von Baur

Red Dog: In Richtofen's Skies we would do the same type of thing sometimes. The event would be organized for three or five fights with limited ammo and if you die or land too damaged to fly that was it...for that mission. While it did lead to some long stretches of being able to do nothing but root for your remaining teammates (if you were the unlucky recipient of a quick golden BB), it also forced you to be more wary and not just zoom into a bad situation secure in the knowledge that you can respawn. And a dogfight event could be set up like that in OFF, too, providing enough human pilots can be mustered to make it fun (four per side is a minimum, IMO). The reason that doesn't work well in the Sunday get-togethers is that, as Axe said, there are AI planes on your side and if you die the game automatically puts you into the next available aircraft...it's not something you do by choice. The only that I can imagine you could stop it would be to exit the game entirely on your death. The way it's set up (only your accomplishments in your original aircraft in any mission count toward your total and in the event of any death your slate is wiped completely clean and starts over at the start of the next mission) works quite well. For the rest: If I die on a mission I will fly that next plane the way I would if it was my first. I won't set up an enemy and invite an active pilot in for the coup de gras just because I won't get permanent credit for the kill. As Dutch said, the object is the destruction of the enemy force, not padding scores. You may damage an EA to the point where it's barely flying, but if an active pilot comes in and overshoots his pass because the enemy is slower than he anticipated (after all, he may not realize how badly it's been damaged) it could still get a lucky shot in. If all nearby planes are taken and I respawn far away I check my position and if I can get back to the main action I try to. If not I look to see what kind of trouble I can get myself into wherever I am. And at that point I might even get reckless...after all, I would have nothing to lose. As far as snaking someone else's kill, I try to avoid it. As I did with Dutch, if I see a friendly engaged with an enemy 1-1 I'll try to assess the situation and only get directly involved if he needs help. Otherwise I hang out and try to position myself so I can render help if he suddenly needs it or to intercept any enemy aircraft that may try to aid their comrade. I've never cared for the gangbanging that used to pervade the Red Baron team servers. Not only is it unsportsmanlike (this is a game, after all), it's not good tactics because it blinds the bangers to potential threats and uses up waaaaaaaay too much ammo on one aircraft. Also, Red Baron's team servers had friendly fire turned off. Not so in OFF. So if three or four people start trying to take out the same enemy, not only can they crash into each other but they can also shoot each other. Not a good thing.

Beg pardon if they've been asked and answered elsewhere, but I'm old and may not have enough time left to search and sift. Flight lead: I've selected lead by rank in workshop, but I am always the boss. Yes, I enlisted as a leutnant (you don't think someone with 'von' in front of his name is going to stand for being an enlisted man, do you?) but there have been times when I've had other leutnants and even an oberleutnant or two in the flight and they're still following me. I'd like to think it's because Hauptmann Boelcke recognizes my vastly superior leadership abilities **cough, cough**, but I have a feeling it's some kind of glitch (did they have glitches in 1916?). Weather: Why do I have missions in bad weather? Even in WWII rain and low clouds put a damper on air activity. Why do you think flyboys got the reputation as pansies they did among the ground troops? And yet, there I am on the field, my cockpit filling with rain and Herr Hauptmann telling me to take off. I don't want every day to be clear-and-a-million, but I could see getting one of those notes saying "Air operations have been suspended for the last several days due to bad weather, but the skies are clearing and it's time once again to have at the enemy" or "I hope you've all rested during the recent spate of unflyable waether, because the meteorology office expects clearing skies and we must make up for lost time", with an appropriate skip ahead a few days. I've taken to ending missions that open with rain and simply telling the ground crew to push my machine back into its hangar and walking to the mess, but along with scowls from the commander this tack is being met with a lot of missions 'flown' in my pilot's dossier that never took place. Is there a way to delete these so that I no longer have those 0-minute missions? Flamers: I'm guessing the vast majority of my kills are flamers. If you doubt that, ask those who fly mp with me. I know these airplanes were highly flammable, what with their unarmored fuel tanks and doped canvas skin and wooden frames, but I understood that they were rather rare irl. Have I been misinformed? Or is there a propensity to light 'em up? And finally, Clouds: I seem to be getting the extreme turbulence again when I enter one. Is anyone else having this problem, or am I just lucky? Is there something I can do to reduce it? I'm patched to 1.32G (or H, or J, or X or whatever the one released last week is) and my realism is pretty much maxxed out with flight model set to realistic.

