JimAttrill

I put the winners banana in my scanner but it didn't come out too well Hey Mr Typhoon - as you know the Mossie fuselage was built in two halves with the systems installed inside and then glued together. What other famous aircraft had a metal fuselage made in the same way? (I ask this because I read a book about this other aircraft where it was said that this method of manufacture was unique)

Hitler was a Gefreiter in WWI. Not very popular by all accounts but brave. He went to school with Wittgenstein it appears - I have seen a school photo and have a copy somewhere. In WWII the Luftwaffe was seen as an adjunct to the Wehrmacht as Hauksbee says and was very successful as such. But they never had much of a strategy and their only strategic bomber the He 177 was a failure. As a computer person I have always been interested in Turing even though I am no mathematician. I enjoyed the film "The Imitation Game" even though it is full of factual errors. But as the director of the film said he was doing a story and not a documentary. After watching the film I got on the net and downloaded an Enigma simulator - there are a few good ones about. I used it to send messages from one computer to the other! http://enigma.louisedade.co.uk/index.html There is a wonderful web site out there that details exactly how they managed to break the codes - sometimes actions that I (and the Germans) thought would increase security made the codes easier to break. One fault was using standard military expressions which the British picked up on - for example Rommel's quartermaster general always started his messages with the same salutation. Also captured German spies in England would send messages back via radio to Germany. The SD then used to code them verbatim in Enigma and send them to others. So the code breakers had what they called a 'crib'. Without getting too technical, one thing that made the Enigma breakable was that as it was also used as a decoder of messages (you put the code in backwards so to speak and out comes the plain text) no character could be coded as itself. So if you saw an A in code that meant that the text could only be one of the 25 other characters. It's all fascinating stuff

Very interesting video showing shots of Rudel and 'smiling Albert' Kesselring that I have never seen before. Rudel and Goering were both interviewed by Capt. Eric Brown RN (who is still alive) and he does write that Rudel was real Nazi and admirer of Hitler not that that was unusual in those days. He said the same about Hanna Reitsch who he really admired. Hanna wrote that famous letter to him just before she died. She was reputed to be the mistress of Robert Ritter von Greim who was the last head of the Luftwaffe and who committed suicide in the Berlin bunker.

What I like about this forum is that it belongs to US - the WOFF fliers. The moderators are not connected to OBD and just check that we don't do things they don't want like posting porn photos. For the rest they leave us to our own devices. Maybe we can persuade some of the newer WOFF pilots to use both forums - never let it be said that I want the pilots to leave the SimHq forum at all. But I like this forum. Maybe I am a whale - I always did like 'Whales and Nightingales' by Judy Collins. No matter what happens three of us (myself, Olham and RAF_Louvert) will carry on using this forum to send PMs of the DiD charts and DiD medals to each other even though the charts eventually appear on SimHq. I must say that some of the stories on the SimHq forum are well worth reading! But let us not lose this forum - does it cost us anything?

I pop in about once a day to see if anything is happening. I have a question for Capt. Sopwith - I used to fly 'Wings of Glory' that appears in your signature (on this forum, not the other one). I am considering creating a Virtual DOS machine (I already have XP, Ubuntu, W10 versions) and I can install FreeDos (or M$ dos if I can get it to read my USB floppy drive) - I just wonder what the config.sys and autoexec.bat would look like. I am a bit out of practice with dos (haha) - could you help? Back in the dark ages I used to love WOG. I forgot to add that I have the installation CD and all the manuals still on the shelf.

Well I like it over here and visit every day. So if you have something to say at least one person will read it!

I have no idea why the 'official' WOFF forum went over to SimHQ but suspect there is some money involved especially as the official OFF/WOFF site links to there and not to here. This site is valuable partly because it has the pilot map done by Olham (and that can't be transferred I think) also this is where I started and I come in here to post occasionally. This site allows avatars and the other doesn't which annoys me. I do get a 1984 (or 1914!) 'Big brother is watching you' feeling over there ..... I think we should encourage the use of this site. This is partly because I have been threatened with death over there at one time. I was wrong, yes, but there is a good way of saying something and a bad way. (I must say my offence was not that of being offensive to others). In other words although I like the OBD software I prefer this site where OBD devs are not moderators. The two mods on SimHQ are Polovski and Sandbagger. Maybe this is not a good thing. Not that I have anything against them personally but I would prefer mods who are not 'interested'. I must say that we (on this site or the other one) wish all the best for OBD - we don't want to shoot ourselves in the collective feet! I must also add that I am a moderator on other sites which have nothing to do with Flight Simulators or games or anything connected with OBD.

I notice two things after joining the 'dark side'. One is that the clock in the crew room is of british make and has a 'broad arrow' aka 'Pheon' on it which means it is British Government property. For those who haven't seen one before, here is one: Also, when I tried to take on a pilot with the name Blücher WOFF refused and stated that I could not use such a character. It has a thing about umlauts, so I suppose it would complain about Herr Göring as well I have posted this here because it makes a change from the 'other' place

I spent quite a few years watching news readers with a cat on their heads. They didn't seem to mind at all The now deceased cat would not like modern TVs which don't get hot like the ones in the 60s. I remember that in those days you were warned to switch off the tv on going to bed because they tended to burst into flames. Some even had an automatic fire extinguisher inside. This was early colour tvs.

