Lewie

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?

Does the Claim Form cover the duty roster board? This is the second time I've tried to make a claim, and forgeting the rank and name of my wingman I'm going to forfeit the kills. GGGRRRR!

( 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 have been researching new systems here lately, doing a lot of comparison shopping and looking at 'Bare Bones' and BIY systems. One of the more important pieces of kit for the new gaming box is a sufficiently adequate heatsink/fan combo for the CPU. I think I'm going to build with another AMD processor, mainly because I'm a repeat and satisfied customer, they have a great bang to buck and they took the 3D world head on with the early K6-2 processor with '3D Now!'. I still have an old box running this relic. And because of my fondness for this simple, and above all, quiet old machine I have to wonder about all the recent bells and whistles being thrown at CPU coolers. My other machine is a sub gigahertz Duron running a Thermaltake Chrome Orb cooler that the fan died early on, I just removed the cooler fan from it and put one of the case fans adjacent to it and it's been running this way since 2003. It never gets hotter than 40C, no matter what. Now I understand the heat generated by a more recent CPU is many orders of magnitude greater than these old machines, but have you looked at the numerous and extensive amount of CPU coolers out there lately? And they all look like something put together by the borg collective. I'm a proponent of simple and easy maintenance, and low energy use, and tend to like small foot print setups in a PC box just because of the room it allows for airflow and cable routing. At any rate what is with the monsterous 'heat pipes' setups with the combination of copper and aluminum? Why can't they make them low profile? And coming from what I've researched, and unless aluminum has suddenly changed it's thermal conductivity and atomic number, I'm guessing it's still the best material to build your heat sink out of. My other concerns came from reading one of the online CPU Cooler comparisons, the writer commented on that a lot of these new coolers are coming with less than polished heat transfer surfaces that actually sub optimize the cooling of the CPU. My old Thermaltake had a near mirror smooth surface for the contact patch on the bottom, some of these so called Heat Pipe systems are pretty crude, with gaps between the copper and aluminum. Has LED infested and decorated computer Nerd-dom taken over from sound engineering and precision of manufacturing?

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.

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.

No, he would recommend the FE2b, with it's weird yaw-roll coupling and it's need to be edited into a 'fighter bomber'. How the heck do you open the .XPFD file? My version of Acrobat doesn't want anything to do with these files.. Oh and stefnuts, welcome to the jungle, mind your head, and don't eat the yellow grubs...

It's a learned tactic from Redbaron3D. If you are in a numerically disadvantaged situation with a Nieuport, low on altitude and ammo and the Huns are getting to be a bother, just keep level circling while they try boom and zoom pop shot's. They, (in RB3d at least..) lose about 300~500 feet with every attempt. I'm not sure if it worked in OFF as well, but they did turn from red to white in my tac screen while we, (I) taunted them. The ignominy of being popped by a random and dumb flak round, I would have rather been shot down in flames or shredded by Spandaus. I want a Farman lattice tail campaign, Dev's, are you listening? I want to be a pilot of the aircraft Boeleke purportedly remarked about that "they ignite so easily.." ( Oh well, if life serves you Russian Caravan Tea, break out the fermented mares milk and go native.) Didier might manage to escape. I like these poorly rated French fighter squads, but in particular I love the way the early Nupes fly in this sim, but we need some N10's for the early RNAS Flanders crews, and some N12's for the Alsace Luxiel squads... and some Caudron GIII's, GIV's, ...

Certainly, drop in on the SDOE FS-WWI forum to see what's cooking, I'm waiting on ArgonV to finish up with Snick's LDotR mod.