baffmeister

Screen shot of the D-20 supporting Sherman tanks attacking defending German Panthers at about 5-7KM range. The D-20 had a DataLink=TRUE statement but the Sherman didn't so I added it. Not sure if that helped because I placed the D-20 at a higher elevation as well. [poor test procedures.] The D-20 didn't actually hit anything at that range, the rounds were well short. I did see a couple of hits at closer range during another test. I hope to make a semi-historical campaign for this terrain so plan to add the artillery at locations that weren't overrun during the Battle of the Bulge. That would include the Monschau/Hofen area and Elsenborn Ridge, on the northern shoulder of the battle. Will probably add some anti-tank guns as well. Any campaign will have to be VERY simplified compared to the actual battle which was very complex with lots of small unit action. For anyone interested, here is a link to a good article about the battle. https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USA-E-Ardennes/index.html#XIX

It might just be that I have to place the artillery at the higher elevation areas surrounding the target area. More experiments to do but maybe some kind of networking statement in the data.inis would help?

Got an Americanized version of Wrenchs' D-20 upload working in game. Set up a few pieces near a GROUND_ATTACK route and they are engaging the enemy forces. The attack route is in a hilly area and the artillery seems to require contact based on line of sight. That goes for the tanks as well. I've seen some tanks not engaging even at short distances and when zooming in for a look I can see they don't have line of sight contact. Some more testing to do while I continue to place the small towns. Got MontyCZs' Flak 88 and Flak 30 downloaded but not installed yet.

I will stick my nose in. Transition tiles can be done quite well with Gimp, copy and paste, use feathering at about 6 pixels.

I downloaded some MontyCZ Skoda [i think] artillery so will take a closer look. Agreed. Both MontyCZ and Stephen1918 make some nice stuff!

Wow Wrench! Your WW2 Formosa terrain has some great looking target areas! After seeing it I went on a shopping trip and got Monty CZs' awesome railway station from the SF1 downloads. Bastonge had a small railway station but the terrain is a bit lumpy were I placed it and the object count is getting a bit high already at 170 and increasing so decided to bomb the spot were the train station was with some permanent bomb craters and destroyed buildings. It seems the allies got some of the French rail network functioning and had a rail head in Liege so will look for a flat spot there to put Montys' rail station. From a map on the subject it looked like Arlon, to the south, had a rail head so may put a station there as well. Montys' dirt airfield looks good and I may try to re-texture it for winter use. Re-textured, it would make a great grass airfield as well. Here's a screen of the current Bastonge, with the bombed out "railway station" in the lower left corner.

Thanks ShrikeHawk! I rather like the idea of WW2 in small chunks. There are some other possibilities as well that might be worth starting a new thread for but will do a bit more research first.

Will check out the airfield and thanks!

Making some progress. I have seven allied airfields leveled and a map exported using Gerwins TFD tool. The airfields were called Advanced Landing Grounds but most of the ones I've installed were large Dutch-Belgian-Luftwaffe airfields that required major repairs prior to use. I think only the two with the Y prefix were built from scratch. To get your bearings, the four large cities nearest the wall are, from top to bottom, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, and Charleroi. [i think] The Luftwaffe airfield showing on the map is Bitburg but it's just temporary. During the Battle of the Bulge time frame the Luftwaffe had moved all their aircraft east of the Rhine. I don't plan on doing any re-tiling so have to fit the new airfields around the existing Stary tods. I'm using the stock small airfield 3 and Gepards single runway, which is a bit long at 7000ft. With Gepards runway I plan on adding some hardstands and a few roads/taxiways. From photos, the large airfields did have hangars etc. that appear undamaged so will add some of those. The next step is to get some of the well known Battle of the Bulge towns installed. At this point, only Bastogne has been positioned. For both the airfields and small towns, positioning will be very approximate based on the relative position of existing TW cities.

The small church I got from the WW2 Palestine terrain. The church was made by Stephen1918, I think.

Building a new terrain is major work, even for the experts. Then, you still have all the targeting to do. Then, it would be nice to make a campaign for it. Then, as Wrench mentioned, there may be some planes not available. I think time might be better spent on improving and/or re-tasking some of the existing terrains. As an example, the present WW2 Euro terrain could be edited to make a Battle of France terrain. I started doing that but sorting out all the target areas / locations is a lot of work and I lost interest in a hurry. Another idea, make a Battle of the Bulge terrain using the GermanyCE terrain. Some locations are very near the edge and not usable and it would require some new towns made using building objects, not Tod's, but I think it would make a fun little terrain for a mini campaign, having target areas only in the area of interest. I started this project just recently but haven't been able to get Stary's Hard Winter terrain tiles / tods to show up in the Target Area Editor. The tiles are jpg so that may be the problem but it does demonstrate the numerous potential issues with even a simple terrain project.

Could you tell us what the model is? You may find a volunteer to help.

I have seen that before but it was well worth another look.

It's an interesting area to look into. I have tried playing around with some of the TW alpha tables for the V-stab but haven't been able to get a convincing effect yet. For the next update I would like to get some interesting high alpha yaw instability modeled as well as the large drag increase Fubar mentioned. The flight manual mentions the drag increase as well, warning about high sink rates on approach if the airspeed gets too low.

Interesting, thanks Fubar. From a quick look at the flight manual there was a risk of spinning the Skyray at high alpha but it seems to be due to loss of yaw stability. It did generate some buffet at high alpha so I will try increasing the AlphaStall / AlphaMax significantly and see how it works. I have to double check the flight manual but I think the buffet and yaw instability occurred somewhere in the 20-24deg range.

Thanks Crusader. I was just at that site a few days ago looking at a flight manual for a different airplane and didn't think to check for a Skyray manual. I will be reviewing that info prior to the next release.

Ahhhhhhhh.................................permission to land? Understood. Working a desk for the rest of my career..........................[That's a relief.]

The BoB fighter FM's I did can do wheels up landings. I just more or less copied what Cliff did with one of his FM's. Here is a link to the BoB FM's if you want to check one out to see how it can be done. http://combatace.com/topic/83205-battle-of-britain-fm-pack/

I found this site useful when trying to optimize my graphics card. Interesting reading. Here's a link: http://www.tweakguides.com/NVFORCE_6.html

Attached is a drop in FM for the Raven/Wrench Sea Hurricane IIc available here: http://combatace.com/files/file/13561-sf2-ww2-hawker-sea-hurricane-iic-by-raven/ The FM is a quick adaptation of my BoB Hurricane II FM with some edits to make the damage modeling a bit more conventional. I put together an MTO install only a short time ago and after getting frustrated with some of the damage modeling with the BoB FM's I thought this would be a good time to try a more conventional approach. The Sea Hurricane gets self healing tanks, a bit of pilot armor and some front armor to represent armored glass but that's it. One of the main objectives was to test the Hurricane FM on the HMS Eagle to see if it could do the free take off. Seems to work fine. Here's the FM, make sure you back up the original: SeaHurricane_DATA0.95.zip