The first radio I bought was a transistor Nordmende in Germany in 1970. Lovely radio with a wooden case. My parents had a PYE radio for the blind at the time. This was a 40s valve radio with four settable presets which was very unusual but easy to use. Eventually that radio went phut and I gave them the Nordmende as I was off to Saudi. Everybody liked this radio except the cat which was used to the heat of the valves. The cat then migrated to the top of the television

The interesting thing is that WOFF doesn't mind umlauts in 'place of birth' as it happily took Düsseldorf ....

I use Process Lasso to set affinities for WOFF, CFS3 and TrackIr. It remembers the affinities you set. And it is free.

Rather you than me! I have stood at the front of an AW Argosy (the aircraft in my Avatar) and watched the RAF parachute team jumping out of the open clam doors at the back. What a bunch of maniacs! One walked on his hands to the door and then dropped off and many of them did somersaults on the way out. They were all volunteers of course and from all trades. I was issued with a parachute once for a trip to Gibraltar in a Vickers Varsity (it took 2 days from Norfolk). Luckily I didn't have to use it!

I downloaded 'The Dambusters'. Well worth watching for the shots of the Lancasters.

My first WWI sim was Wings of Glory which I used to run on my 1 speed CD drive back then. I still have the CD and all the books. How can I get it to work with W7? Or should I try to use my Oracle VM which is running FreeDos?

The slang had something to do with the 'Scale' of pay or something. I will find out. Of course RAF slang was something else as those who have seen the Monty Python scetch will know Apparently Married persons were paid on 'Scale E' and that's where it came from. Simple!

Rather reminiscent of the Dambusters having two spotlights pointing downwards at angles so that when the lights merged they knew they were at the right height which was very low in order to get the bomb to work properly. Sometimes simple stuff works. It rather reminds me of the little wind vane on the nose of the Harrier which showed when the aircraft was drifting sideways, and also showed which way the wind was blowing like a windsock. We laughed at it but it seemed to work.

When I was skydiving I always wanted to jump from a balloon. Jumping from a plane you're already moving nearly at terminal velocity, just horizontally and slowly transitioning to the vertical. The idea of dropping "into the void" from a basically motionless platform and having that first few seconds of absolutely no control...it seemed like the coolest thing I could do. My father was in charge of the paratroopers hangar at RAF Abingdon in 1958 where paras were trained to land correctly etc by among other things jumping off a twenty feet high platform onto coconut matting. Their first drops were from a captive WWII barrage balloon with a basket underneath. As a 'scaley brat' (RAF slang for children of serving members) I used to watch them jumping out nearly every day. The paras said that jumping from the static balloon was a hundred times more scarey than jumping from an aeroplane. There was a Sgt para instructor who got the George Medal when he was up there with (I think) three trainees when the bag burst. He pushed them all out before jumping himself and was very lucky to live.

I must say I have never seen or heard of this Pemberton-Billing aircraft. (Maybe because it was such a failure). Strange aircraft were designed in those days!

There was a motorbike made, in Germany I think, that had a rotary engine mounted in the front wheel. I think it had a 3-cylinder engine, or maybe a 5. It did work but was impossible to steer what with the gyroscopic precession forces. In 1919 there was a British motor bike - the 'pax' with a 3-cylinder rotary engine in the back wheel. Ah, found the German bike - it was a Megola and quite successful as a racer. The trouble with googling 'rotary' is that the Wankel engine and the WWI engines have the same name but work completely differently ... http://big-diesel.blogspot.com/2009/08/megalo-concept-engine-on-wheel.html

And if you were the gunner on top you couldn't exactly have a fag when nobody was looking

And I think that he was right in that he was saved by being much shorter than Geoffrey. BTW those photos of BVR and Udet are new to me. Thanks for them. Richthofen seemed to be in a very good mood!

Hasse is flying a Roland and seems to be doing ok in WOFF. I haven't tried it but might when I give up on the Gotha IV which is easy to fly but suicidal if there are fighters around.

I don't have Netflix but I have all his books. "Wings on my sleeve" is his autobiography and his book "Wings of the Luftwaffe" is fascinating. He got to know the systems of German aircraft very well. He must also be one of the few pilots who shot down two aircraft and then flew the type himself later on - the Fw200 Condor. He should have been the first through the 'sound barrier' if not let down by the British Government for some reason that has never been published. He holds numerous records - most aircraft types flown, most carrier deck landings, first landing of a tricycle aircraft on a carrier (P39 Airacobra), first twin engine landing on a carrier (Mosquito) first Jet Landing on a carrier etc etc. About the only record he doesn't hold is first four-engine landing on a carrier which was done with a C130 Hercules much later. A remarkable man!

I really don't know. That information must be somewhere on the net. Personally if I was Vickers (or whoever) I would have told them to go **** themselves with a fuse.