33LIMA

Fighting the Hun # 53 - how NOT to conduct a head-on pass (or, 'why, sometimes, it IS a good idea to turn away at the last minute')

Possibly best PM the UK ever had, barring Churchill. That rare thing, a politician motivated more by conviction than power or popularity; she makes the likes of Tony Blair look like the self-seeking and untrustworthy people they were. There's a good reason why people in the Forces here tend to refer to Mrs T more or less affectionately as 'Maggie' while Mr Blair is more commonly referred to as 'TCB', which you can look up on Arrsepedia, if you don't know what it means - http://www.arrse.co.uk/wiki/TCB . Arrsepedia's own entry for Mrs T is a fair summary, tho written in that site's usual tongue-in-cheek, 'Forces Humour' style it's really quite to the point - http://www.arrse.co....garet_Thatcher. Makes a nice comparison with TCB's equally to-the-point entry - http://www.arrse.co.uk/wiki/Tony_Blair Above all else, she had the gumption to save the British citizens of the Falklands - to which territory the Argentine claim is doubtful, nobody should be taken in by claims to the contrary - from what her predecessor Jim Callaghan acerbically but quite accurately described as 'a bunch of f***ing fascists'. It's quite simply untrue that most in the UK hate her. Some do, and a few of these shamed themselves publicly by some quite disgraceful 'celebrations' at her passing. But Mrs T has plenty of people here who appreciate her qualities and her record, the good and the not-so-good.

Pretty! And not too outlandish - I don't care much for skins which go far beyond what was seen in real life at the front (which provides enough latitude!). I don't think I have ever flown the RoF SPAD 13, tho I have many of the payware planes. Their Pfalz DIIIa is my favourite (regardless of its supposed ability to hang from the prop and pop you off) next the Albatros DV. Conversely the Pfalz is my biggest disappointment in OFF. It's a nice plane (despite the drooping tailskid) but it has a FM I find sluggish, with weird stall behaviour, tho HPW's FM mod helps. The FE (A Team) Pfalz DIII and DIIIa are firm favourites (tho I'd have preferred the saxaphone-style exhaust to the multi-stub ones), plenty of interesting schemes available too.

As for the last SPAD from my flight, there was no escape. The fight I had joined had also attracted Albatri from four different Jastas and it was not a healthy environment for a solitary Englishman. They probably ALL claimed the kill

Anyway that reduced me to the role of spectator on the combat which followed. Hopefully my flight mates would have better luck. But alas no. They decided to have a go at the Rumplers that the V-strutters seemed to be covering. Result - Rumplers 2, SPADs 0.

Some pics from mission #2 in a SPAD 7 campaign with No.23 Sqdn, RFC. Not my usual cup of tea but was the follow-on to an OFF-FE2 comparison post I made over on SimHQ in the thread on 'Best Current WW1 Sim?' Well it was really mission #1 in a restarted campaign as I didn't survive a forced landing the first time out. This mission went even worse. As usual it started just fine, four of us bound for the Lines in fine weather. The FE2 SPAD 7 is a fine machine and has the correct angular tipped rudder and elevators, unlike the OFF SPAD7/13 hybrid. As we approached the Lines, I could see some Hun Archie at work ahead and to my left. Closer to, over to my right, a fight was already in progress and I chose to pitch into this. The scrap had already claimed a victim, who was going down vertically, trailing smoke. The Huns turned out to be V-strutters, who came at us head on. I don't know about you, but there are definitely times when I have occasion to regret following too literally the 'Dicta Biggles', in this case the one that goes 'When meeting a Hun head-on, never turn aside. It isn't done.' This was one such occasion. At least, I head the satisfaction of knowing that the Albatros with whom I had collided had fared no better.

Wow - look at the company markings on the tail and rear fuselage - neat!

Lovely terrain - the only thing that's missing is Julie Andrews appearing over one of those hills!

Again is it just me, or do balloons in FE/FE2 seem rather undefended much of the time? I can live with them not being winched down but Archie often seems to be absent or asleep if I visit (in the Mafia sense) an observation baloon. Maybe it's just the ones that appear rather far behind the front and if (as in the Flanders terrain) they tended to be located closer to the Lines they would be more likely to be in areas covered by AA fire. This lack of defense seems to be the case in most campaigns/terrains. I wonder if there is anything that could be done to improve this? I don't have a death wish and i definitely don't want balloons with dummy observers and a large command-detonated bomb in the basket or even Flaming onions, but a little more AA fire more often would be nice. PS if we must have mostly undefended balloons, then maybe, after all, a command-detonated balloon bomb trap Ground Object mod might be a good idea, scattered amongst the 'real' balloons, so that you would never know for sure when that nice, undefended balloon you were about to pop, might go bang and take you with it, instead...:) See what I mean? The only pyrotechnics visible, in the second screenie, are those caused by the gasbag's demise.

