Lewie

Hellshade's video does a good job of illustrating combat tactics. Interesting in that the attack scenarios I use to better success when stalking and shooting JU88's with a Typhoon in the CFS3 CAP campaign, has a similar pattern, except that the JU88 is generally more interested in dive bombing ground targets. Not that I haven't been nailed by the tailgunner. I tend towards the attack from underneath tactic and have been using the flaps set on the first notch to damp my speed of closing. Yeah i know, apples and oranges.. Which brings me to two seater gunnery. The Bleriot is a two seater with one forward firing fixed gun and a pintle mount Lewis for the rear gunner. When I switch cockpits the joystick control of the free aiming gun suffers from a bit of inertial over swing, something that SDOE FS-WWI has spoiled me on with it's tighter control. The problem I notice is that despite this over swing, that the AI of my opponents in CFS3 have no problem being as deadly an aim as the opponents in SDOE's gunner's AI, and there's less spray in SDOE's guns, 'generally speaking'. So two seater gunnery in OFF is going to take much more practice. But hellshade's demo of setting up your fight so you're not suddenly rushing your opponent in a dive, by cutting throttle is something I've already picked up with SDOE. And just judging by hellshades video, SDOE's ships tend to be more draggy in a dive when you reduce throttle. Not stand on your nose and have it slow down, but you can reduce your airspeed considerably while in a less than 40 degree decent in some kites. Of course both the Farman MF11and the Caudron GIV tends to shake themselves to bits in any speed over 105 mph. Of course slowing down like this in a dive really should not that possible with prototypical fixed throttle rotaries like the early Gnomes. yeah, more apples and oranges..

Shades of the 'Tipsy Nipper' in Those Magnificent Men... The Piggot.. Makes you wonder about the whole fuselage structure and if the wings spars are actually connected to the longerons, I mean otherwise it's kind of a neat looking airplane. I'm tempted to make one for my SDOE-FW-WWI pioneering mod.

I was being reciprocally facetious, sorry if I was misunderstood. I'm actually not new to campaign sims and I presently have a one month old Typhoon pilot in CFS3 that has done nothing but CAP's out of Leiston. ( because he keeps on dying when he elects to go on long patrols and has to fight BF109's). My question is how do you close on an aircraft to attack in a BE2c? Yeah I'm going to start my first WWI pilot in two seaters when OFF arrives. The Fee is especially attractive, because of Frederick Libby's exploits in his autobiographical "Horses Don't Fly".

Some nitwit always comes along and thinks they can improve upon an old discarded idea. Since Alberto Santos-Dumont gave up on the 14Bis back in 1908, you think normal aircraft designers would understand the problems inherent with putting your vertical direction control surfaces up front. The Gilbert Canard And for those of you who think the Roland Whalefish CII was an original design.. I say Nien! Ein Englischer Fabrikrappten The Piggot Bipe..

I just discovered this on YouTube. From the archives of history, a film surfaces recorded in 1919, of travels over the entire Western front, filmed from the cockpit an old coastal patrol airship. And a modern recreation of the trip filming the difference today with CGI overlays of what the front used to look like. In 4 parts, roughly 15 minutes for each segment, it has overflights filmed from a restored Brisfit in the modern portion! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jJ-gEyxek0

My only beef, like Mark's, is it doesn't show the whole 1919 airship film. I really wanted to see all of places he flew his blimp. It was great they tracked down his daughter to interview, but the whole airship film is what I was hoping to see. Stoopid Discovery Channel style hype and sales gimmickry has taken root in Auntie Beeb's flowerbeds. But yeah good show.

Gotcher. See. The. Big. Bits. Of. Enemy. Plane. Hit. Your. Plane. You. Die. Make. New. Pilot.

Ah I found something even more hideous, and it's French, who out excelled themselves with yucky designs in the 20's and 30's. I give you the Albessard Tandem monoplane. First off how is this a monoplane, it's got tandem main wings with rear tail surfaces? And the elusive Etrich cabin Taube, OW! my eyes..

When Bleriot went for big and ugly he didn't mess around. I have to say I'm a big fan of the AVRO company, but even I have limits to that. I present, from the British corner of the Museum, a rather brutishly conceived design by an otherwise sage designer. The AVRO Type "G" What was he thinking? As if the one off type "F" couldn't have been expanded upon, at least it was better looking. And a counter part from the Central powers side would be the Rumpler Cabin Taube, but I'm not finding an image of one.

And because Olham is smitten with Albatroses.. The Albatros DoppleTaube

Well there is the venerable Breguet IV, which looks like the Breguet III, (pictured) with a goiter. And there's the wonderfully quirky Borel Torpille Or the Euler Military triplane Most of these are just prior to the war, not sure if they count

I should correct that the 'Brisfit overflight' was not done over France but flown from the immediate area of the Shuttleworth Collection airfield. Damn, I was so looking forward to overflights of the modern areas of the front by this old kite.

