to start: (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Schrift) and there are also guides you can buy if you're really interested in the old handwriting. You can also contact genealogical research groups, they specialize in this kind of thing and can help. I bet it's going to br some very exciting reading if you have plenty of old letters and you slowly begin to understand them! The writing you can see in the cards of this thread isn't actually Sütterlin as such - it started to be taught in German schools only in the 1910s and pilots like Immelmann and Boelcke had received their basic education much earlier, but since Sütterlin is based on the earlier forms of writing, it of course has a lot in common with them. Understanding can be easy if the writer had a good hand, but some people write so badly it's really difficult to read it, even if you know the letters. Anyway, it's no rocket science!

Amazing collection! I'm pretty sure some people would pay a lot of money to get all of those... If you ever get tired of looking at them, I'm quite willing to accept donations. When I was a student I took a couple of courses on old German handwriting styles and techniques - the examples we see in these cards and letters are actually quite readable compared to some of the really old stuff we had to decipher. I was never very good at it, but with enough time and tea/coffee I can still manage some translations...

Sorry if this has been asked before, I did try to search but didn't find anything. And now the question: does it matter if I use the metric system when writing my claim reports? So far I've only flown as either Americans or British, but now I have two careers going, one for the French and the other for the Germans, and I like to use the metric system like the real pilots of those countries would have done. (I mean, the French invented the whole system, no way in hell are they going to use any system of British origin! ) So should I use metres or feet or does it matter at all? ("Encountered enemy aircraft at an altitude of 10 000 feet" or "3000 m"?) PS. I really like this claim business. It's exciting to write those short stories, even if no one else besides me ever reads them!

Yes, like Olham wrote, claims don't have to be very long-winded in order to get confirmed kills. I like to write longer stories, so what I do is what I imagine real pilots did in the same situation, ie. describe the action as accurately as possible and then hope for the best. Both approaches seem to work well, so there's no need to write terribly long reports if you don't want to do so. Olham: I think it'd be a great method of failing all of your claims if you used German in them! Aber OFF spricht kein deutsch... Sehr Schade!

I'm just thinking there must some "magic words" the game searches from the claim forms and that the more it finds them, the better chances there are for a positive outcome. It probably recognizes feet and other similar words, but I don't know about the metric system. The whole process is somewhat mysterious, but seems to work well - at least I was able to get several accepted kills as my British and American pilots. I'll have to test this some more and write some reports using feet and some using metres. Like Waldemar pointed out, pilots do have a tendency to die before the claims are verified! In any case, a great game and a great kill reporting system.

Great vid, thanks for posting it! Some people are really dedicated to build something like that. I wonder if there are any Great War era films about test flights and such like there are from WW2 period gathering dust in some obscure archive... Would be interesting to watch them! Maybe the big aviation companies like Fokker and others filmed such events, but have they been preserved to this day is another question.

Wow, that's quite an achievement! 3 Camels in one mission. I'm not very fond of scramble missions, especially when the attackers are using such deadly planes as Sopwith Camels. Trying to fight them effectively is quite difficult at low altitudes, Fokker Dr.I is probably the best plane to use against a Camel in that kind of situation. Haven't really concentrated in Albs yet except testing them in QC, but I know from experience that Pfalz D.IIIa's vs. Sopwith Camels in a scramble mission = plenty of shot down Germans...

For what it's worth, I've seen such strange low-level AI behaviour once when I got overwhelmed by a flight of Albatros D.II's in my campaign as a Sopwith Pup pilot. I was trying to flee from the battle, dove quickly down and the Albs followed me. Then I noticed they were performing strange up-and-down manoeuvres instead of shooting me down like they should have done. I think I could have shot them down easily (or at least damaged them), because the AI didn't seem to know at all what it was doing, but I decided to play it safe and ran away. This all happened at tree top level.

Congratulations for shooting down a SPAD XIII. They are nasty buggers. I've been flying with my Pfalz D.III a couple of missions. No kills yet, but Pfalz is a much better plane for diving after SPADs and other Entente heavy-weighters than any Albatros I've seen. No wings breaking off in the middle of the fight... keeps Der Kaiser happy! (Just don't try to outturn any Camels with the Pfalz, got myself nearly killed trying that!)

Hello everybody! A couple of months ago I was browsing the web casually when I came across something called Over Flanders Fields. How you managed to hide this mod from me all these years is a mystery - I guess I wasn't searching hard enough for new WW1 simulators. It didn't take long for me make the jump and purchase OFF... it has turned out to be one the best decisions I've ever made when getting new computer games! I thought Red Baron 3d was good, but OFF is something absolutely wonderful compared to any other flight sim out there. Price is a little steep for us living in the EU, but it's really nothing compared to the many hours of enjoyment I've already had with this masterpiece. If somebody is wondering whether it's really worth it, I say YES, IT IS! :) I decided to register here after my longest lasting pilot thus far was killed a couple of hours ago. A lieutenant flying in RFC 54 Squadron (Pups) early 1917. He had over 20 flying hours and 7 confirmed kills. No other pilot of mine has lasted this long so far, but I was being extra careful with him and never fought unless the odds were favourable. Well, it so happened that my flight of 4 Pups was on a routine patrol over the front a couple of miles east of Arras on April 4, 1917. Flying at over 6000 feet, I noticed the Hun AA guns were paying us some attention. No big deal, I thought - they never hit anything with those peashooters, not at this height anyway. And then KA-BOOM! A shell directly hit my Pup and blew it into thousand burning pieces! F***! I mean, there's really not much you can do in that situation. I'm still quite angry at the gods of war. But it was very fun while it lasted. I'm just starting a new career as a German Leutnant in Jasta 10, early 1918 with Pfalz D.III's. Let's see how long it takes for him to die... :) Thank you for a great game! If you're going to improve OFF some more in the future, it'd be great to have some more planes for some countries. For example the French don't have too many planes, especially in the early war. And I'd love to see some newer Nieuports for late war American aero squadrons.