33LIMA

I'm sort of used to Peter's FMs now but I do remember finding them slightly more challenging while feeling more realistic - but not some wild, implausible effort to inject artificial challenge by just making everything frustratingly hard, or exaggerating a plane's reported characteristics - that's one reason I like them. By all accounts I have read, and barring some exceptions (like Moranes) spin recovery in very many WW1 planes (not just BE2's!) was not difficult - unlike, say, RoF, where it can be near impossible unless you employ some strange drill like bobbing a Camel's nose up and down with the elevator, or OFF, where, while recovery is not too hard, departing the envelope seems to vary between extremes, some too mild and others insane - the Palz DIII comes to mind in the latter category. Peter's FM's don't produce such effects - spins will happen and can be scary to get out of if you're low but recovery isn't exaggeratedly difficult. Also because FE has the best stall warning effects I've seen in a sim (visible and audible buffet) you have an idea when you're pushing it too hard, so more realistic (but not exaggerated) FMs need not be such a worry. Another plus is that if you fly on the 'Hard' FM in-game setting, many d/l planes eg A Team come with FMs optimised for the less realistic 'Normal' setting, and won't fly properly in player hands on 'Hard' setting; such planes really do need Peter's FM, if you ever plan on flying them. A disadvantage (to my mind) is that his FMs tone down AI gunners to the point of near-ineffectiveness. If you look at a post here addressed to me a few months back, and Peter's readme, it explains how to re-set gunners to stock or better. I have currently reset them to nearly stock effectiveness levels; higher than stock would be nice when flying 2-seaters yourself but makes it very hard for your flight-mates when you're attacking 2-seaters, as the AI tend to attack incautiously from behind and slug it out with the gunner, resulting in some avoidable casualties. You may be happy with less effective gunners, but if not then it's maybe 20 minutes work to edit them all back to a more dangerous setting.

Nice, Dutch Cleansing Woman and all (a long way off B-17 pin-ups, but they got there)! Hopefully these, and the USAS's N28s and S.XIIIs, will feature in Ojcar's Armchair Aces 1918.

...and thank YOU for all the great stuff you've produced in that short time, especially the wonderful planes, which have helped keep FE at the top of the league!

Nice one - the seasoning/weathering on the wodden fuselage is particularly effective - upload please???

The national markings are not showing up for this A Team plane for me, in FE2. The texturesets it comes with don't have D folders so the usual drill to get decals for 1st gen sims to show in 2nd gen ones - copying the skins (and thus the D folder) over into the Decals folder - won't work. There is an additional Kissenberth skin here at CA which does have the D folder but copying that over doesn't work either - the skin shows up, but no crosses. The markings work fine in FEG, from what I can see they use the stock crosses for the 'insignia' decal. Maybe if I could find and extract the correct 'Insignia.tga' I could copy that file into D folder. Any suggestions would be much appreciated - I'm sure we all want to have this bird up and running properly for Armchair Aces 1918 and for Independent Force, when they appear! EDIT - sorry have just managed to find a post here about this, tho I had already tried the suggested fix with no luck - will study that and have another go - wait out! Edit # 2 - this time, editing LOD=1 to LOD=3 in the Decals.ini files worked and she's now flying in all her glory!

Gosh - that's a real work of art, off to grab it now!

Outward bound on the first mission of a 20 Squadron campaign, March 1916, using Ojcar's 'Armchair Aces 1916' , A-Team FE2b:

Lancs had plenty of room on the right:

..and my observer is now doing a better job too, with pitch and yaw rates set at 30 and 45, IIRC that is 10 and 15 less than stock (I usually use 30 and 50 but reduced yaw to 45 for the twin Lewis mount). He shot a Pfalz DIII off our tail during the bomb run last mission, and was doing a good job on what looked like a Pfalz Triplane before I crashed the mission by mistake. Earlier, one of my flight-mates who was being worried by an enemy plane ditched his bombs, broke formation and wheeled away for home. I don't recall seeing that in FE before; the more I see it, the more I believe that the AI in First Eagles 2 is much the most convincing AI in any WW1 sim. The 'Nine' is now one of my favourite FE planes. Amazing to think there are about 90 flyables, all told, if you exclude close variants, about double that if you include them.. Yes it would be nice to have a 1918 German 2-seater, a 1917 configuration BE2c or 2e, a better Albatros DII & Fokker DII, and a couple of others, but it's already just amazing. I doubt any WW1 sim will ever have such a good planeset. Isn't she a beauty:

Heading over to grab them now, thanks!