Now THAT's what I can a bit of lateral thinking! Observers would be do-able too even tho they might still spin about. I wonder if Stephen1918 might consider trying this in his next plane?

That is good to hear Ojcar. I have not flown many campaign missions over the last couple of weeks, it's time to start a new one! Do you know if there is any way in campaigns of designating the area of No Man's Land as a target, or as a series of targets, for recce missions? The idea would be to cause 2-seaters flying such missions to appear often over the Lines. This would represent aircraft taking those strips of photos which they used to make up the photo-mosaics you see of the trench lines. It would also represent 2-seaters doing artillery observation work. Best if they could be made to fly up to the Lines at, say, 4-5000 feet, linger there a while, then fly away home, not just fly up to a certain spot and fly away again right away. Most 2-seaters in FE seem to be on deeper missions, often bombing or longer-range recce missions. this is fine but it would be realistic to see 2-seaters often hanging around over the Lines at medium altitudes, where they were a frequent target of enemy scouts/fighters in real life. In FE they would provide a similar target. Maybe this is already happening to an extent but I think it would be more realistic to see more 2-seaters on recce-type missions over the Lines.

Yes, it was 'Back to the mess for a stiff drink and a change of underpants' after that one, no doubt :)

I have no idea how to do this but it sounds like a great idea! The sight and sound of artillery fire is quite immersive in OFF. The ideal tho is surely to have visible firing batteries, even if they have to be small batteries and scattered, and or have low-density particle effects, to avoid big FPS hits - say something comparable to Archie batteries. One of FE's immersive features is being able to see from the air the flash and smoke of firing AA guns and the same would be good for ground artillery. I very rarely see any kind of ground activity in FE campaigns and when I do it's usually tanks and some ground MG tracer fire, with just the occasional artillery strike. I have yet to see field guns firing, from the air (maybe I should sue 'next ground object' more often!). Visibly active artillery batteries are also good opportunity targets for 'armed recce' missions (or even just 'recce' ones, using screenshots to simulate taking pics perhaps) and if the campaign engine can recognise them as targets, also for 'strike' missions.

[HidePart2] ParentComponentName=Fuselage ModelNodeName=L_Thigh DestroyedNodeName=L_Thigh DetachWhenDestroyed=TRUE HasAeroCoefficients=FALSE Looking at the above lines, I'm wondering if it's possible to prevent aircrew from disappearing when killed, by changing relevant entries for 'DetachWhenDestroyed=' from 'TRUE' to 'FALSE'. This was debated in this thread... http://combatace.com/topic/37798-keeping-the-pilot-from-disappearing-when-shot/ ...but discussion drifted off onto the (admittedly-superior) concept of injured aircrew models without much consideration being given to just stopping them vanishing. A plane which BEHAVED as it had incapacitated crew, even if they were still animated - even gunners - would be better than 'slumped to the bottom of the cockpit' (which is how I rationalise the disappearances) IMHO.

One of my rare outings in a Camel: More a fan of the SE, here illustrating FE's nice lighting effects in this evening shot: SE's are just the thing for a spot of balloon-busting;

Wow! This looks great - First Eagles 'carrier' ops - who'd have believed it! Love the Rumpler; it was always one of the most elegant of WW1 seaplanes and a great choice for this mod.

I thought so; will try again to make the request to Capun; tho generally, provided it's 'legal', I don't like to ask busy folk to do something I could do myself. Not a big deal, they are nice models as they are and I'm grateful for them, although the Aviatik is a look-alike (the actual Aviatik CI & CII had inset 'comma' rudders, for example) which IIRC the A Team has confirmed is from Silverwish's Wings of War. Anyone remember Wings of War? It was fun, looked great, and the only game that ever succeeded in luring me into online play. At one point it seemed that moders might make it into something like a realistic sim. You can see the Aviatik in this clip, about two minutes in:

Thanks Ojcar - I was wondering why the extra MGs and stuff were showing up in campaigns when I could not find the target.ini files in the Terrains folder - which after reading your post, I now realise was because they are in the Campaigns folder!

'bout ye, Padraig :) {='Belfast' for 'How are you?' as in 'What about you?')

