JimAttrill

King of Air Fighters: The Biography of Major "Mick" Mannock, V.C., D.S.O., M.C. (Paperback) by Ira Jones (Author) Paperback: 330 pages Publisher: Greenhill Books (October 1989) Language: English ISBN-10: 1853670383 ISBN-13: 978-1853670381 This from Amazon, but the book is out of print. I found an old hardback copy in a 2/h bookshop. Ira Jones is of course Wing Commander Ira (Taffy) Jones who was an ace himself and wrote the history of the RAF and served through WWII.

Whatever it is, I WANT one! An air-operated knitting machine for bored observers? The first try at a portable CD player? Some sort of navigation equipment like a sextant? As for the manufacturer I reckon it is (for the Americans) The Rube Goldberg widget Corporation and for the British the Heath Robinson amazing doodad company Ltd. Really, I am dying to know the answer.

I reckon it's a wind-operated movie camera made by Zeiss?

If you are somewhat technically-minded you will enjoy this article about George Constaninesco and his Vickers gun firing gear. Note that his gear did not 'interrupt' the firing of the gun but actually fired it. The article also shows that without an army officer who was prepared to disregard a direct and written order, the dead hand of beurocracy would have triumphed again, as it normally does. http://fluid.power.net/fpn/const/const003.html

And I have read somewhere that 'Schrage Musik' means 'jazz music'. A rather strange choice given the fact that AH & co. didn't like it at all. There are enough Germans on this forum to correct me if I am wrong

I wonder if the warp 'x' could be made a toggle - ie. into warp if you are in normal flight, and out of warp if you are in warp? I ask because I am a lefty and normally have to let go of the stick to hit <ctl> x Maybe I should program a joystick button instead.

The first sim I ever flew was Wings of Glory. I have been trying to run it under Dosbox, but can't seem to get my USB joystick to work at all. Dos and USB don't seem to match up. I have an old 'games port' joystick but the SoundBlaster card to power it is not PCI so can't be used in my modern pc. I did like the 'autoland' system in WOG. Maybe getting used to that is why I keep crashing on landing in OFF

If you want an easy time, sign on in No 56 Sqn when they first get the SE5a. Then you can fly around England for a few weeks until the squadron gets posted to France. You can also fly through Tower Bridge and strafe the politicians in the Houses of Parliament.

As an aside here, in the modern-day RAF the airframe fitters are still referred to as 'riggers' even though they have no wires to rig any more. The use of 'fitter' for an engine man had dropped away because 'fitter' became the designation for anyone who worked on an aeroplane at the skilled level (the semi-skilled were called 'mechanics' in my day). As an example, my father started in the RAF in the early 20s as a Fitter IIE, the E standing for 'Engines'. He later became a Fitter I which meant he could work on the airframe and the engine. He worked on Vickers Vimys and such in the early days with RR Eagle engines. In the 60s and 70s the designation was A. Fitt (x) where the x was either an A for airframe, P for Propulsion (a silly designation as we called ourselves engine fitters) or E for Electrician. There were also a few 'fairies' about who did the radios, radar and such other electronic stuff. I have forgotten the designation for the armament fitters, but we always referred to them as 'plumbers'. They did the guns, bombs, missiles and ejection seats, the latter because they also go bang. In the modern Air Force, very little is actually 'fitted' any more. All the people do is change components and send the old ones back to the manufacturers or to the scrap bin. The RAF apprentice school at RAF Halton has closed down - I spent two terrible years there but I learnt a lot.

I will still carry on playing it as before. It is already an amazing and the best ever WWI sim, so if the development team get run over by the proverbial bus I will mourn for them but carry on playing OFF. So my message to the development team is this : You keep on improving things that I had never thought of! Eventually my thinking may catch up to yours, but I don't think so.

Hi Dev guys. I think that any new aircraft you have configured should be a paid-for upgrade. You can't go on giving upgrades for free. I don't think the guys on this site will complain, from what I have seen of their posts. (Although maybe us guys who bought at $39 or more should get upgrades for free as we didn't get use of the $29 special ) I will happily pay for upgrades, just to keep you doing them. I love OFF and am prepared to put my money where my mouth is.

I fancy flying one of these, I would even turn my coat to do so! The dynamics of taxying and taking off on water is quite interesting. But once off the water, wouldn't I be 'krumpet fodder'?

I am a member on lots of forae. These use various engines. The search facility doesn't work on any of them so I have given up using it. Sometimes even google will show me posts that the forum search software can't find. I mean that search facility on some forums won't even find you as a member let alone anything you posted. Pity, but true. I don't know why this is, and as an admin or moderator on some forums I have to just tell users that 'it doesn't work'.