Yes, forget about formation loops and suchlike, this is more what you want. it's not just mossies and 633 Squadron who can go zipping down fjords - prosit!: http://www.youtube.c...&feature=relmfu ..or if you fancy seeing off the Ivans on the Eastern Front: http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=dfUaw0BfaZA

You don't have to re-install OFF (or CFS3) after a driver update or even a graphics card change. Just run the configuration utility (CFS3config.exe) from Workshop (or from the main OFF install folder, same thing). That IS needed after even a driver update. CFS3 was/is the same. But it's all you need to do.

This might be of interest too, the old Profile Publications issue on the Lancaster: http://www.scribd.com/doc/4661514/Aircraft-Profile-065-The-Avro-Lancaster-I

Fair enough, but we need one of these rather more - a classic 1916-17 'Quirk':

They may have taken off roughly together in groups from each base and I realise that raids sometimes involved over a dozen a night, but I don't think raiding Zepps operated in anything resembling a formation. I'm not sure with such relatively low-powered and cumbersome machines, so subsceptible to wind and weather, that formation flyng would have been practical in daylight, let alone at night. The account in the link below is pretty typical, with the various Zepplins being described as navigating and manoeuvring independently and being only sometimes able to see another Zeppelin and even then, sometimes only when they were caught by searchlights or AA fire (or shot down!): http://www.richthofen.com/dark_autumn/

TThe first two letters - those to the left of the RAF roundel - are the squadron code and will be identical for all aircraft in any specific squadron - eg 460 Squadron's squadron code was AR. The third letter, the one to the rght of the roundel, was the individual aircraft letter and was unique for each aircarft in the squadron - eg AR-P would have been aircraft 'P for Peter' (in the phoenetic alphabet of the time), AR-G would have been 'George'. The serial number, on the fuselage to the rear of the codes, was of course unique for each aircraft. AR-G's serial number was W4783: http://en.wikipedia....ki/G_for_George Squadron codes for wartime Lancs were of course red., sometimes outlined in yellow but most often just red. IIRC, the individual aircraft letter was often repeated, smaller, either side of the nose, behind the bomb-aimer's 'blister' window. You should try to pick a serial number from a batch that was used for the Mark of Lancaster you are modelling, preferably one used by an actual aircraft in the squadron planes, easy to find an example online. No need to invent a squadron code, when you can use a real one

Yes they are much better now, great stuff! Re tactics, ever since I somehow managed to shoot down an Albatros flying an RE8 in OFF, I am often tempted to dogfight scouts and not worry about losing height if necessary. However, in FE with Armchair Aces, low level flight can (realistically) be much more dangerous because of the AA MG fire. And even tho I have increased the gunner yaw and pitch rates to nearly FE stock levels and reverted the guns themselves to stock where necessary, I find that my own gunner is still a bit reluctant to save our bottoms even if I fly nice and level to make it easy; and if he doesn't start shooting I end up dogfighting again. It's a vicious circle - literally Maybe it is an urban myth but AI gunners seem more effective when flying with AI pilots rather than with the player. May still need a bit more tweaking to find a gunner setting that makes them dangerous but not excessively so.

There's a formation.ini download at CA that's designed for big bombers, IIRC to keep them apart on takeoff and in flight so they don't overlap and explode - might be worth a try for the Zepps. Given they tended to fly solo, not sure why you'd want to fly formation...visions of the 'Silver Arrows' doing (VERY slow) fromation aerobatics over Fanrnborough...have you by any chance tried looping or rolling a Zeppelin?

Looking great - never been much of a fan of the DVII but that could be about to change...nice to see the fine skins for the Roland and the Pfalz in there, too

Stephen's great new DH9, out on a squadron formation training flight, 'Somewhere in France', 1918:

Use a cloud mod that is made for any SF2 series sim. In my experience, clouds made for a 1st gen sim will not work on a second generation one (apart from horizon cloud graphics) - I read it was due to a 'different particle system'. But SF2-compatible cloud mods should work with FE2. That's waht I did, tho I don't recall which (overhead) SF2 cloud mod I'm using, there are several. Create manually any folders you need for a mod; when you install FE2, it only creates a basic set of mod folders (for Vista= in [username/Saved Games/ThirdWire/FirstEagles2, not the main installation folder in Program Files or wherever you selected)) and you have to create any extra subfolders needed for a particular mod. You don't usually need to extrat .cat files; the mod will usually come with one you install into the appropriate mod folder, like a new environmentsystem.ini for the Flight (mod) folder.

