Capitaine Vengeur

About his "Three Musketeers" and some other works, Alexandre Dumas once said something like: "No matter you f**k History, provided you give her nice children!"

File Name: National counters for Wings Over Vietnam File Submitter: Capitaine Vengeur File Submitted: 06 June 2011 File Category: SF/WO* Hanger/Menu/Loadout This mod provides you with a batch of colorful, reduced-size counters, devoted to each of the nationalities present in Wings Over Vietnam. Besides having a more attractive map and less confused stacks, you can also find more easily the units you're after. As a rule, the counters with rectangular national flags and divisional devices show the ground units, while the counters with roundels concern the air units. - September 2013 update: adds USMC, ROK and Australian ground counters, and now distinctive USN and USMC light grey air counters. Click here to download this file

Happy birthday, fellow!!

Yep, nobody likes to see the Red Army in one's wife's bedroom! It reminds me of a burlesque comics with the puzzled last Soviet officer remaining in the Soviet Embassy of hostile Berlin after 1989: "Me not understand why Niemetski they don't like us. Yet long time since we not made rape!"

The Iron Eagle series was already a four-dimensional movie !! ... ... I mean it had a problem between space and time: the movie continued to run even after the audience had gone!

Found it at some second-hand bookseller. An interesting study written in 1978, but clearly outdated even by the following year's unexpected events, as he stated that Egypt would follow the Soviet alignment, while Iran would remain a firm pro-Western ally by 1985. Camp David and the otherthrow of the Shah made a clean sweep of that balance in one single year.

We hear very little about this otherwise noticeable incident down here, in the second-most using nuclear power in the world. I would be much more confident about foreign medias reports, not submitted to the nuclear lobby neither influenced by the oncoming elections.

Since I have the DVD, I have always watched this movie in German version, for better immersion.

I would have probably preferred any safe place I could have grabbed: Garde Républicaine if French, border guard at the Swiss border if German, National Guard of California if American... Any enlistment where you are engaged in battle only after the cooks, musicians, chaplains and crippled field officers have already been... Rather being able to say 60 years later: "It was a harsh war, but I managed to survive!" than to end the war with your mouth full of Picard earth!

Such a suit would probably need an exoskeleton to help the user sustain the huge weight of millions of micro-sensors and micro-screens, and an advanced cooling system to prevent both the millions of side-by-side devices and the user from overheating, and a physical connection to an enormous power source to make all of the damned stuff work properly! And it would probably need hours of maintenance and astronomic costs for every minute of use! Definetely worthless safe for a couple of them for some special agencies crammed with billions dollars to waste! (CIA?)

Lörzer seems to have always been a pro-Nazi in the heart. But many counter-examples do exist. For instance, when the Nazis wanted to remove late Wilhelm Frankl (20 kills) from the lists of German air heroes, many of his former comrades-in-arms protested, and one of them was no less than Wilhelm Bittrich, a future important SS General (he appears as quite a human SS in "A bridge too far", played by Maximilian Schell). Also, when Willi Rosenstein (9 kills) wanted to emigrate to South Africa after the Nazis rose to power, he had to ask his former flight leader Hermann Göring the allowance to bring a plane with him - as emigrating Jews were intended to leave "naked". Fat Hermann gave him allowance to bring enough spare parts to rebuild three planes. Before that, Rosenstein was prohibited to fly as a Jew, but the man responsible for the next airstrip, a former brother-in-arms, gave him full allowance to the place. Rosenstein finally ceased to fly to prevent his comrade from having problems.

Safe for people living just next to the extermination camps (which were mostly out of Germany), who could have imagine that all of the most modern industrial means could be used to kill not thousands, but millions of European close neighbours, moreover while these means were required to fight a total war? At that time, this was unprecedented in the World's History! And who could have imagine that such a will could come not from usual raw Antisemites (Romanians, Hungarians, Poles...), but from a people who gave to the World many of the best musicians, philosophers, scholars and physicists (many of them of Jewish ascendency)? During WW1, the French papers accumulated propaganda lies in order to have people believe that the Germans were degenerate, unhuman people ("bobards", those were nicknamed). One of these bobards related that the German armies were followed by giant mobile crematoriums to burn their deads, and that the corpses were used to make soap. After the war, of course, everybody laughed at such childish propaganda. To make soap out of dead bodies! Who could have believe such an enormous bulls**t!? And who could have believe it again in any following war, had it been used?

Oh well, I can just imagine some other titles like "Bambi vs Godzilla" (lasts for 2"...) or "King-Kong on the Towering Inferno" (hot fingers!). They'll probably do.

Really weird people in Frisco...

I had read a review of this movie by Guy Sajer ("The forgotten soldier"). In spite of some bitter criticisms about realism (AT guns used point-blank) or self-flagellating German vision of history, he gave it a rather positive overall appreciation. He said that the strong last picture sums up well the fate of the German army in Russia.

File Name: National counters for Wings Over Africa File Submitter: Capitaine Vengeur File Submitted: 13 August 2011 File Category: SF/WO* Hanger/Menu/Loadout This mod provides you with a batch of colorful, reduced-size, more immersive counters, devoted to each of the nationalities present in Wings Over Africa. Besides having a more attractive map and less confused stacks, you can also find more easily the units you're after. As a rule, the counters with rectangular national flags and division devices show the ground units, while the counters with roundels concern the air units. Click here to download this file

File Name: Choosing and keeping your German personal emblem File Submitter: Capitaine Vengeur File Submitted: 10 August 2011 File Category: Other Central Powers Aircraft Skins Here is a small trick to have your personal plane (and your wingmen's too, if you wish) always display the same fuselage emblem(s) you have chosen from mission to mission during a campaign in First Eagles 1. It will require a little work in installation for every concerned skin, and a few manips before each mission. Click here to download this file

I know only one French movie about WW1 air warfare, and it is definetely not a fine one. "L'instinct de l'ange" (or "Angel's wing", 1993) showed Lambert Wilson (The Merovingian in Matrix 2 & 3) as an avatar of Guynemer: an upper-middle-class boy with feeble constitution due to tuberculosis, very clumsy and dangerous at first in training, but then enraged in stacking air victories to prove he's worth something. He is hated by his brothers-in-arms for his individualistic character and the belief that he brings bad luck, for each time he shoots down a Hun, one of his comrades is killed. He is finally discreetly shot down during a fake dogfight by the one he thought to be his mentor and only real friend, Devrines (avatar of Védrines, of course). Very disturbing, really... The only good point is the presence of many of the planes of La Ferté-Allais (some Morane AI especially, warbirds rarely seen), and some aerial acrobatics staged by Jean Salis.

A movie about the Bong vs McGuire competition for top-ace in the Pacific. I just love the P-38.

It's Heiligwald, actually: Teutonic production. But the Germans can do much better. I liked also the insignia of Escadrille 94 on Hawker's anachronistic plane, and the German Jewish pilot able to hold on laying on his flaming Albatross' back while this one dives like hell to the ground. Or the pilot igniting a balloon with a flare pistol; never heard of that method, but I suppose many more would have done if it was feasable...

A remake of "Black Sheep Squadron"? Well, I just can imagine what a modern Hollywood remake of "Hogan's Heroes" could look like, with CGI and very expensive FX, with Peter Jackson as a director, and John Goodman as Sergeant Schultz, and some Affleck as Colonel Hogan... It would be... It would be... well, appalling, I suppose so!