Yes, keep the crates on the ground and get whatever manpower you have at the field into defensive ground gun positions, and hope to hell the armorers haven't been slacking off and leaving the ammo belts and drums half empty. Grab every Lewis and Vickers available and get a man behind it's triggers, you've got a target rich environment that is at a disadvantage for the enemy, because they have to spend 2/3rds of their time climbing back up to altitude and getting reoriented on their targets.

On a more serious note I once had a notion to make the Blackburn Tripe for TargetWare's Richthofen's Skies, I even had half of an FM made up from the few 3 Views I could find online. My guess is it would be a near disaster in ground handling. Because of the narrow track and the roll intertia of the extreme span of the tail surfaces and fuselage placement. Once it got up to speed, got some air flowing over it's various bits it probably wasn't so bad. It would have the same odd gyro precession the DH2 had, coupled with even larger tail surfaces, both capable of making for some really twitchy control inputs. Plus the forest of struts for the tailbooms and rigging which would make for a rearward center of drag which would attempt to damp the tail controls some. This aircraft wouldn't be anywhere near pleasant to fly, but it wouldn't be a complete handful once off the ground either. It would be decidedly odd, quite slow and not very maneuverable,at least in any extreme need. I guess one should look to the other Admiralty aircraft that did get used by the RNAS, The Short 184 wasn't exactly a beauty either, slow, heavy and ponderous, but it was successful for what it did. Compare it to the early Franco-British Aircraft company's flying boats.

Not me, I'd want to be outside with a Lewis on a pintle, shooting up Albies. Of course being a slit trench while doing this would be safer.

Step ladders were in short supply it appears.

If that was 8 aircraft that was nearly half to 2/3rds of a normal squadron strength I'd wager. Do you get to optionally man machine gun pits in these missions?

I was always annoyed with the frequency of RB3D's Campaign Manager CM11's penchant for sending the entire Allied airfield I was a member of, off on repeated airfield attacks, which would decimate our flight group sometimes by two thirds. There was also the frequency of the German airfield strikes, which wasn't a historical norm for 1915-1916 at all for the Jasta's of the western front. Does OFF send in the entire Jasta field's strength in their scramble attacks? Is there anything similar to the CAP that CFS3 has for their WWII campaigns? SDOE FS-WWI has training missions with half decent scramble scenarios. My favorite is the Rumpler Tauben vs. my Eastbourne Monoplanes with handguns. You have to be really good at leading the target when you run the 'turret' of the handgun.

Their early monoplanes were not bad aircraft.The Shuttleworth collection has an original one with it's original Gnome 50 hp that they fly on calm days. [media] [/youtube They also had a few inter-war planes that were notable, but nothing from WWI that was worth mentioning. ]

Well that's the Voison LA2 which was the first plane to carry a machine gun aloft and first to score a kill with it's MG. And the second is a Farman Shorthorn, and was one of the most common French observation aircraft of the 1914-1916 era. Happe's Bomber squadron Esc MF25 rose to their own fame flying the "Chicken Coop". Neither were designed originally as pursuit planes, but they have their own level of successes.

I take it you've not seen the Blackburn Tripe? It's nearly the same airplane.. Then of course there's the Wight Quadraplane.. And my favorite , which I also made a scale RC model of.. The Austin Triplane.

Since I'm waiting on my copy of OFF to arrive and have installed CFS3, I went searching for 3rd party aircraft. I found a few different aircraft online for downloading. I've downloaded the Brisfit and the Jenny, and there's supposed to be a DR1 somewhere online. The Brisfit is fun but oddly enough it loads into the American Squad's aircraft. anyone know of other WWI aircraft available for CFS3?

Thanks for the link. I've found some other links, I now have two different Bleriot XI's and the Jenny in addition to the Brisfit, running in the sim. It's funny, in the Campaign I have a pilot in, the 1909 Bleriot is part of the planes parked out on field in the entry 'movie'. The Bleriots and the Jenny all needed much work on their .cfg files to run in CFS3. I'm not sure if their creators were clued in to how beta they were. The Jenny especially had a .cfg file that looked nothing like a CFS3 file, and it would keep bringing up a dialog box saying that the game couldn't load it. I've dialed in the old 1909 Channel crosser so it flies like the original, with a 41 mph speed maximum and about a 150 fpm climb rate.

Back when Memorial Flight, the Musee 'd Air workshop that restores and builds new/old WWI aircraft, found their LVG CV, they had disassembled all of the fuselage formers, took photos of them layed out on the concrete of the shop floor. It was pretty interesting how cleverly the fuselage was shaped around these formers. Quite a few German aircraft from WWi were made of a "molded' type of plywood skin like the Pfalz. Great series of images btw thank you.

It was the precursor to stressed skin construction of WWII aircraft with Aluminum sheet. Actually the DH Mosquito wasn't too far removed from this construction technique.