Ah I see Ojcar....I'd need to extract the .cat files to look at the stock terrains, but looking at Flanders_targets.ini. I see this entry: [TargetArea196] Name=Balloon Unit 1 Position=132250.00,149750.00 Radius=100 ActiveDate=01/01/0001 Location=1 Alignment=FRIENDLY Target[001].Type=Balloon Target[001].Offset=0.00,0.00 Target[001].Heading=0 Target[002].Type=AAA Target[002].Offset=0.00,0.00 Target[002].Heading=0 Target[003].Type=AAA Target[003].Offset=10.00,-20.00 Target[003].Heading=0.0 If I am reading this right, the Flanders terrain designer has (sensibly) located two AA (AAA) units near this balloon, one right underneath (same co-ordinates) and the other slightly offset. So in other terrains - I fly in the Cambrai one mainly - I would need to find all the entries for 'balloon' in Cambrai_targets.ini, and for those which did not already have AAA target types, add in one or two, for each undefended balloon? Possibly a ground MG too.

I have FE1 (FE Gold) and FE2 and with FE1 patched to date, it is much the same as FE2. Developer TK has said as much over on the Third Wire forums. However, there are some differences: FE2 doesn't have multiplayer, FE1 does - makes little difference tho if, as seems to be the case, FE1 MP is pretty dead; FE2 doesn't have seasonal terrain variations, FE1 does (but you can copy the FE1 seasonal textures over from FE1 to FE2 or use mod community terrain textures which DO have seasonal variations, if you like them); FE2 runs more smoothly on multi-core PCs (not a vast difference in my case); FE2, setting for setting, has a more distant horizon than FE1 (tho I needed to tweak an FE2 data file to push out the draw distance of towns, to avoid visible draw-in at longer horizon settings) FE2 AI seems different, somewhat better in ways I can't recall now; FE2 plane wrecks are 'persistent'; in FE1, unless there's a setting I never found, they just disappear after the initial ground strike; FE2 supports bump-mapping so giving a 3-dimensional impression to things like rivets, panel lines and wing ribs, for plane models whose textures support this, at the highest graphics setting (FE1 may do so also, but IIRC you may have to hand edit the options.ini file to set UseAdvancedShaders=1, to get that to work). FE2 is easier to mod/install mods into, EXCEPT that in mods built only for FE1, you sometimes need to adapt the install instructions to get some things to work eg decals/markings. FE2 is definitely better in my experience and I play it more or less exclusively now; Hansa evidently has a different impression but not having been patched recently, FE2 seems at least to have escaped the controversial effects of recent patches on other TW sims. The FE2 DR1 doesn't appear to have a bump-mapped lower wing as the screenie below shows, but it's still a pretty beautiful model:

Anybody know how to get the N.28 fin/rudder flashes for Deutschmark's Rickenbacker and Campbell skins to show in the right order, white-blue-red (in First Eagles 2)? I gather the French-style red-white-blue was also used on US machines but the download page screenies show these skins both have the distinctive US order, and they don't display this way on my install. Strangely, the .tga files for these two skins AND the default A Team 'Frenchcamo1' textures all appear to show the US-style flashes - but they all show up red-white-blue on my N28s, in-game. I created the necessary Decals folder for my FE2 install to get the other markings in the US N.28s to display right, but the tails are stubbornly sticking to the French-style flashes. The fact that the FIN shows up white in the US skins makes me think there's some leftover or setting somewhere that's overwriting the correct flashes but darned if I can find out what it is.

Got your n.28 skin and it looks great - still had to edit decals.ini, changing the rudder decal from 'tail' to tailD', to get the white-blue-red rudder flash (and I then got a green fin rather than white).

Got it - thanks Hansa! I seem to recall someone was working on a set of N.28 USAS skins but i can find no sign of it now - was that you? Re US SPADs and Salmsons, they all seem to have used red-white-blue flashes. In fact the Nieuport 28 seems to be the only plane which commonly carried a white-blue-red rudder flash, and even then, US Nieuport 28s are often portrayed with red-white-blue flashes (not the blue-white-red the French commonly used) although original photos showing rudder flashes do not seem common. On the Aerodrome, I see Dan San Abbott reported that 'The Nieuport 28c1 aircraft were delivered with French rudder stripes and were repainted in the American colors, from the rudder post, white, blue and red. When the rudders were over painted the data was covered up and not re-painted'. Why this was apparently not also done with SPADs and Salmsons, I have no idea, but I suspect the practice may have died out, perhaps because they decided that they had better things to do, or that a central white stripe was a useful allied recognition feature.

