Lewie

It would be nice if the claim forms could have an option of automatically filed, or... The full-on St. Omer, "Can Can you find my claim claim? No-ones around to blame blame, were the hells my claim, claim...

Or in my case live in and around a forest most of your life, so you get a good feel for what looks life-like. and I have to say the forests in Alsace are looking pretty damn good. There are certain 3D scripts or plugins for some kinds of 3D renderers. Blender has what's called a "Discombobulator" Python script that will insert random objects, in a random order of a bunch of pre selected 3D shapes onto a surface or group of surfaces. They use it mainly to put lots of busy little gizmos and techy looking stuff on the surface of 3D spaceships, but I could see it being used to generate lots and lots of trees on a terrain mesh.

OK,... I guess this is to keep one more aware of the social aspect of being in a squad. Sorry if this isn't computing for me, but I figured the claim forms would be subject to all the normal bureaucracy and mayhem of something being filed in a state of high chaos. But to actually have a bit of user encouraged non functionality of the sim. I mean it's crashing to desktop!? I'm sorry guys but this is just so nuts..

As you know Elvis sightings are highly over rated. And besides, Mojo Nixon put that Istanbul malarkey to rest. Elvis is everywhere, man...

What? a windows product mod that doesn't have windows functionality? It's incontheibable! OK *sigh* So I should write down the entire flight's crew names before I hit the field? Are you pulling my leg? The annoying thing is, in both cases, the forms for the claims came up, but when I tried to click and drag the claim form down or to the side, or tried clicking on the roster chalkboard to bring it topside, the Mission generator loaded another Mission that failed to execute, caused a runtime error, and then it CTD and erased my just finished mission. You guys tolerate this?

( Hmmm, 305 posts and he already has a fan base?..) I'm not trying hard enough, obviously..

I have to say that the CFS3-OFF control and keyboard mapping configurator in 'controls' , in the right side drop down menu is one of the easiest and most intuitive of any sim I've had the pleasure of using. Open the menu, select controls and you'll see a grey and white pop-up window with the configuration selections Your default joystick will be named 'mine' but you can add as many as you like. Plus you get the ability to narrow down the search of what category the controls are that you want to configure, so you don't have to spend several minutes scrolling through 'all commands'. It's a piece of cake really, just click on the command you wish to change to highlight it, then select the button 'delete assignment' and click it, then select 'add assignment', click it, and then press either the joystick button, or the keyboard key you wish to use. It will occasionally ask if you wish to change what is an already assigned key or button, so make your choice with some forethought.

The loneliness of the long distance virtual tree planter. I tried to replicate the Black Forest in TargetWare using their base models for Stone Pines and Red Fir, they just ended up looking like a tree farm. It takes talent to be able to make a forest look like it's naturally planted.

Thanks Parky, I get the impression you take your tech more seriously, considering what you had to share you could have ended it at the first paragraph, but...

That was quick, I might have bid on that if I hadn't been so sluggish this morning.

I appreciate the recommendation plug_, but it's just another "We are the Borg, you will be assimilated" monstrosity. It's huge and weighs nearly two pounds! My case will not have see through sides so LED fans are, well, useless. This is close to what I'd like to get, but i'd prefer it in an all aluminum package.. This is the ThermalTake MeOrb Low profile, and it's looking better and better. There's not a lot of options close to what I want, that aren't stock model coolers, that themselves are barely able to handle the heat.

Well if you have to, get yourself a twisty joystick, at least one with enough optional buttons and hat switches so you can move some of the more frequently used keyboard commands to the joystick. My recommendation would be to initially move the elevator trims to two of the buttons straight away, as it will reduce the amount of workload trying to hold the joystick off center for climbing and descending rates. get to know your throttle control and treat it like it's supposed to be, as the up and down control. Most of these kites have little handling quircks. Also get to know your F4 key for panning external views and keep the "Z" key, ( which brings up the HUD information..) handy so you can keep track of how the various planes handle, their stall speed and which direction they're headed, as some like the Bebe don't have a compass.

Granted it's a nice cooler, and respectfully I'm not sure I see the logic in buying a CPU cooler that is much more expensive than the CPU it's cooling. I'm not an overclocker, and I don't think that an Athlon II 3 GHz dual core would make appreciable use of it's overly ample cooling. You can't say that system is low profile or simple. The radiator itself is huge. I'm trying for a small footprint and low tech reliability. Plus I'm on a budget, that cooler is more than both the case and PS I'm looking at.

I like the Sopwith Camel but I've only flown it in CFS3, and if the Nieuport 11 is any indication that the planes do fly differently between CFS3 and OFF. The Bebe Nupe is good kite, but it's touchy about climb rate and rudder input and it has a good portion of gyro procession to make rudder turns interesting. Yes hydration helps but I don't always remember that when I've been drinking.

I usually have a couple of technicolor discussions with the Great Porcelain God before I can even think of sleeping, if I ever am that far down the bottle(s). Airplane spins, you can keep them, let the Camel pilots get their thrills getting dizzy..

I'll have to look that cooler up, I'm in the USA. Yes, Arctic Silver compound comes highly recommended, and I'm using it in my laptop. It's stellar stuff.