Oh, sweet! and she has twin Vickers, too! Watch out, Hunland, here I come! Pity there are no railway yards in FE/FE2, being seemingly the most common target for bombing missions in WW1, but the long 'boulevards' in the bigger towns look a bit like railway stations so we can always bomb them as a break from airfields

Good to hear, Ojcar. I think the Nine's bad reputation will have been 90% due to the engine not the airframe. When it was working, the Siddley Puma, even tho down-rated to 230hp, produced a very reasonable HP and power-to-weight ratio for a 1917-18 2-seater. And there's no reason I think to believe that accounts like the ones above, or the ones below from Wikpedia, are any more or less subject to exaggeration, or are examples of extreme pilot skill imbalances, than any others. So I think the DH9, when the motor was running ok, was at least as much a match for a scout as most other 2-seaters could be - for example in 'Winged Warfare' Billy Bishop reports a 1917 fight between his flight of SIX Nieuports and a single German 2-seater, which turned into their attack and then fought them for an estimated 3 minutes, hitting and nearly killing Bishop and another pilot, before breaking off and getting away. So a well-flown 2-seater could get the best of even well-flown scouts. The Nine was obviously no exception. 'The DH.9's performance in action over the Western Front was a disaster, with heavy losses incurred, both due to its low performance, and engine failures (despite the prior de-rating of its engine). For example, between May and November 1918, two squadrons on the Western Front (Nos. 99 and 104) lost 54 shot down, and another 94 written off in accidents.[4] Despite this, on 23 August 1918, a DH9 flown by Lieutenant Arthur Rowe Spurling of 49 Squadron, with his observer, Sergeant Frank Bell, single-handedly attacked thirty Fokker D.VII fighters, downing five of them.[citation needed] Captain John Stevenson Stubbs managed 11 aerial victories in a DH9, including the highly unusual feat of balloon busting with one.' 'On 23 August 1918, Spurling was flying on a bombing mission when he became separated from his formation. Thinking he was over the British lines, he prepared to land on a German airfield near Lens which he mistook for his own, but was attacked by a German Fokker D.VII fighter. He then saw a formation of thirty more of the Fokkers. Despite the disadvantage of his flying a bomber, and being vastly outnumbered, Spurling launched a single-handed attack (not forgetting his Observer, Sergeant Frank Bell, real name George Stanley Bell), shooting down three of the German aircraft, while Sgt. Bell accounted for two more. Sharing Bell's kills, these five victories immediately made Spurling an ace. It was for this action that Spurling was awarded the DFC and Sgt Bell was awarded the DFM. Two days later Spurling shot down another D.VII over Mont Notre Dame.'

In Squadron/Signal #164 'DH9 in Action', Peter Cooksley reports, after describing some of the operational disasters, that 'Even with the engine problems, the DH9 could give a good account of itself in air-to-air combat. On one occasion, the observer of a No. 49 Squadron DH9 shot down [presumably=claimed] four enemy fighters that were attacking the unit. One pilot reported that, after dropping its bomb load, a DH9 could turn with a Fokker DVII [never mind a Rumpler CI!!] and could be tightly looped.'

If the Cessnas I've flown (just a few lessons) were anything like these DH9s I would not be typing this! Admittedly they were three-wheelers but they didn't need much rudder, the only problem I had was remembering that the yoke was not like a car steering wheel and you had to use the brakes on the pedals to turn or line up for takeoff, instead! I just managed to get off in a DH9 with no bombload and found the sudden lurch to one side was still there, just not quite so bad. Once in the air the Nine is a real barge, even empty, some AI-flown Rumpler CI's were all over me (my gunner was no use, never fired a shot in return, so I have reverted him to stock Lewis Mk2 and told him to do better next time). It was all I could do to keep her from stalling in even fairly gentle turns. The DH9 was supposed to be quite manoeuvrable with bombs gone, able to dogfight with scouts, but I don't think I will be trying that myself!