I'm planning on Sunday. The SPAD's not a bad bird. Not my first choice, but it's easy to see why her pilots liked her.

I can confirm this. I've had three balloon buster missions in my current campaign and only brought one down. The other two went 'poof' as I was on my way in for the first pass.

I've had a couple of rather frustrating anomalies with claim formes lately that I'd like to add here. Maybe someone can shed some light on them and help me prevent repeats. I tend to be fairly detailed on my claims. Some of them could be copied and pasted to the "Reports from the Front" thread. A couple of weeks ago I'd shot down three BE2's in one mission. I gave each one its own line, as is my wont, and after completing the claim form I went back to my pilot's log to reread them. To my surprise the narrative for the first one stopped halfway through. Subsequently that claim was not confirmed while the other two, which went through in their entirety, including the witness (significance of stating this to come), were. I attributed its rejection to the fact that, while the actual form has the witnesses as the first entry, the claim puts the witness last and I assumed the game looked at it as having no witness, even though it must draw the info from the same place as the others. The second occurrance was on my last flight. It was one of those 'gift of God' setups in which I was presented three FE2's, four BE2's and wigmen who either had jammed guns or were conscientious objectors because they wouldn't fire on anything no matter how many times I stabbed the attack key. To make a long story short, I ended up dropping all seven (and I fly with full realism settings, btw, although I do use lables and a 2-mile TAC placed so that it shows only from 9:00 to 3:00). Since there are only five lines on the claim form, I decided to group them into two lines, particularly since that's how I had shot them down, BE's first then FE's. When I completed the form I got the "Erroneous claim" warning. I tried to modify things here and there, especially since the BE's had been witnessed by one wingman (the other trailing far behind), the first two FE's by the other (having caught up and the first wingman becoming seperated while diving on the fleeing FE's) and the last FE being downed near a German obs balloon, but each time the claim was considered erroneous. I ended up deleting the entry with the BE's altogether, claiming the FE's and having the witness listed as the pilot who only was around for the BE's. The claim is still pending. If anyone can shed some light on this, I would appreciate it. Dev team, I can understand Pol's not wanting to get into a part of the game that's another person's area, but I'm sure I speak for most, if not all, when I ask that if there's any information you can give to help us get more confirmations or avoid the situations I've described we'd appreciate it. After all, those who are going to pump things up will find their ways, because that's what they do. But those of us who want to play it as straight as possible deserve to be given a chance to be awared what we deserve. While we're on the subject, is there any way the claim form can be moved to after the mission review. IRL a pilot would have a chance to go over what happened before having to fill out his claim, wouldn't he? And can it be changed to allow more than five claims and maybe a witness line for each, in case one has multiple engagements at different locations, with possibly different witnesses? Or would that involve too much rewriting to be changed with a patch?

Addendum to Group Commander's report, from the other side (and I ain't talkin' about behind German lines ). I would have to respectfully contradict the group commander's assesment of my unfortunate mishaps. While it is true that my standard attack procedure is to approach as closely as possible, often within 50 yards, before firing in neither case did I make contact with the aircraft with which I was engaged. In fact in the first instance, just before death closed it's icy grip around my heart I saw the aircraft (or what was left of it) that collided with me continuing it's trajectory at nearly 90 degrees to my flight path, port and slightly upwards. I never saw anything of the second German plane that hit me, but it was such a devastating impact that it wrenched both top and bottom wings from my SPAD, and there is no way I could have hit the aircraft I was following that hard. I submit that in both cases the real culprit in this is not my airmanship, but rather the poor visibility offered by the large chord of the SPAD's wings, both top and bottom. This coupled with the fact that they have a turn radius only slightly smaller than a British Dreadnought, while we are forced to confront the extremely nimble Fokker D-VII, which I believe will become recognized as the best German fighter of this war, if not one of the best from any side and whose pilots have access to parachutes while we still have none, leads one to an inescapable conclusion...that the top brass must be getting some form of 'royalty' (which you may read as 'bribe') for their choices of equipment. And this may well extend down to group level. (Vasco, please be assured this was all done with tongue fully in cheek. Which is probably why I spilled so much of my drink while I was posting it.)

Well, it's Sunday (morning, here), four hours from normal start time. I haven't seen anything posted changing that, so I assume that for this week we're sticking with 2:00pm EDT. Reckon I'll start mowing the lawn and check back in in a couple hours and see.

