Hasse Wind

This is great work, Lothar. The vanilla maps are absolutely awful.

CLOD is a waste of money. Everything that could be made to go wrong was made to go wrong in the development process. IL2 1946 with mods is still easily the best WW2 sim available, though obviously its age is showing in some ways.

I'll wait until Windows 9.

The whole Western world is in decline. Has been for some time now. I don't see things changing for the better anytime soon. Of course, if WOFF were to come out tomorrow, things would instantly look much brighter.

Politicians trying to benefit from old wars and nationalism? Nothing new there. "Lions led by Donkeys" has become a popular catchphrase, but actually it's not entirely fair to the "Donkeys". In every war, there have been good and bad commanders. WW1 was no exception to this rule. There definitely were some real donkeys in charge of operations, but some brilliant minds too. The Entente powers couldn't win the war by staying idle in the west while the Central Powers were beating Russia in the east. They needed to attack to weaken the Germans, and in WW1 conditions of the Western front, these offensives inevitably became brutal bloodbaths. New and better technology and tactics were required to break out of the trenches in the west, and developing them took time. It also cost a huge amount of human lives.

On 11 October 1914, the German submarine U-26 torpedoed the Russian armoured cruiser Pallada near the town of Hanko on the southern coast of Finland. The ship blew up and quickly sank, taking the whole crew (about 600 men) with her to the bottom. It was the first Russian warship to be sunk in the Great War. Now the wreck has been discovered by Finnish divers. Pallada lies in three pieces, all upside-down, at a depth of 50-60 metres. You can see some great pictures of the sunken ship in this article. It's in Finnish, but you can click the photo and browse all the pics without knowing the language. Pallada in 1911:

I know the feeling...

Olham, earlier I recommended to you Professor Johannes Werner's book Boelcke der Mensch, der Flieger, der Führer der deutschen Jagdfliegerei. You should be able to find it from Abebooks or somewhere similar.

And don't forget that these Knights of the Sky tried hard to shoot each other in the back, preferably without alerting the victim to the attacker's presence. But I guess it seemed to people like something very chivalrous when compared to the life in the trenches. The same kind of chivalry wasn't restricted only to the air forces. At first, the submarine warfare was quite gentlemanly, with submarines giving time for the crews of the cargo ships to get to their lifeboats and even giving them directions to the nearest port before sinking the ship.

No need to go over this again - there was a lot of discussion about the move back when it happened. It is what it is, and we'll all have to deal with it.

Soon, the devs will bow to all this pressure and announce the Italian Front expansion pack to WOFF. It will be released two weeks after WOFF.

I wonder how the natives survived in that area thousands of years ago?

Why am I not surprised it was an unsuccessful design?

Maybe it has a jet engine inside its tail?

Good to hear it wasn't that bad in your area.

A little bit of friendly pressure every now and then may help to make them work faster.

When can we expect to see the Italian front in OFF?

When you see an explosion like that it makes it easy to understand why so many leading military minds of the 1920s and 1930s believed that modern wars could be decided simply by bombing enemy cities back to the Stone Age. It came as a surprise to many during WW2 that it wasn't as simple as that. People in most countries just kept fighting even though their cities and towns were under constant bomber attacks.

A simple and cheap device like that one must have been perfectly adequate for the Moth.

An excellent satellite photograph of Isaac can be found here: http://lance-modis.eosdis.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/imagery/single.cgi?image=Isaac.A2012241.1630.2km.jpg By choosing 250m as the pixel size from the left you can see a wonderfully detailed picture of the storm.

The climate in Italy is wonderful. And for somebody interested in history, practically the whole country is one big museum! I'd love to go there more often, but I can't afford it.

I'm happy we don't get that kind of storms here. Blizzards can be bad too, but they don't cause nearly as much damage as a hurricane. Again, good luck!

Yes, it really was something special, something that had never been done in the history of mankind. It took tremendous skill and courage, and not only from the astronauts themselves, though obviously they were the ones who'd have lost their lives if something had gone badly wrong.

Good luck! I hope the storm won't cause too much damage.

I think it means that 121 of those planes were in good enough condition to be captured or at least could be reached by the German forces on ground, who would then remove guns etc. from them. The rest must have been too badly wrecked or out of reach of the Germans.