33LIMA

I had begun to get the better of the blue and red Pfalz when I made the mistake of carelessly reversing a turn, after he had forced me to overshoot, thinking I had hit him hard enough to put him off his stroke. Dumb move. My plane seemed to get a bit sluggish after he put an accurate burst right into me...probably something to do with that missing starboard upper wingtip! Didn't help that my engine packed in shortly thereafter. By that time, some of his mates had arrived to help, but it wasn't needed...I reckon I'd have survived the subsequent forced landing but just as my tailskid was about to come down, my right-hand wheel came off the axle and it was Goodnight Vienna. It was some consolation that, just as i was coming in, I'd seen the Pfalz which got me being hit by MG fire from the ground and going in nose first...serves him right! All this in a single campaign mission! Before flying the mission from which these screenies were taken, I had flown an N.28 campaign mission in one of the other two current WW1 sims, and FE was much more satisfying. Truly, First Eagles is an amazing sim, and Armchair Aces campaigns are an amazing way to get the best from it.

Just finished a mission from an 'Armchair Aces' USAS campaign in early 1918, flying the elegant Nieuport 28 and the skies were really busy with AI flights, including these: By the time my flight got to our patrol area, just on our side of the Lines, air fights had already broken out at different locations, and it was noticeable how these involved different machines from a variety of units, all flying missions of their own. On arrival in my patrol area, I took my flight down to join in a scrap which I could see going on at low level. There, I got caught up in a prolonged knife fight with a really hot pilot flying a blue Pfalz with a red cowling, who had just knocked down a Dolphin:

The difference is fairly subtle, with the rudder moved forward to the correct position, but well worth having. From the appearance of the Halb in your nice screenie, where I don't see shadows on the plane, you might also want to edit the HalberstadtDIII.ini file to set CastShadow=TRUE. Even if you have the in-cockpit self-shadowing disabled (by setting shadows to 'medium' in the Options menu) I find the appearance of dynamic external self-shadowing adds a lot to the appearance of planes in FE2. Since I replaced my budget graphics card with an aged but effective 8800GT, I have checked all my planes and made sure the above edit has been made so I get external shadows and I don't get a serious FPS hit, even with the more complex planes.

Two Marlins AND two Lewis guns??? I'm glad my German careers are generally 1916-17 :) And I'm tempted to squeeze in a 1918 campaign now, BEFORE this arrives! PS if General Pershing is a new ground object and we bomb him, do the Yanks Go Home? :)

Height? Depends. Photo recconaisance might be quite low-ish if they wanted oblique photos. If not, as high as you can get and still see the target - it was high-flying Rumplers that McCudden often coaxed his finely-tuned SE5a up to intercept, and this was at about 18-20,000 feet in 1917-18 (and likewise Biggles his modified camel, in 'The Camera :) ). McCudden recorded that '...the Rumplers at 20,000 feet are extremely efficient...' An 8 Sqdn pilot flying BE2c's in 1916 records that 'the best height to take them [photos] was 6000 feet' and described between 8-6000 feet as 'a reasonable height' with the cameras then in service. In the early years, 1914-15, where visual recconnaisance with a notebook and pencil rather than a camera was common, a little lower maybe, lower again perhaps if there was cloud cover, but high enough to minimise the risk from small arms fire. Depends also what you mean by 'recce'. If not photo or visual recce, then you might consider what the RFC called a Contact Patrol a recce of sorts, ie monitoring the progress of troops, but while often at dangerously low level this would be a 2-seater task. Artillery Observation is another mission that might be considered a recce, in FE mission terms. Tho I doubt there is any facility to get planes so detailed to fly figure eight circuits between battery and target at maybe 5000 feet! But again, 'art obs' would be strictly a 2-seater mission. Really, you should NOT get a recce mission in a scout - especially not a German one. I am quite sure I recall an RFC Nieuport scout squadron putting a camera in a plane on a few missions, giving the aircraft an escort from their squadron-mates and sent over the lines. But that seems to have been rare indeed, unheard of for a German scout I suspect, with or without a camera. Scouts are just not good recce platforms. In FE campaign data files, from a quick glance, scout squadrons are rightly assigned a zero percent chance of getting a recce mission so maybe you were flying a single mission in that Halberstadt and chose a recce. for that mission. Methinks for such a task, you should pick one of these:

Still looking forward to these. Good to see the colours on the fin/rudder in the right order on an Nie.28 at last! Always liked this bird since building the little Revel 1/72 version when it was released in the 1960s.

Spot on there, Hansa. I am grateful to TW for getting FE to market, and patching/expanding it beyond its initial very limited release, tho it was the modders who ensured that its good basic qualities have been built upon, to the point it really is the all-round best WW1 air combat sim available today.

Amazing!

Anyway keep the screenies coming please, Quack. The combination of your skins and the modders' planes and terrains is showing FE at its best.

Great - D/L'ing it now. Single Player campaign is the beating heart of a good sim for most of us, and Armchair Aces enables all the great planes and the other great mods to be experienced in that mode - it's the 'Mod of Mods'!

Pretty...but did they get the cows? Or were they driven back by a gas attack? :)

This Blue Max campaign is really like flying in the movies... But even in the movies, there are often Bad Guys...take this lot, for instance... ...looks like another early bath, movies or no movies.

Have just completed another mission in Ataribaby's Blue Max movie campaign. It was another horrible deep escort mission, this time taking a flight of AEGs back to work over Leavilliers. It was quite peaceful at first, a dawn takeoff with a new pilot replacing the chap who bought it on the last mission. But it got a bit hairy as we ran into the target and the flak got started; worse when a flight of SE's took exception to our visit. As if that wasn't bad enough, I got separated from the others in the ensuing combat and was then very nearly killed by two marauding Englishmen in Camels, who basically ran rings around me. Caught on my own, I took the first opportunity to dive away, using up what little altitude I had left at that point, but only managed to get back to the Lines after a long tail-chase at daisy-cutting level, because my Pfalz proved just a little faster than the Camels. Phew! We all got home, though, and I was credited with an SE, with the others getting a further three between them. So it wasn't a bad trip, on balance. How many more of these little shows I will last, is entirely another matter.

Interesting, Wrench....railways being one of the big gaps in FE. Tracks running about the countryside, or trains running on them, might be neat not least as landmarks; but are not really necessary, since aerial attacks on junctions or running trains happened but were comparatively rare in WW1. It's railway stations and goods yards with static trains and lots of wagons in sidings, in towns, that would be needed most, these being regular targets to attack or defend and railway yard or station attacks often featuring in historical accounts of air operations. Once placed, can stations or wagons in simulated goods yards be made to be actual targets, for AI or player-led flights, I wonder?

Yippeeeeeee!!! this guy is a STAR!!! A BE2 and a late LVG is GREAT NEWS! Stephen - is there some freeware s/w - 3dmax or something - you would recommend, to anyone here who is at least willing to give it a try, in the hope of discovering that they have both a knack for it and the patience of a particularly patient saint? Like many of us I daresay, I did a lot of modelling 'back in the day' (including 1/24 balsa scale models of WW1 planes, built from my own plans, long binned alas). But the only time I ever tried 3d modelling was a local diesel railcar using a package designed for MS Train sim, that ended up lost in a hard drive crash, about 20% complete. So I'd probably fail both of the above criteria, but would at least give it a bash. Edit - just noticed you said 'LVG CI' not 'LVG CVI' or 'CV' - maybe a typo, as the latter two were major types and the CI and CII were small beer, altho perhaps quite useful in FE2 as a 1915 C-type?