Yeah, see that's what I don't like about these water coolers, they aren't simple and one piece. here's a Thermaltake Chrome Orb for a Socket A AMD.. For 2001 it was a great CPU cooler and it is adequately effective even with it's fan removed and a case fan blowing on it. It's all aluminum, well made, if I was to make a motorcycle engine analogy this would be the radial finned head of a Maico 450, simple, easy to clean and more than adequate for cooling. Something like this in a much more effective low profile form package with about 4 times the fin area and the ability to adequately cool even if the fan malfunctions. Water cooling has it's place, but I don't trust it in a computer. It's still dependent on something moving, in this case 'water' in a thermosyphon system that still needs to liberate the heat away from the CPU after 'conducting' it away. Aluminum already does this.

Hi Rugby, Some of these newer AMD dual and quad core CPU they say it's about 70~120 watts output, depending on whether you overclock. That is a lot of heat for such a small footprint. Just from my own electronics experience running any complex semiconductor at over 80~100 C is asking for shortened life. My concern with these new coolers is that they are top heavy and the fans are mounted up high and are frequently plain bearing cheapies that can start to vibrate with age, if they aren't already somewhat 'buzzy' to begin with. Vibration is not a friend of your CPU. All box fans are fairly cheap in construction, it's one of the reasons I scavenge old systems for better fans.

One will also notice in the pair of images uncleal posted, that the Voison LA, ( lower image..) has a big 4 bladed propeller powered generator sitting on the lower left wing, and you can bet that they used it plenty, There's nothing crazy about keeping warm on a long and high altitude obs mission.

I think my laptop would be a fair representation of a low end machine, even though at it's time it was considered one of the better laptops. HP Compaq Presario R3400 running windows XP 32 w/SP2 and recent updates AMD Athlon 64 ( single core ) at 1.8 GHz 2 gigs of Ram NiVidia Geforce Go440 64 meg discrete video card I'm doing quiet sector campaigns with the video set at 16 bit colors and 1024 X 768 pixels, and I frequently get about an average of 24 FPS that drops some to about 17 FPS if the background gets busy. I let the OFF GPU configurator at it's default, and just turned off the shadows in 'Display'. I would suspect that most folks would find this resolution, frame rate, and color level not acceptable, but since I run quite a few late 90's and early 2K era sims and 3D programs, I'm pretty happy with what I'm getting out of this old clunker. It used to get pretty warm when taxing the video and CPU but cleaning out the dust bunnys, reseating the cpu/gpu cooler and applying new heat sink compound has helped it a lot.

There may have been some sort of harness or simple restraint. I'm not sure what it looked like.

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ what he said.. I'd like to add that the only true trainer aircraft in OFF is the RAF BE2c or Quirck. This is where this sim could use some variety, an AVRO 504 and an Albatros BII would be good entry level trainers. There is a freeware WWI sim that has a number of easy to fly early WWI aircraft, and the flight model is less rigorous than OFF's

If you think the allied pusher pilots had it tough look at the rear gunner's 'cages' on the Caproni Ca33 They were completely out in the open. Quite few of these aircraft did come with wind powered generators to provide electrical power for the Obs and gunner's resistive wire heated suits.

Oh well, a fateful morning to you all.. I finally got my recalcitrant DVD onboard burner/player on my laptop running. It was a couple of problems, a corrupted driver file, and the darn CPU shares it's heatsink with some of the various 12 volt rail drivers and the GPU, and one of them was a bit out of contact with the cooler surface. It was mounted this way since it came from the factory..:P At any rate the cooler doing it's job rather better, and has also upped the GPU performance a smidge, and I was able to get the OFF disc to read! It's installed. It would read CD-ROMs OK. I have no idea why this is, but I'll say this, having a HP Presario laptop forum to peruse is what saved this puppy. I also bought some Artic Silver compound and it's now pumping out the heat that used to warm the keyboard. Big plusses. HP's quality control of this era's 'puter is less than stellar if the laptop forum is any indication. I started a French fighter Sous Leut. pilot with Esc 118 in June of '16. He was flying from Marcuiex and had been tasked with his first mission, a 'loon shoot with rockets in his Nupe 11 kite with two wingmen. It was a sucky start as it was raining hard and the upper cloud deck was about 4000'. When he got to his third waypoint across the front he noticed that he was being followed by a trio of bogeys about 2000' feet lower. Instead of doing the smart thing, and continuing on, I decided to stir the pot a little and see if I could get them to crash on their own by circling above them. But I lost some altitude myself and broke this off. We continued on at about 3600' to the target, with our curious Bosche in tow. Unfortunately right when I was within about 2 miles of the target, I was hit by a flak round that severely reduced my engine power and whapped an aileron. I had no choice but to abort the flight and launched the rockets at my pursuers, then circled around while repeatedly telling my moronic wingmen to save their hinders, while I kept sinking lower and lower. I don't know if they made it back but I managed a rough field landing and was immediately captured. feh! Well time for a new pilot, as Didier is stuck in a holding cell awaiting transfer somewhere. What a busy morning. Oh yeah I think I can claim having the slowest PC that still runs OFF in a near tolerable manner. I think I'll stay with early war year pilots and semi quiet sectors. The Alsace region is quite pretty.

Yeah I suspect this is what will happen. I was hoping that that OFF, like RB3D, does an occasional die roll and sometimes pops your interned pilot out via a hike in the rough through Switzerland. I guess Didier is going to be weeding turnips for the Kaiser for the remainder of the war. I want to keep the die roll option myself, Oh well, Didier vers. 2 coming up.