I thought from the start the wings and nose had a Tiger Moth look, but the empenage threw me. They obviously at least took the time to refit those to look more Hun, which is more than can be said for most movie producers. Uncleal, I don't know what your hangup is with Death Hunt. I admit being somewhat predisposed to it, having first seen it as a young special forces member stationed in Anchorage, AK, but not only was it a great movie in terms of action, plot and subplots, scenery and the plausibility of what was portrayed (with the major exception being Bronson's escaping unscathed the bomb that destroyed the cabin), but if that wasn't at least a replica Bristol F2b I'll eat it. And given the history of the Brisfit, it's exactly the plane that would have been available to the RCAF in the early 1930's and if available would have been the perfect choice for this task. OK, I admit they blew it by putting the gun on the top wing instead of using the real one, even though they did have the hole in the nose through which the real one fired. But considering the cinematic horrors to which we WWI aviation buffs have been subjected over the years, this is a minor, almost miniscule, infraction.

A very enjoyable day, marred only by the collision on the first mission. I take full responsibility as, being the following pilot , I had the clearer vision of Beard. Otherwise I had no trouble with lockups once I started entring through the CFS3MP.exe and my connection stayed solid most of the time. Thanx, Vasco, for hosting and acting as observer. Welcome to leadtongue, always nice to see a new player. Hope to see you again next week.

I became familiar with Hugh Laurie (Stephen Fry, too, for that matter) on the "BlackAdder" shows on BBC America. Came to appreciate the breadth of his talents and his amazing comic and comedic skills on "A Bit of Fry and Laurie", also on BBCA. His current run on Fox's "House" shows that his dramatic ability is every bit as good as his comedic.

They make other types of games??? How about that!! Seriously, though, long ago I used to play a Delta Force demo that came packaged with F-16 by Nova-Logic. AI bad guyswere dumb as rocks, though. Only mission was to take out a rebel base manned with 25 insurgents (Central America, this was before 9/11). As a member of a squad I had to sit on tacks to stay awake. The only way to make it challenging was to do it all by myself, and even that became easy after a few times. Played a driving game for a while. Porsche-based, but it wasn't NFS. For the past seven years or so it's been nothing but flight sims: WWI, WWII, Korea, and Falcon 4.0 here and there along with MSFS 2000 and 2004 (fs9).

Good game when I could get in and stay in. Thanx to Vasco for hosting again. Sorry for all the problems, but between the game freezing (seems to happen a lot since 1.32, don't know if the two things are related) and losing my internet connection (can't wait 'till winter, when the trees between me and my wireless connection's antenna lose their leaves), but that part was very frustrating. Looking forward to next week. Probably be up to hotfix Q by then.

What's the plan? Hotfix b? Hotfix c? Hotfix d?

I've been thinking of reinstalling, given bouncing between hardcore and FB's dm and back and back again. I take it this last line means that all I need to do is install the main game, 1.32 and 1.32a to be up-to-date, correct? Does this make the official hardcore dm obsolete?

So if we were good last Sunday we should be good tomorrow, right?

what setting do I need to make the mirrors useable? All I ever get is a frosted disc that lightens and darkens.

