Lewie

A more modern version of a STOL aircraft is the PZL Wilga. It will never win any beauty contests but it does the job of getting off and back down from the ground handily enough..

And from the archives on Youtube from PublicRescource.Org. Newsreel film clips from WWI. Some RNAS Hydroplane operations.

And from the History Channel the series 'From Flying Coffin to Gladiators of the Skies' which has much in the way of archival film

Some archival footage of the Baron himself.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkB_vlh0iMs&feature=related

You have to also remember that Dr. Gros of the French Army was the developer of the two component Gasoline-Aniline explosive aerial 'safety' bomb that was adopted by nearly all of the Entente forces after its introduction in 1916. Before this, the French in particular, were using retro fitted with fins, artillery shells. There were a number of horrific accidents involving the 155mm shell being fitted up to aircraft. So the French army did eventually get it right. But the Gros bomb had other problems, one in particular was the aniline agent leaking past the seals and stinking up the cockpit, nauseating the crews. Still it was the first real attempt to address the need to make a bomb that stayed relatively inert until it hit the ground.

Well I'm officially in the OFF realistic cockpit sim mode now. Downloaded Freetrack 2.2 and read everything I could about any issues it would have with CFS3 and OFF, then set up a simple 2 axis, 1 LED head movement tracker to test it out. I'm using a cheap old headband mounted camping LED illumination lamp with a bit of Scotch brand frosted tape to blur the light source some. combine with an old USB webcam I've had for ages but never used, and It works quite well. It's actually astoundingly easy to set up. It's been said before but, woah, having the ability to crane the ol' neck around, and actually look at my squadmates while they start to take off, and to avoid the new pilot hotshots that like to cross in front of you when you're circling to regroup, is going to help save some of my pilot's careers.

Yes, I had envisioned some sort of contraption made of some of my less than stellar, 1/4" square balsa sticks with a pair of small alligator clips hanging off of my glasses. Add to it an on-off switch, connectors, 1500 milliamp hour single cell Lipoly and a snarl of wires, I'm the Geek from the Freak Lagoon.

It maybe apples to oranges in this case, but I've got a couple of hours flying time behind the stick of of the Richthofen's Skies DRI. And it's a handful, but it's much like the Camel in the same game, it's got that 'nervous as a long tailed cat in room full of rockers', twitchy turning ability, that the RS Tripe didn't have. The Tripe in this game is pretty mild and well behaved, it's odd that it feels a lot like the Camel in OFF also. One British plane I would have liked to have seen compared to the DRI in realspace would have been the BR2 powered Austin Osprey triplane. But since it never made the jump from experimental to squadron issue we'll never know.

Here's a video of the real thing a Omaka in EnZed. And the FT-17 Renault at Rhienbeck.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU8HGs_GrRw&feature=related Are they? As my copy only had the Model T and bicycle..

Yeah as much as I hate wearing hats indoors it might be easier. Definitely in the 'fabricated in a couple hours' range with soldering iron and a hot glue gun.

When I joined The Aerodrome I noticed that Dan San was extremely knowledgeable about nearly everything WWI. His style of writing also spoke of someone well on and experienced in years. I think we in this society take older people for granted sometimes, his loss will never be fully known, as Dej has said, a lot of the unshared stuff left with him. And we are poorer for it.

Yes It's fantastic. The immersive factor just went up exponentially. It's not a big frame rate hog either, I think I lost maybe 1 or 2 FPS overall. I need to build the 3 LED version that clips to your reading glasses' sidepiece so I can get the 6 DOF part activated. But as it is, this simple 2 axis set up is fine, as it cures 90% of the ills with the fixed cockpit view.

What I've found is that in about 30% of my missions, that I've got enemy aircraft lurking nearby, since we're right on the front, I often times end up involved in helping defend my field, squadmates, or the escorts at times. Usually minutes after I've cleared the sod. My character with RFC 13 is also fond of hunting the odd DFW passing by, which saves on the long arduous climb to '9000.

I put together a inexpensive, light gaming machine that I run XP 32 bit OS on. It runs OFF at some respectable FPS's. I'd recently discovered that my PCI-e slot for the video card frequency, was a bit slow, and was slowing OFF some, so I bumped it up with the tuning software that comes with the Gigabyte motherboard. My system, if anything, is a bit slow compared to what others here in the forum use, but I still get 40 to 50 fps most times and it drops into the mid 20's when I've got a busy background like Mont St. Eloi airfield with 5 Fees waiting to take off. My system is a Gigabyte M68-SP2, with a Athlon II XII 250, with 4 gigs of DDR2 800 mhz RAM, EVGA GeForce GT 430 1 Gig vid card, anda Western Digital 500 gig generic 7200 rpm SATA HDD, with a 450 watt PS. Frankly it runs so cool that it seems like the PS is overkill. The EVGA GT430 is considered one of the lowest current consuming video cards in the 1 Gig memory range of cards. It's not considered a powerhouse for gaming though. The Gigabyte M-68 series motherboard also has IDE slots, a floppy slot and com ports, so it's got a bit of old periphrial capability. That was nice as I've plugged in my old HDD to transfer files off of. My system was about $345 US. It also runs all my legacy and Win 98SE vintage sims I've got at blazing speeds. BTW welcome aboard and I'll take a Rogue Dead Guy Ale

I usually select it depending on how I want to plan my obs/bombing runs, sometimes the path the game chooses for you isn't the best option.