I also find that PSUs of more than 350w are very expensive. You can, however, easily run two PSUs in the same pooter. You just have to jump a couple of connections to fool the second PSU into thinking it is connected to a MOB. This is commonly used to test PSUs on the bench. With 2 PSUs you can power the drives and fans off one, and the MOB and graphics off the other. This is handy for me because I have about five usable 300/350w PSUs from old computers at work which are just lying there. If anyone is interested I can find the URL of directions on how to bridge the contacts.

And I never knew that the Imperial Navy flew heavier-than-air craft. Did they have seaplanes as well for coastal patrols?

And somebody should tell him that the SE (and other krumpet kites) used arabic numerals, not roman. The dastardly hun used roman numerals as in Fokker EIII and DVII. There may be exceptions to this rule, of course.

The longest-lived individual aircraft may well be Sopwith Camel B6313 which was flown for almost a year (2 Oct 1917 - 29 Sept 1918) by the same pilot, Bill Barker VC. He clocked up 379h25m in her, and the total airframe hours were 404h10m. Somebody put on 5 hours before he arrived in France. See the interesting article at: http://www.cbrnp.com/profiles/quarter1/barkers-camel.htm This aircraft is also thought to have the highest score of any before or since. The longest serving aircraft type must be the BE2 in its various forms, though I'm not sure if it was still an operational type by the end of the war, having been replaced by the RE8 and A-W FK8. I certainly hope no-one was still flying over the lines in them in 1918.

remember the P key. It's handy when you want one

I have just read that the total RFC killed in WWI was 6 000, but with 8 000 killed in training. At its worst in April 1917 the expected lifespan of a new pilot was 11 days and 21 days for an experienced pilot. It definitely seems that the training given in Canada was much superior to that in the UK - this shows by the large number of Canadian and US aces trained there. Of course the weather was better which makes a difference. I suppose that 14 000 aircrew killed pales into insignificance alongside the general losses in trench warfare, the infamous day being 1st July 1916 with 30 000 killed. The difference would be that the RFC losses were nearly all of commissioned officers.

It's from a book about the American involvement in the air in 1917-18 and the expectations of the American public and especially the politicians who thought that you could create a huge air force just by throwing money at the problem. The book is "The dream of civilized warfare" by Linda Raine Robertson, I read a few bits of it here: http://books.google.co.za/books?id=IEazJzZPaGMC&pg=PA106&lpg=PA106&dq=RFC+pilot+losses&source=bl&ots=VLGTotD_Qp&sig=wk6f7brbEdqaURGP6d6Ua2c9Cl0&hl=en&ei=W6OTSoSKNZiQjAf9t8XwDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6#v=onepage&q=RFC%20pilot%20losses&f=false And you must note that the RAF didn't make the same mistake in WWII where huge training programs were set up in Canada, South Africa and (then) Southern Rhodesia. You can go from nothing to a PPL in about 3 weeks here, because the weather is so predictably good. VFR flying in the UK is often impossible for weeks at a time.

You don't have to use a new name for your new pilot. I am on my sixth Fred Bloggs in 4sqn 1915

Medals? The only decoration my pilots ever get is the KB (which is not the Knight of the Bath, but the Kicked the Bucket)

I keep my mouth shut since when watching 'A bridge too far' I complained that the chocks holding back the Dakota C-47s were of a collapsible metal type only used by the RAF since the late '50s. The WWII chocks were made of wood with ropes attached to pull them away. The steel chocks had chains. It's a small point, but they could have got it right easily. My wife thinks I'm nuts, but as I personally used those chocks for ten years I am entitled to notice them. But it all depends on what you are interested in. My sister, who was mad on horses, used to notice that the cowboys would swop horses during a chase. All horses look about the same to me. I used to count how many rounds they could fire from their six-shooters without reloading <br><br>

Hey Olham, a completely OT remark added to yours: I would call that 'cleat' a 'Bitt' at least that was what it was called on sailing ships. As that bit of rope (excuse the pun) was fixed and did not wear, they sailors would sometimes change over which end was attached to the bitts and which was attached to the anchor. This is where the English expression 'to the bitter end' comes from. It has nothing to do with taste. Sorry, I couldn't resist this . I am enjoying this thread but don't know enough to join in.

I had a pilot went from Sgt. to Major in less than a month with one kill, no medals and 30 hours. I don't think this is very realistic at all, especially as the Major was normally in charge of an RFC squadron and often did not fly much, or at all. And (I think) that the German aces never made it past Hauptmann, even if they were leading 3 staffeln. Promotion in the French services was even slower, many pilots never gaining a commission.