Flight models: Personally I like the hard fm. Most of the scouts in WWI were highly unstable and often killed as many of their pilots as did enemy action. And for someone to hop into one without any training and take out every enemy in sight is, IMO, unrealistic. No disrespect meant, Winston, but one cannot compare a Cessna to a Sopwith Camel. And I'm guessing if you got hold of an accurate (built to original specs, including a rotary engine) repro you'd find that OFF is a cakewalk. I agree completely that the lack of tactile input in a simulator is a major drawback, which is why the first stick I bought was force feedback and as long as it's possible I will 'fly' with one every time. You get that mush as you approach a stall and it gives you the warning you need. Richtofen's Skies didn't support ff and I had the same problem you have with slipping into stalls in OFF, Winston. And I won't say it doesn't happen to me here, but I can usually feel it coming on in time to correct and avoid it. If you don't have force feedback, I highly recommend getting one. Yes, I was one of the ones who had a mismatch Sunday. I felt particularly bad after taking the harsh stance I had in Sitting Duck's thread. The fact that there were two Fortiesboy's 1.2 dm's somewhat (but only somewhat) diminshes my culpability, because I don't have time to sort through every post on the forum and I hadn't seen that it was changed but still had the same name. It also shows what can happen when there are so many fm's, dm's and whatever else can get in the way of successful multiplay. And it hammers home the absolute need to have and stick with one setup and not change it on a whim or because something new has come out. I'll go along with reducing the number of aces but I've also had no-namers in QC hammer me at over 1,000 yards so I'm not convinced that extreme marksmanship is the sole property of aces. More significant, IMO, is the fact that with this dm our airplanes come apart as easily as do the enemy ac. Which means that not only does the AI have greater accuracy, there's also the fact that any hits are likely to do significant damage. So whereas before one might take a few hits but sustain little damage, now your wing is coming off or your engine is sputtering after the opening volley. As far as which type of mission, I'll always take humans on each side. The greatest challenge and test of my abilities is against other people. This doesn't necessarily exclude co-op missions but I think they need to be crafted, with all aircraft flyable and within the operational zone. Speaking as one who's respawned into a plane that was probably 50 or 60 miles from the action (and therefore the other players) that's not a lot of fun. I'd rather just accept not respawning as my penalty for failing to stay alive than be taunted by being put back into an airplane that has little to no chance of getting any action. The seperate TS channels for the different sides works well. Anyone who's flown with me online knows I like to keep the radio chatter to a minimum for realism's sake, but I'm also comfortable with using it when necessary. After all, while it's true that 90 years ago they didn't have air-to-air communication what they did have that we don't is 100% immersion in this. Flying and working together was something that these men did from the time they woke up to the time they went to bed. They practiced their tactics and hand signals (which we can't use at all) day in and day out and never 'switched sides to keep things even'. This is a level of communication we can't hope to match and I have no problem with making limited use of TS to compensate for it. I plan on continuing to fly online and I hope you reconsider, Winston. The loss of one significantly diminishes the rest. But I will repsect you just the same if you choose to stand by your decision. Apparently Vasco has posted an outline of his plans and I'm going to have to look that up to make sure that I'm on the same page as everyone else, come Sunday.

Sorry if I went off on a tangent or a rant or whatever, duck. As to your question, I think it's the responsibility of each and every player to have his files ready to go at the the designated start time. In all honesty, anything less is rude and inconsiderate to every person who has taken the time and responsibility to prepare. This can, and in fairness must, be facilitated by the organizer/host getting out the word well in advance. IMO, the four days Winston posted should have been enough and he did offer to be available before the session to help people prepare. I don't know if anyone took him up on it. I didn't, but my problems weren't because of the patch. To be honest, I still don't have any idea what caused the 'disappearing planes' I experienced. I've run the same installation in sp and not had a recurrance. I don't want to turn anyone off to multiplayer. Quite the contrary, I came from Red Baron and in its heyday (of which I caught pretty much the tail end) it wasn't uncommon to find a couple dozen people online at any given time and you could almost always find a server with at least a half dozen or so people. And I would love to see that happen with OFF. But a big obstacle to that is the abundance of patches and the frequency of their release. I certainly don't want to discourage anyone's efforts to enhance the gameplay for all of us, but the decline in numbers in Red Baron (as I remember it, anyway) more or less coincided with the beginnings of 3rd party flight models. And if a person has to change his install every week or two to stay up to speed it makes it less attractive and less likely he'll give it the time it takes to get proficient in multiplayer. And less face it, going up against people is a lot different that taking on AI.

