Lewie

Actually a few, there's a couple in enthusiasts hands on the continent and there's a few in Australia. Now how many Indian 4's do your neighbors own, eh? Besides look at the Indian, it's a farm implement at best, considering it's at least 18 years newer than the FN, and its well over 500 pounds in weight. The FN 4 was a sprightly 230 pounds, it's lighter than my Yamaha dualsport XT225.

It wasn't available in 1913? Besides it took BMW almost 68 years to figure out how to build a bike like the Belgium made FN. Look it up, the FN was the first inline four cylindered motorcycle made in the world, and it won races.

Why do people think the Nieuports had bad visibility? The upper wing had a generous cockpit cutout, and it wasn't that far above the fuselage. Not anything like the Albatross DI, and it also had the thin chord lower wing, which helped with low visibility. Compared to the Sopwith Pup they were fine.

Generally, and it's quite literally "generally" as there were more versions of the later types than you can shake a stick at. The N23/N24 had former and stringer rounded fuselages past the cockpits, but usually retained the comma rudder and trapezoid shaped horizontal tails. They also uprated from the LeRhone 110 hp to the LeRhone 130 or the Clerget 130. The N27 'generally' had the same features as the N23/24 but also had the Nieuport 28's tail shapes with the fin and rudder and arc shaped stab and elevator. These planes would be delivered with whatever armament the squads would request, either twin Vickers, single Vickers, with a Forster mount Lewis or just the Vickers or just the Lewis. Also remember that the first N28's the fledgling AEF corps got were often without any guns.

Mine's more colorful and it's a flatbed, so I can come pick up the remains of your bike ride.. First time for everything, a bicycle that explodes when climbing a hill, what will they think of next? Why didn't you guys, when you were making the Schlieffen Plan tour through Belgium, pick up a few FN motorcycles? Tres hot!

From Mason's book "The Escadrille Lafayette", The early N17's that Esc. N124 received were delivered to Luxeiul without any guns. The base CO had to drive up to the Nieuport factory, and track down enough guns and interrupter mechanisms to get their squad up and fighting. There was a couple of conversions done to mount the over wing Lewis, but Kiffin and Lufberry were particularly annoyed with the small amount of ammo carried in the drum of the Mk1 Lewis and the struggle it was to change the cartridge drum while in flight.

The weight of the Vickers and it's interrupter gear, I'd think. They were not a aircraft with a lot of wing area.

You should post some pictures of your Howard when it gets close to being finished. BTW thanks.

Nieuport Sesquiplanes are tricksy little buggers, the same lightness and relative ease that they can be flicked, about is also dangerous in combat because they are kinda flimsy. You don't want to dive them very fast, best to lose altitude with a series of split-esses and quick vertical turns. They are, (were) my favorite plane in RedBaron3D. I had one campaign persona who started with the N10 and finished with the N27.

No that's actually quite a small model, only about 38 inches in wingspan. It's scaled one inch to the foot or one/twelfth scale, i.e. 1/12" . I don't have room for big models either, most of my planes are about 1/12" or 1/14" scale. They're considered 'parkflyers', and the Farman II is flown a bit faster than a fast walking pace.

Yes indeed it does, and it's also quite scale about it's flight envelope as it quits flying and drops like a soggy feather if the power goes away. There's a lot of drag in the airframe. Plus some interesting interactions with the lifting tail surfaces and the prop blast over them. I rather like really early Farman Boxkites...

I thought I'd post this image of my 1/12" scale 1911 Farman III electric powered RC model. It is scratchbuilt with the scale control yoke and rudderbar controlling the flight control surfaces.

For a career flying a plane commonly known as the "spinning incinerator" I think you had a pretty good run and a fair stroke of luck. DH2's were known for occasionally throwing a cylinder off. I'm wondering if this was an attempt to model this in the damage modelling?

Back in the dim dark AMD Socket A days, the GPU's often had a utility bundled with them that adjusted the removal of unseen polygons from 3D images. You could adjust either to aggressive or none. A cockpit view's FPS will largely be regulated by whether there is a lot of polygons present or not. Same with external shots. This is why as a 3D modeller you acquire the habit of being economical with your polygons. Not stingy, but intelligent about their inclusion. It also depends on whether the polygons are animated, and if they are making draw calls from a number of different image files, what the size of the files are, and if those image files are being called upon to do any alpha masking or other custom lighting functions. This is probably at the transistion point for CFS3 and possibly Shader 1.5 tech but I don't know if CFS3 uses Direct draw or OpenGL for rendering.

Yup, me too, we have a store that stocks bulk Sri Lankan ( Ceylonese ) black that's my favorite. And as in the RFC old school, we add a wee dram of Issue Rum on cold nights when we have to ride the Messenger motorbike to St. Omer.

Well if it was indeed Zepps, then the home defense crews would have been flying special Quircks and Fees. And don't get so cocky, some of your lads fell to the home defense crews of 1916. Just sayin'...

