Lewie

I think if you Google E-Coli and Farming in the US in particular, you'll find enough hits about contaminated food. Generally this is because the fertilizer commonly used is from Dairy farms and feed lots. A simple solution would be to compost the stuff, but that adds labor and cost. And since as 'developed' countries, we have this thing about giving our food animals lots of hormones and antibiotics... And yet we are surprised when super 'bugs' appear and make people sick or worse. It's all about expediency and profit margins.

'Two weeks' was the code word for Targetware's long delayed update back in the day. Seems to be a common meme in sim development.

Just make sure the SS DIV doesn't use the Ersatz oil.

You know there's a couple of late-war 1918-1920 era blimps that were made for CFS3-OFF-2? Launching them from my favorite CFS-3 airfield causes much mayhem. Oh the humanity!

I'd like some nice summer weather, um, quite a ways before Christmas, please..

If you look closely a a few of the early lattice tailed kites and the Nieuport V strutters there was quite a bit of fabric wrapping of wooden support struts. It's used to give the wood some strength against longitudinal splitting.

Some of them had full body pilots visible from the 'head' view, some didn't. I think the body looks a little big from the headview, but they are wearing Sidcots which were pretty bulky.

That's just the Guynemer Way " Nobody gets me baby, I'm like the wind..."

I have to fire up the OFF the Nupe campaign again to check, but here's the N12 from Targetware. The joystick's lower end is somewhat hidden by the seat in this shot, but the fulcrum it pivots on to move the ailerons, is a cruciform shaped device which has it's lateral ends connected to the pushrods running up to the aileron bell cranks in the wings, the two big greyish tubes close to the front end of the seat are the pushrods. The whole mechanism is articulated except for the 1/3rd circle cable sheave on the joystick for the elevator cables since TW doesn't do mesh warping or deformations or even keyframing in version 0.64 it's not possible. Second image it appears that the pushrods don't articualte with the bellcranks, an the joystick fulcrum is below a floor fascia. But then the N17 is a bit different from the earlier N12 two seater.

I rather like the cockpit of the OFF Nupes but they do miss one detail. All the Nupe V strutters in Richthofen's Skies had the entire functiong monkey works of the joystick>transverse rods> aileron pushrods>aileron bellcranks>ailerons. It was a joy to watch all the interconnected gizmos as you pushed it through maneuvers. The cockpit of their N12 was especially open and had the celluloid covered center section of the upper wing. I'm not sure how close to accurate it was but it was a joy to fly even if it sounded like a 1950's Cessna.

I'm going to stick my cheapskate neck out and say that my Saitek ST290 pro wasn't a bad deal. It's limited in extra buttons but it has a hat switch and a pretty ergonomically adjustable hand rest for left and right handers. I've had to do some modifications to remove the 'goop' they use to damp the throttle and rudder axis' and to weaken the centering spring in the rudder twisty bits. They are a bit of a challenge to open up in the handle because of the amount of interlocking bits that work with the 4 screws that hold it together. I also trimmed away the stops to open the twist arc some, it was easy to do with a hobbyknife. It was $21.00 including shipping, it's cheap enough that you could buy 3 and for it's price the construction is more than adequate using pretty resilient ABS plastic. Even 32 bit XP recognizes the stick immediately once plugged into the USB port, painless uninstallation and reinstallation because of it being in Windows' driver .cab files. It gets pretty good ratings for being a 'beginners joystick' in Amazon's reviews, mainly the price and it's sturdiness.

I like the OFF Nupe 17, if anything it's better than the various Nupe V-strut versions of RB3D patched, that had, (especially), the Lewis gun N17's which in WFP were as doggy climbers as the Sop Pup and Spad 7 in Full Canvas Jacket. The thing the OFF Nupe 17 excells at is descending turn fights with fast "E" gain after you finish your turn around, no plane in the game does this as well. It can be combined with little zoom and booms but you are limited to how fast you can dive.

Well in some of my 'other sim' development you find that sometimes that draw calls for images and mapping for 3D shapes, especially if these are a bunch of numerous and separate little image files, can slow down frame rates on even more than adequate machines. This is part of why a lot of 3D artists started working with what is called 'texture atlasing' which takes the bunch of smaller files and combines them into a larger mega file that might have special compression programming, or predirection tags for certain shapes or particle effects. I notice that OFF uses .sm files for the static ground objects, which are what OpenPlaneStudio uses. But they don't open on OPS so they might be a special compressed version of this file. There is all sorts of little tricks to get games with vast amounts of details and resource hungry effects to run better

I have to wonder why we are asking this when Po stated in his update thread that P4 at this stage was running pretty well on a system he's using for P3. I suspect they will find some things that make it run well on machines that are adequate for playing P3, we will still have detail sliders, right?

I'm not sure where my "performance spec's" are at, since I'm running XP 32 bit. I don't seem to have that info available from right clicking 'My Computer>Properties.' It's a Gigabyte AMD socketed micro ATX Mb with a Regor Athlon II 250 which isn't in the list of processors in the poll..

I think you'll find it's the same series I posted an Youtube thread about last February, it is a great series

yup coming up... For the most part looking towards the SouthEast, and the ill fated Etrun airfield. Plus there is ample hunting to the North, as the Hannoveren's like to do airfield attacks near constantly at the cluster of airfields and front-line Spotters surrounding Armentiers.

Well untill I get the 3 LED cap made I'm limited to just two axis'. Sso I can't duck my head down at all. Which brings up a funny thing about Targetware's Richthofen's Skies, when I was making models for it, the pilot 3D mesh is one-sided, like it should be, but sometimes in the .acm file you'ld get the eye point placement off, and you would be looking out from the pilot's virtual chest or neck, which with mouse panning was a bit odd at times.

If you want to play in a two seater 'career' in another sim, SDOE's FS-WWI has the abilities to fly as either pilot, bomber, or photographer in their respective veiws and places, The HP 400 and the Caproni Ca33 are a treat because of the multiple choices for gunnery stations.

I like RFC 71's and AFC3's home field of Bruay It's a bit closer to the lines but not so close as to have the insane Jasta visitations that Etrun gets near Arras. Seems like every third flight south from Bruay there's a few Albatros' harassing poor old RFC13. My two Camel jockeys have made their ace status from Etruns attraction to airfield attacks. I can see why my RE8 pilot with 'Lucky' 13 has become somewhat of an offensive two seater ace.

The Sopwith Camel has the instruments blocked by all of the MG hardware, I end up using the HUD function often times.

Bumped Just for future reference, all I want to know is will we be able to continue to use our present video cards and processors? Inquiring minds..

I'm getting a bit annoyed with the virtual cloud of German offensive overflights that happen well deep into allied airspace over your assigned CAP area. I just lost my favorite pilot Pippin Laetra to a bad crash when he and two wing men got into a skirmish with 3 other German offensive patrols. They hadn't a chance, it was a ratio of 6 or seven pilots/planes per flight of German flights. It was whack-a-mole for 30 minutes until Pips ran out of ammo. This is why I don't fly assigned allied side flights anymore, there's far too many German offensive flights and the game unrealistically 'plans' your arrival coincident with far too many opponents. JMHO

Nothing to report here, apparently the Left coast is too socialist to be raptured by that heinous twit of a god, suits me fine.

I found this short little clip, since Mike's video's got me interested in 'arry Tates I thought I'd celebrate these venerable old workhorses. {youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0YB_fwVlkQ&feature=related Notivce how easily the RAF 4A lights off when they get ready to leave. Let's post up a bunch of old WWI aircraft videos..