My two cents. I believe that part, if not most, of the problem is the variety of patches and mods out there coupled with a desire to 'have the latest'. Not everyone wants the latest. Does that mean that those who don't aren't worthy of having fun with the rest of us? I certainly wouldn't want to be on either the giving or receiving end of that attitude. But I think we're getting dangerously close to exactly that. As I mentioned Sunday (for those of you who weren't there), I think there's a danger in having too many incompatible mods available. 'Incompatible mods'? In Red Baron people like Rabu and Capt. Winters and, most notably, Kess created upgrades to the scenery and ground objects to make them more real looking. Then Baron von Helton and Charles deThielt started working on the planes themselves and they stopped giving the feel of WWI aircraft and started to look like the warbirds they were supposed to be. All of these mods were strictly up to the individual player to use or not, depending on his level of comfort with changing files and the ability of his computer to handle them. I could have CdT's planes and Kess's Promised Land graphics while someone else might be using von Helton's Revenge of the Jastas planes and Rabu's terrains and a third person might be flying strictly stock and all of us could be online together with no problems. Later various people started adding aircraft that weren't available in the stock game..planes that Sierra/Dynamix had ignored, flyable two-seaters with working AI gunners. Then some very talented and well-intentioned people started 'fixing' bugs in the flight/damage models...the 'uber' effect in afm, the lack of gun jams and g-force effects in nfm, whole new intermediate fm's. Since these were outside of Sierra's original parameters the standard security checks (woefully inadequate as they were) would reject them, making passworded servers necessary to ensure everyone was flying the same fm, which in turn led to fewer people in any given server at any given time. And some of them you couldn't even get the password to unless you were a member of a squad. In OFF you can't even get into the game if your files don't match, which will at least keep the hackussations down. But it leads to the frustrations that sitting duck is talking about. Another offshoot of these changes were that people developed their favorite flight models and wanted everyone to fly the one that they liked. This led to fractionilization and factionilization of the community to the point that there was as much forum space devoted to bickering over which one was better or more 'accurate' as there was to level-headed discussion and fun. And I'd hate to see that happen here. I've also played Richtofen's Skies, Target Ware's WWI offering. Like OFF, the system checks your files against what's supposed to be there and won't let you into the server if they don't match. Unlike OFF you can't just put up a new plane or fm for everyone to try out. Anything has to be run through the dev team and if they like it they include it in the next update, thus keeping everyone on the same page. There was no "I like this fm over that one" because there was only one at any given time. I don't want to discourage anyone's trying to improve things that they feel could use improving, I just think that they need to run it by the devs to see if it should be included in an 'official' patch.

Not to be a wet blanket, but the maneuver you're describing was never performed by Max Immelmann, and probably not done by many if any in rotary engined aircraft. Gyroscopic precession made keeping an aircraft on heading through a loop almost impossible. Then there's the power factor...these beasts generally didn't have it, especially the early planes. What Immelmann did was a form of hammerhead. He stated that at its apex the controls were reversed, with the rudder functioning as an elevator (changing the vertical orientation of the aircraft) and the elevators functioning as a rudder (changing the horizontal). While it's doubtful he got his E-III into a completely vertical attitude in the course of this he probably managed more than 45 degrees and maybe as much as 65-70. What's now commonly referred to as an Immelmann turn did not become called that until well after the Great War.

OK, who did it? Come on, fess up! That's one of the funniest things I've ever seen and I have six ferrets.

As you can sse, BuB, there are lots of options (and opinions). The key, IMO, is to remember that with Track IR handling the views you've got essentially 8 more programable buttons with your hat. Personally I don't like to use the corners because I tend to hit one or the other side and slide into it. When you're dealing with standard a view setup it doesn't matter, but if you've mapped (for example) up to release your bombs and you accidentally hit that when you're trying to go to up-right it's going to release whether you really wanted to or not.

Hey, BuB. Welcome to OFF. Look forward to seeing you online (every Sunday this month at 2PM EDT). Sidewinder FF2 Pro w/o pedals here, and only TIR3, but I do have Vector so it's kinda like your setup. I'll give you what I use and you can do with it as you wish. Since the hat isn't needed for views I've mapped it for my mixture control. Left is full lean (to kill the engine when I'm landing) and right is full rich (if I need to add power). Down decreases the mixture incrementally to lean it as I increase altitude and up increases it as I descend. If you choose to use auto-mixture you'll obviously not need to worry about those and can do something else with your hat. Button 1 is "Fire all" and I've mapped button 2 to F12, to provide a handy recenter for Track IR. Button 3 is "Zoom In" and button 4 is "Zoom Out". Button 5 brings up the HUD info (F5), but for realism's sake I've disabled all instruments...I use it to keep an eye on my ammo and on my fuel state in the aircraft that don't have fuel guages. Likewise, button 6 is mapped to "Z" so I can check my latency when online, my framerate and my altitude and heading in aircraft without altimeter and/or compass. Button 7 selects weapon (bombs or rockets in aircraft so equipped) and button 8 releases the weapon. There you have it, sir, my setup. As I said, this may or may not be useful to you, as what each person considers an important control varies. Hope I helped.

Any plans for this Sunday Winston?

Tremendously well-written show, though the first arc was never my favorite. And the supporting cast had as many great lines as did Atkinson, particularly Baldrick. But one of my favorites in the "Private PLane" (even the titles of the episodes showed imagination, as each arc's followed a pattern) was when Flashy asked Lt. George if he knew what it was like to feel the wind in his hair.