Does OFF have a 'best rate of climb' setting for autopilot? I'm just asking as in fighter Squadron WWI when you set waypoints usually the sim will try to keep the aircraft at a reasonable airspeed to climb rate. Just going on one of my 35 hp pioneers I've been testing, a shallow climb is actually a quicker way to altitude than trying to yo-yo or mush at a higher AOA. This was very true of the Fokker EIII and Vickers Gunbus of Richthofen Skies, especially the Gunbus which was a dog for climbing.

I'm not that familiar with OFF's limitations, but considering the time period and the aircraft commonly used, historically 8000 to 10.000 is a pretty good altitude for the engines and airframes of the time to achieve. The Oberusal was a copy of the Gnome 80 and 100 h.p. which had atmospheric intake valves which really limited altitude severely. The RAF and Renault aircooled V8's of the time where not much better. It took many minutes to reach even 6000 feet with these old engines. Add to it airfoils, strutting and wires that added to an already draggy aircraft. In addition to DID there should be the early war proviso 'Early is Slow and Low'. Not sure how you would implement it, considering that some folks like to warp. I'm just going on my experiences with RedBaron 3D patched with the WFP2 and the early war campaigns flying the Farman F40, BE2's and Aviatics.

A few months ago I approached you on the Aerodrome Forum about using my models in OFF, but the response I seemed to remember was lukewarm. If you want to see what I've built, you can go to OpenPlaneSim.com, ArgonV's website for all things SDOE, and take a look at the RE8 of mine we recently have up for beta testing. I have a number of two seaters and early war kites, unfortunately I have a fondness for French lattice tails, and prewar pioneers, which probably wouldn't be as needed in OFF. I do have a SpadXI It will have to be completely remapped and the interior built. These are in AC3D format. Still interested?

Having watched the development happen in another dedicated, openly editable combat sim, I'd say that the OFF team is trying to do the right thing. User editable sims usually have to have the contributions beta tested thoroughly for compatibility and 'user friendliness', and a wide consensus reached with the dedicated user base about it's inclusion. Patches and updates are always apt to have rushed tweaks and cludges to make something work that wasn't available prior. Well I would consider myself as 'old blood' but in that matter I'm still game for the hunt so to speak.

Yes they were rugged as hell. as long as you made sure the oil content in the fuel was correct, and set the timing every time you cleaned or changed plugs, they would go forever. But the local police did not like my car on cold mornings, they said I was "fogging for mosquitoes". It did smoke a bit when cold. The SAAB engine was based on the old DKW Schnurle ported two stroke car engine, that the Trabant inherited. Long stroke, lots of low end torque for such a little engine. I own a Volvo 740 now and even it seems complex. I sometimes wish I still had my old SAAB.

No, I'm sorry I should have clarified that the light was coming through the spark plug insulators, which are normally a bit translucent, especially the NGK and Bosch, ( the later were particularly hard to find.) The Bosch were more translucent than the NGK's and I kept a clean set in the glove box for checking out my engine's ignition system. As you can see the spark plugs are right on top of the engine and are easy to see.

You may already know this, but. When resizing images, some programs like PSP have two options called Resize and Resample. If the images are temporarily changed from .bmp's to .jpg's and then resampled from a quality larger image, the jpg resample will approximate the quality of the Jpg at a smaller size with less 'rasterizing' of the image that you would normally get if only resized. The downside is the whole of the image quality suffers some as resampling adds odd artifacts to the edges of lines and sharply delineated shapes.

Long ago, I used to own a '62 SAAB 96 sedan with the 36 hp two stoke engine. It had these huge spark plugs that needed to be cleaned at 3000 mile intervals. One way you could tell if they needed to be cleaned was by the way the new ones conducted light from the flame of combustion in the cylinders. It was pretty interesting to pop the hood open and watch the light show from revving up the engine on a dark night. It also was a good way to see which plugs were fouled or really dirty with soot.

I love OFF. I have watched all the vids, read all I can about the sim, and have been following it closely since it was announced many years back. Problem is I've been following the itch to build 3D models for a WWI sim for ages, and have spent considerable time with Targetware's 0.64 version Richthofen's Skies and here lately with ArgonV's wonderful but somewhat limited sim Fighter Squadron WWI. I want to contribute to OFF, but my machines are ancient museum pieces I keep running with baling wire and Ebay used parts. A new system is just not in the works for me this time. The Simple question, the one I dread asking here because it really shines a light on how not so well off I am is... What kind of minimum system will run OFF in it's most basic, utilitarian state? I'm not expecting DX 10 Shader 2 abilities, but I am capable of DX9 vers B on my best machine, but it is limited by an old MX series NVidia 440 card with 64megs of vid RAM. Yup, I know, pretty hopeless, I've been told repeatedly by smarter folks. So I ask the experts here. Cheers Lewis Some screenies from some RC models I've done for AFDP/Easyfly.