baffmeister

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!

I would like to add some artillery positions to the Battle of the Bulge terrain I'm working on but I'm having a hard time finding equipment. Many of the old SF-1 WW2 uploads have lost their screenshots and many of the files available don't have much of a description as to what they actually are and the date range they are good for. Some objects might just be described as BTB-152 Mk3. [i just made that up but hopefully you get the point.] Anyway, I would like to install some U.S. and German artillery in the 100mm range as well as a couple of pieces in the 50-75mm range. Any ideas suggestions? Re-tasking some other objects might work as well. I'm interested in the most common guns in the 1944-45 time frame.

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.

I mentioned in a different thread that I was trying to make a Battle of the Bulge terrain using the TW GermanyCE terrain but was having problems getting the tiles and tods to show in the target area editor. Turns out I just had to add dedicated TFD and HFD files to get Starys' Hard Winter jpeg tiles to show up. Here's my first attempt at making a small town using some WingWhiner building objects. Some of the buildings are a bit modern but most will probably fit the WW2 era quite well. The buildings were arranged using the Target Area editing feature. There are about 70 buildings showing but I plan on doubling that number and rearranging the layout. I plan on keeping this project simple. It's meant for the single engine fighter bomber types so will just have small airfields. Some new forward airfields will have to be leveled for the allied forces. The Luftwaffe can use existing airfields on the east side of the Rhine but some ini editing will make them non-targets. Target areas will be limited to allied airfields and areas in and around the Ardennes region with no targets east of the Rhine and no targets in the larger cities.

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.

Attached is a beta test FM for Julhelms' "Totally Excellent" SF2 F4D-1 Skyray, available here: http://combatace.com/files/file/11687-f4d-1-skyray-ultimate-pack-for-sf2/ I've been working off and on with this one for quite some time but it's just based on internet information so should be considered a "best guess". I have been having quite a bit of fun flying it and that's about the only requirement I have to do an informal release like this. NOTES: The landing gear speed is set to 180kts. I think I got that number from a navy training video on YouTube but I'm not sure if that's the actual limit speed or just the standard operating procedure for an approach. The tail trimmer is set up like an automatic flap and deploys and retracts around 200kts. If you want to switch back to the original manual trimmer just scroll down to the controls section and disable the current setup and enable the previous. [look for the xxx to see how it's done.] I found this plane quite difficult to land on a carrier due to some issues with over the nose visibility. The best technique I've found so far is to do a quite steep approach at 150-160kts, speed brakes retracted, and aiming at the far end of the carrier. Once in close, chop the power, stuff the nose down a bit while aiming for the wires, then flare and land. The min/max and collision points on this plane were quite wonky and have been re-worked. From the Navy video [i think], take off rotation speed is 125kts [that works with this FM] and approach speed is 130kts. The actual stalling speed was considerably less than the approach speed but the approach speed was governed by over nose visibility, potential tail strike issues, and probably increased yaw instability at higher alpha. Some pilots thought the Skyray was a good dogfighter but it had a lot of handling quirks with various control input restrictions at different speeds and altitudes. At certain speeds the high roll rate could over stress the aircraft. Safe to say this FM is much more docile than the real Skyray. ISSUES: I like to set the carrier birds up so they can do a trap on the autopilot but couldn't get this one to work using TWs' stock Kittyhawk carrier. It would always overfly the wires, even at speeds down around 110kts. Not sure why, but the aim point for the Kittyhawk might be a bit long. I will probably take a closer look at some point. Make sure to back up the original data.ini, here's the new one: F4D-1_DATA_0.92.zip

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

I was tempted at one point to add a small amount of HE to the 303 Browning to simulate the incendiary round but never tried it. I did add some to the Breda 12.7mm heavy machine gun after reading somewhere that there was an HE round available for it. With no armor protection on either the CR-42 or Gladiator the results seem "OK". The CR-42 had self sealing tanks from the factory as well as a CO2 engine fire extinguisher so it's not very flammable. The Gladiators with 4 Browning's have no trouble shooting them down, however. With the Breda 12.7 the CR-42 can set the unprotected Gladiators on fire quite often. Saw an interesting wing root fire on the Sea Hurricane. It seemed to burn for almost a minute then went out and the Sea Hurricane continued on it's merry way. Doesn't seem particularly realistic but it was fun waiting to see what would happen!

Here is Geezers' CR-42 FM with a no WEP engine table that generates max horsepower at altitude similar to the SF-2 version. It may require other edits I'm unfamiliar with to work properly in FE-2. Feel free to modify and upload any required changes. CR-42_DATA_FE2_0.98.zip

Which Spitfire, the IX? Some of the later versions with retractable tail wheel require an edit of the stock data.ini to get the tail wheel working properly. For the TW Spitfire, make sure you do the take off with the flaps up, otherwise it becomes quite uncontrollable. For anyone with a flyable version of the TW C-47, it has the same issue when doing a take off with flaps extended. The take off with flaps problem is due to a low stalling angle coupled with a large negative delta stall alpha angle with flaps extended. Here are some edits to try: For flaps: [FlightControl] StallSpeed=41.03 CruiseSpeed=95.13 ClimbSpeed=72.28 CornerSpeed=119.53 LandingSpeed=41.99 MaxG=8.00 MaxSpeedSL=174.35 MachLimit=0.642 PitchDamper=0.0 RollDamper=0.0 YawDamper=0.0 GunBoresightAngle=0 RocketBoresightAngle=3 FlapSettingForTakeOff=0//...........add this line FlapSettingForLanding=1//.............add this line NOTE: From my experience, the FlapSettingForTakeOff=0 doesn't always work so you will want to check flaps up for take off every time when flying the Spit. For the Spits with retractable tail wheel you will have to modify the stock tail gear data like this to get a functioning tail wheel: [TailGear] SystemType=LANDING_GEAR Retractable=TRUE DeployTime=5.0 AnimationID=1 DragArea=0.08 HideGearNode=TRUE ModelNodeName=tail_gear_strut InsideNodeName=tail_gear_bay_inside ShockAnimationID=4 ShockStroke=0.12 SpringFactor=2.0 DampingFactor=1.8 WheelNodeName=tail_wheel RotationAxis=X-AXIS ReverseModelOrientation=FALSE RollingRadius=0.13 CastoringWheel=TRUE CastoringNodeName=tail_gear_frame Steerable=TRUE MaxSteeringSpeed=30.88 Locking=FALSE MaxSteeringAngle=45.0 InputName=YAW_CONTROL ControlRate=1.0 HasBrakes=FALSE RollingCoefficient=0.05 MaxDeploySpeed=71.53//.......................Add this line......................!! MaxLoadFactor=4.0

View File Geezer CR-42 SF-2 MTO Here is Geezer's excellent CR-42 model set up for SF-2 use. This CR-42 represents an early production version with no bomb racks. Future plans include an Italian fighter/bomber version, export versions, and one with a tight date range for Battle of Britain use. Make sure to check the included README regarding installation. CREDITS: Geezer: CR-42 model, Skin, Italian Pilots, Hangar Screen, Loading Screen Baffmeister: Flight Model and Ini Edits. Crusader: Gunsight tga. Wrench: CR-42 Loadout bitmap Not sure who made the original PW_R1830-90 engine sound but a modified version is included. ISSUES: The cockpit is WIP with non functional gauges. WAIVERS: This file is for freeware use only, commercial use is not permitted. Submitter baffmeister Submitted 05/07/2016 Category Italian Origin