Lewie

Oh well, a fateful morning to you all.. I finally got my recalcitrant DVD onboard burner/player on my laptop running. It was a couple of problems, a corrupted driver file, and the darn CPU shares it's heatsink with some of the various 12 volt rail drivers and the GPU, and one of them was a bit out of contact with the cooler surface. It was mounted this way since it came from the factory..:P At any rate the cooler doing it's job rather better, and has also upped the GPU performance a smidge, and I was able to get the OFF disc to read! It's installed. It would read CD-ROMs OK. I have no idea why this is, but I'll say this, having a HP Presario laptop forum to peruse is what saved this puppy. I also bought some Artic Silver compound and it's now pumping out the heat that used to warm the keyboard. Big plusses. HP's quality control of this era's 'puter is less than stellar if the laptop forum is any indication. I started a French fighter Sous Leut. pilot with Esc 118 in June of '16. He was flying from Marcuiex and had been tasked with his first mission, a 'loon shoot with rockets in his Nupe 11 kite with two wingmen. It was a sucky start as it was raining hard and the upper cloud deck was about 4000'. When he got to his third waypoint across the front he noticed that he was being followed by a trio of bogeys about 2000' feet lower. Instead of doing the smart thing, and continuing on, I decided to stir the pot a little and see if I could get them to crash on their own by circling above them. But I lost some altitude myself and broke this off. We continued on at about 3600' to the target, with our curious Bosche in tow. Unfortunately right when I was within about 2 miles of the target, I was hit by a flak round that severely reduced my engine power and whapped an aileron. I had no choice but to abort the flight and launched the rockets at my pursuers, then circled around while repeatedly telling my moronic wingmen to save their hinders, while I kept sinking lower and lower. I don't know if they made it back but I managed a rough field landing and was immediately captured. feh! Well time for a new pilot, as Didier is stuck in a holding cell awaiting transfer somewhere. What a busy morning. Oh yeah I think I can claim having the slowest PC that still runs OFF in a near tolerable manner. I think I'll stay with early war year pilots and semi quiet sectors. The Alsace region is quite pretty.

I haven't decided on a name yet, it involves flying aeroplanes older than the ones in WWI,

If it involved the ability to do a short bit of sky diving, sort of like base jumping it would probably be a hoot. Not that I'm into that kind of stuff.. Like this... Yikes!

Well you normally get a parachute, which nearly all Allied pilots didn't get. I could see where it would appeal to someone with an extreme sports addiction.

I'm playing old games and sims. SDOE's Fighter Squadron-WWI, mainly because I'm making a mod for it, but I'm also waiting on Snick's 'Last Days of the Reich" mod for it, which will have a bunch of fun Luft '46 type aircraft. Flying Model Simulator R/C model simulator along with the IPAC's EasyFly RC sim, which I find has a more realistic flight model. I've been importing some of my FMS models into it. I have a couple of pilots in Campaign in CFS3 flying Typhoons on CAP's and Escort. One of my pilots has 5 kills already. BF109's are tough opponents. I also fire up TargetWare's Richthofen's Skies some times. If I get system upgraded I'm looking forward to installing RC Desk Pilot as it's all DX10 Shader 2 supported and will have realistic water, water landings and ground/wind effects, i.e. R/C slope soaring. Oh yeah and flying OFF too.

The trick would be to see if you could actually do it in OFF. With the lengths the planes roll out on solid ground I suspect it's not possible.

Didn't Willy Coppens actually land on top one balloon he was attacking? Ah, found this quote online, not sure how attributable it is..

Priceless! "Ja, herr Baron ist no longer bord, he spanked da Krumpet's Fliegerheinder."

Very nice screen shots, is that the Alsace region? It pains me a little that I'm probably going to be stuck with a new machine quite capable of running OFF P3, but P4 may stretch it's abilities.

The Jenny was popular with wing walkers in particular because of the relatively slow cruising speed and the generous aileron surfaces, which could compensate for the weight transfer of the wingwalker from one aircraft's wing to another. Watch the amount of aileron deflection being used as Gladys climbs to the right kingpost of the first Jenny and then her shift off the wing, onto the other plane's wing.

Ah! Well mon ame, as the French say, C'est La Guerre, no?

Just heard about this yesterday, The Fun and Sun air meet in Lakeland, Florida is devastated by a series of heavy rain storms and a tornado.. I don't know how close to this uncleal is, but Yikes! what a mess. This is purportedly the very twister that passed through Lakeland, destroying many of the homebuilt aircraft.

OK here's the Renault FT17 which is similar to the whippet.. Since Passchendael was in the British sector i doubt any Renault's were used during the battle. And the larger and less flexible St Chamond..

Cavalry? Are you certain they were still being used in 1917? Olham posted an image of the Whippet light tank which was faster but not as heavily armored or weaponed as the Mark IV..