Well a few of them wrote memoirs.. Frederick Libby : Horses Don't Fly

I guess this part if the forum's 'help section' doesn't have the answers I need to figure out what to do with GMAX. Please don't tell me to 'search' the forum, I have searched and searched. I've imported a 3DS file, looks fine, but I'm not able to get the mapping to show. And I take it that to export to the format that CFS3-OFF uses, I also need to have CFS3 installed? I spent a bit of time looking at other format importers for GMAX, seems to be the general consensus that most if not all of the 3rd party import exporters have flaws and bugs. Bugger! Discouragement has been my companion today, I'm getting sick of his company.

While I'm at it I'd thought I'd post this link to a Youtube vid I uploaded recently, it is a recording from my copy of RC Desk Pilot's R/C modeling sim. I've made a few models for this sim, since I got started in 3D with RC modeling with Flying Model Simulator. This particular vid is of my Sopwith Strutter model chasing the flock of Starlings 'away from the maize crops' game in the sim.. The sim uses Direct X files and comes with it's own model maker cum animator. It's fully DirectX 9.0C with Net 2.5 compatible. He's planning a small lake with decent water effects, and reflection mapping. I'm trying to talk him into modelling multi main winged aiframes for biplanes and tripes, but as it is the FM is only monoplanes. he does however has this killer airfoil and airframe modelling inteface with the model editor. All in a small 14 meg download, and it's free! Give it a try, it's excellent. RC Desk Pilot

Yes I've read Milt's Tute(s) it's one of the best, and it describes using boolean cuts in a way I could understand. Now if SOH would only except my registration, damn Yahoo email restriction, I've been with them for 12 years, it's never been a problem before. Yeah. I'm probably selling Gmax short, My problem is trying to keep all of the UI functions all of the 4 different 3D renderers I use straight when I sit down to make stuff. TrueSpace 7.61 beta 8 is quite possibly the worst UI and most bloatware filled 3D renderer I've used. 'Pick' is probably on because I don't have a clue as to what it does? The UI of Gmax is still quite bewildering to me, My experience limited to renderers with more basic UI's, but I've found that the meshes using this process come though perfectly, and with a little forethought and if I persevere at it. So I don't need to use Pick, didn't figure it out as at one point I was just randomly clicking functions. I'd reached a frustration saturation point. I think one of the conversions loses the mapping co-ordinates, butI'm not all that concerned, the old mapping was a crude 256X256 pixel .tga. BTW here's my 1912 Caudron with the wing warping modification.. This is a big success for me al the parts are intact, no missing polys the alignmrnt of the parts is perfect, it's probably not scaled correctly yet but I can check this as I go it's easy to rescale.

Well from all the information I can gather it looks like I'm just going to have to accept that I'm going to have to remap these meshes. The originals would have been nice to have. but they're less that fair in quality and size, resolution.. I've gotten the meshes to reliably show in Gmax, that's a big start, as I'd prefer to do these models in Metasequoia initially. Still it's a bit of an annoyance.

OK the one time and place I'd like to time travel back to. Martleson Heath of Spring 1909, for at least for a couple of months so I can watch ( and take photos..) of A.V. Roe while he builds and flies his first Triplane. No big deal, no big explosions, just history being made in a small way.

More muddling along, I can't seem to figure out how to make it remember the original mapping co-ordinates. AC3D can do this, TrueSpace can also, What gives with Gmax?

well through stupid trail and er-r-r-rrro-or.. I figured it would be stumped by files other than a BMP so a bmp is what it got... I've gotten this far. BUT WTF? it's just takes the over color of the .bmp and makes it mud colored.. I give up..

Thanks Hairy,, I was expecting this to be a bit convoluted but.. OK I have the material box open, I have the mapping file, (a .TGA) in the file finder, how come I am unable to ''drag-n-drop" the image file from the finder to the material box.. and the other thing is the files were showing in the material editor earlier I now have to go show where they are to Gmax. I'm really, really, unsure about all the trouble I have to follow through on just to do basic things other 3D software allow you to do intuitively.