Thanks Wrench! I was looking at the decal.ini for the Rickenbacker skin (cut & pasted below, shortened to save space) and the only odd thing seemed to be that nearly all the decals are pathed to a named file in a Decals subfolder (eg FilenameFormat=N28/Rickenbacker/N/Insignia), EXCEPT for two for the rudder (decals 011 and 012). Their 'filenameformat' has NO path, and a name ('tail') which does not exist anywhere in the N28 folder. All three skins have a 'tailD.tga' (which appears to be the camouflaged tail end of the fuselage with an irregular white area. I'll try replacing 'FilenameFormat=Tail' with 'FilenameFormat=N28/Rickenbacker/N/TailD', but it's strange that Deutschmark's d/l screenie (taken in FE1, presumably) shows the correct US tailflash without any such tweak; this makes me think the underlying problem must be one of those things you need to do differently for a second-gen sim. [DefaultAnimationTime] Animation01=0.5 Animation02=0.5 [Decal001] MeshName=Wing Upper Outer L DecalLevel=0 DecalFacing=TOP FilenameFormat=N28/Rickenbacker/N/Insignia Position=-3.1,-0.31 Scale=1.27 DecalMaxLOD=3 [Decal002] MeshName=Wing Upper Middle L DecalLevel=0 DecalFacing=TOP FilenameFormat=N28/Rickenbacker/N/Insignia Position=-3.1,-0.31 Scale=1.27 DecalMaxLOD=3 ......... [Decal011] MeshName=Rudder DecalLevel=0 DecalFacing=RIGHT FilenameFormat=Tail Position=-4.76,0.53 Scale=0.6 DecalMaxLOD=3 Reverse=TRUE [Decal012] MeshName=Rudder DecalLevel=0 DecalFacing=LEFT FilenameFormat=Tail Position=-4.76,0.53 Scale=0.6 DecalMaxLOD=3 [Decal013] MeshName=Wing Upper Inner L DecalLevel=2 DecalFacing=TOP FilenameFormat=N28/Rickenbacker/N/NUMB001 Position=-1.4,-0.3 Scale=1.2 DecalMaxLOD=2 [Decal014] MeshName=Wing Upper Middle L DecalLevel=2 DecalFacing=TOP FilenameFormat=N28/Rickenbacker/N/NUMB001 Position=-1.4,-0.3 Scale=1.2 DecalMaxLOD=2 [Decal015] MeshName=Wing Upper Inner R DecalLevel=3 DecalFacing=TOP FilenameFormat=N28/Rickenbacker/N/POST Position=1.23,-0.32 Scale=1.0 DecalMaxLOD=2 [Decal016] MeshName=Wing Upper Middle R DecalLevel=3 DecalFacing=TOP FilenameFormat= Position=1.23,-0.32 Scale=1.3 DecalMaxLOD=2 ....... [Decal017] MeshName=Fuselage P DecalLevel=1 DecalFacing=RIGHT FilenameFormat=N28/Rickenbacker/N/HAT001 Position=-1.5,0.0 Scale=1.50 DecalMaxLOD=2 Reverse=TRUE [Decal018] MeshName=Fuselage P DecalLevel=1 DecalFacing=LEFT FilenameFormat=N28/Rickenbacker/N/HAT001 Position=-1.5,0.0 Scale=1.50 DecalMaxLOD=2 [Decal019] MeshName=Fuselage P DecalLevel=2 DecalFacing=RIGHT FilenameFormat=N28/Rickenbacker/N/NUMB001 Position=-2.4,0.03 Scale=0.4 DecalMaxLOD=2 [Decal020] MeshName=Tail DecalLevel=2 DecalFacing=RIGHT FilenameFormat=N28/Rickenbacker/N/NUMB001 Position=-2.4,0.03 Scale=0.4 DecalMaxLOD=2 [Decal021] MeshName=Fuselage P DecalLevel=2 DecalFacing=LEFT FilenameFormat=N28/Rickenbacker/N/NUMB001 Position=-2.4,0.03 Scale=0.4 DecalMaxLOD=2 [Decal022] MeshName=Tail DecalLevel=2 DecalFacing=LEFT FilenameFormat=N28/Rickenbacker/N/NUMB001 Position=-2.4,0.03 Scale=0.4 DecalMaxLOD=2 [Decal023] MeshName=Tail DecalLevel=1 DecalFacing=RIGHT FilenameFormat=N28/Rickenbacker/N/HAT001 Position=-1.5,0.0 Scale=1.50 DecalMaxLOD=2 Reverse=TRUE [Decal024] MeshName=Tail DecalLevel=1 DecalFacing=LEFT FilenameFormat=N28/Rickenbacker/N/HAT001 Position=-1.5,0.0 Scale=1.50 DecalMaxLOD=2 ........ Well, that worked!