Typically the Mark IV looked like this.. Although there were two different subtypes called "males' with two 1and 1/2 pounder cannons in the side turrets, or the "females" which generally were for scouting and had Vickers .303's in place of the cannons. They were really slow, no more than maybe 4 mph tops, and quite a few of them got mired hopelessly in the mud of the front. The French had a couple of the smaller, "Whippet" types and a larger boxy one with a fixed 75 mm MLE cannon.

Yeah I think an SE5a would have a bit of trouble taking off with 500 lbs of additional weight. Most of the front line fighters of that period, that were equipped with bombs either had Coopers or 20~25 pounders.

Yeah, that could easily have been a bit of red lint..

Well so much for my paraphrasing the passage, I'm guessing the obs/gunner was hurriedly cambering and clawing his way onboard. Fees have that little ladder rung under the nacelle, and the wheels are handy

There's an online book about the British Fee Squadron RFC 100 where the writer talks about an adventure one crew had on a early winter's evening. They had flown a late day sortie in deteriorating weather and were forced to land safely in a large field on the wrong side of the lines because of the lowering clouds and snow storm. They weren't sure at the time if they were over the front, but the assumption was made that this was true and they busied themselves with getting the Fee ready to take off again, before they were found and captured. Luckily, at about that same time, the German Artillery nearby started up and helped them cover their own noises. This bought them a little time to get the kite turned around and prepare it to get started. But as they were about to prop the engine over, the guns stopped and a distant group of German voices were heard shouting from the murk and fog of the field's edge. They barely had time to finish getting the engine to start before the obs gunner had run around to the front of the kite and jumped on board just as his pilot had opened the throttle and they both just managed to clear out of there before being caught. They flew at at about 300~500 feet all the way across the front and had surprised a few German squads huddled in their trenches.

ah it's not a widely known about aircraft as it was mostly for training and coastal patrol "Early in the war, an Anson scored a probable hit on a German U-boat. In June 1940, a flight of three Ansons was attacked by nine Luftwaffe Messerschmitt Bf 109s. Remarkably, the Ansons downed two German aircraft "and damaging a third before the 'dogfight' ended"" This was of course in the meelee of the evacuation of Dunkirque and there was a lot of chaos at the time. Still the Anson's crews kept their heads on considering they were out numbered 3 to 1.

Yeah I know, Pol has reminded me that the two sims are different. What I'm noticing is that the OFF planes in CFS3 are flying about like I would expect them to fly in real life. I've done a few FM's in my flight sim mod experience, and they seem pretty close to fidelity under CFS3. So I'm expecting that the change to OFF will not be that big a difference. It's all good.. How many people actually have run OFF planes in CFS3 yet? Don't take my word as gospel, but between Targetware, SDOE-WWI, and this sim I'm finding not too big a difference in level speed, climb rate and maneuverability in the same kites. I'm sure that the way the AI is applied between CFS3 and OFF has substantial algorithm differences. But the game engine is based on CFS3's base engine. I don't think that the gunnery AI has much changed though, at times it feels a lot like attacking a two seater in RedBaron3D, the AI's accuracy at distances of over 700~900 feet is pretty damn good. And I'm not the only one mentioning this about the two seater obs gunnery accuracy in OFF.

What I notice is that the obs gunners seem to have an excellent aiming ability with distance. Tried stalking two Roland CII's in QC and they repeatedly hit me from well over 900 feet away, and this while they were climbing and diving to enable their gunners to get a bead on me while I stalked from underneath. In the same situation where I'm the obs gunner I'm lucky if I can get a few hits on an attacking plane coming from my six and above. Seems to me like most sims I've played before, that the AI gunnery of the attackers is a bit 'ubered'. I remember from a custom mission I made for Richthofen's Skies, that the 88mm German Flak guns were popping British Obs balloons from over four miles away. It was funny to start off for a flight over the front and find a bunch of your side's balloons all in the process of burning or bursting into flame.

Yeah this would almost be better in a Camel. Did you ever hear about the 3 RAF WWII Avro Ansons that were tasked with defending the Dunkirque harbor during the evacuation of Dunkirque? Well they weren't alone, there was quite a few Hurricanes and Fairey Battles.. It's an interesting footnote about outclassed aircraft in a dogfight.

Hmmm, Looks like I might try this out in QC, a Bf109, vs an SE5a Viper, but I doubt I'll barely last long enough to gain enough altitude before his cannon rounds vaporize me..

Have you tried asking at the Aerodrome Forum? There's a few really knowledgeable folks who post over there. Speculation on my part, but I seem to recall that some of the earliest versions came with the unthrottleable Gnome 80 hp and were a handful when descending because of the relatively clean aerodynamics of the Pup compared to it's contemporaries. Damage to the engine from over revving or 'coup'ing too much and fouling the spark plugs or worse, causing a cowling fire. I suppose that learning to sideslip became an early Pup pilot skill.