DeFreest Larner

At the moment, I see wings falling off and control cables snapping On a bit of a hiatus from FC at the moment, including skin making, but hoping to finish this one up eventually...last time I worked on it the pattern was getting really hard to maintain towards the back of the right hand tail section (the bit left blank in the screenshots )

Oh, a good few hours...! I haven't been keeping track It's definitely easier to go about it square-by-square though - you can focus down each square and get it looking reasonably proportionate to the overall pattern, whereas the first few attempts just refused to "wrap" correctly, and trying to fix any blemishes would offset everything else. Still some hiccups in the pattern here and there that are driving me mad, but I'm keen to just get the bulk of it done before worrying about that

So here's a fun one....I decided to try my hand at something a little more 'Hunnish' and found possibly the most enraging skin to attempt in the history of FC..... The Albatros tail section (particularly the closer you get to the tail) is especially irritating to work with on the best of days, and diagonal lines tend to be a real headache....so this Bavarian pattern is turning out to be a real nightmare to try and apply. After starting over at least 7 or 8 times I finally decided that the only way to go about it would to be to individually place the blue squares (pretty laborious task!) Here's where I'm up to:

FrankenSpads: One interesting little quirk that you see in Spad XIIIs is that, on occasion, aircraft will have their parts replaced from parts of other old or broken airframes. As different Spad manufacturers painted roundels and camouflage schemes differently, this can lead to some interesting quirks between aircraft...one good example is Lt. Wright of the 93rd's Kellner-built Spad, which ended up with mismatched lower roundels owing to one wing being replaced with a spare Bleriot wing!

Just a quick update for those of you that might be on the 3rd P.G. forums - Pilots of other squadrons who have an account on our site have been updated to display their appropriate ranks and national wings as well as awards from J5 Flugpark's communal awards system. S!

Great tune! Always a good night out when the Cult's in town

Did some more colour testing and I think there's been a marked improvement in all the squadrons in terms of recognisability. Still not quite the fully desired effect (I.E. instantly recognisable from extreme range) but I think I've got the squadrons looking as good as they ever will as far as recognition is concerned. The 213th's new "orangey-red" does the trick quite nicely, and one aircraft in particular is pretty much immediately recognisable from almost any range! Speaking of the 213th...I stumbled across the old "1st Edition" 213th skins the other day...was really cool to see how the skin pack has changed since then!

Some fine detailing (Paint cracks and fading) and the new "213th Red":

S, all! With Flying Circus Vol. 2 right around the corner, I thought it would be nice to revisit the early days of Flying Circus to remind us how far along it's come (DMs and other craziness aside!) For that reason, I put together a brief history of Flying Circus' first organised community event in a little "Mini-Book", to be enjoyed by old FC pilots and newcomers alike. You can check it out Here ! Enjoy!

...screenshot it and put it in a museum...will be a while before we see another one of those...

It never fails, does it? From what I see you can still kill pilots with MG, you just can't damage the plane in any other way past visual.

It's been really fun to discover all the little quirks of different colours while working on the 3rd P.G. skins - blue's still a bit of a mystery to me. The current colour for the 28th's numbers is about a mid-to-dark-blue, and even at point blank range you'd think that it would be lost in the camouflage, but oddly enough it seems to be very 'spottable' in the air - not so much readable (as in "Oh, there goes aircraft No. 12), but you can definitely tell that there is some kind of blue on the wing when zoomed out. Strangely, the effect is lessened when zoomed in! Even more curiously, it seems that that mid-dark colour is the most easily identifiable - our C.O. stripes, which have a much lighter blue, are almost impossible to spot at any kind of meaningful range! Another good example is aircraft No.24 of the 93rd - which has a blue tailplane. It wasn't ever officially assigned to any of our v-Pilots, but me and Talbot used to "unofficially" fly it quite a lot. The tail is painted quite dark blue, and I'd assumed it would generally blend in (especially over the mud!) but we quickly noticed that it was exceptionally easy to pick out in a fight, even out to extreme ranges! It's a little bit of both! For the national vs squadron markings, it was usually the case that the factory would have a different supply or mix of paint to the guys in the field - so a "Squadron' red might not match a "Cocard" red. I also read in the butterfly project that, owing to the way the paint was mixed and applied, even different SPADs of the same factory might have different shades of red and blue in the roundel from plane to plane! I'm still umm-ing and ahh-ing over whether to include this detail in the next pack or not (seeing as red tends to be so damned temperamental in the skins for some reason!) At the moment I'm trying to settle on a "unified" red for in-the-field squadron markings (as the 3rd P.G. was all stationed together on one airfield, and I'd assume they'd be using the same paint supply) - but the 213th's numbers continue to give me grief It's also possible that the blue of 3rd flight was closer to the Prussian blue of the 28th's numbers, but from the photos I'm not convinced that they were. This SPAD VII fuselage cutout also seems to display two different reds for the personal insignia and the squadron insignia!

Some more notes on picking the new pack's colours: Today I tried out a few different shades for our tactical insignia - the Squadron Stripe and number which denote an aircraft's unit. Initially I went with: Red 870900 Blue 0F3665 Green 406C20 White E2E2E2 Chrome Yellow FB9319 One of the most interesting things I noted was that out of all the colours, it was the Blue numbers which seemed to be most obvious when not zoomed in! The numbers were generally not perceivable when zoomed out, but there was a very obvious blue "flash" as a 28th aircraft flew past, out to ranges of roughly 400 - 500m. Reds, Greens and Yellows all tend to vanish at any kind of longer range, but after changing the 93rd's numbers to FFFFFF they could be seen clearly from damn near 1K out!

In case it's of any interest to the fellow Skinmakers over here, here is the current (subject to change) colour palette for the new 3rd Pursuit Group pack:

Well, it's only taken three days of painting, repainting, re-repainting and re-re-repainting, but I got those C.O. stripes looking just about right. I've been using my "Handpainting Technique" for them, so the stripe hasn't been 'painted in' yet (hence no picture), but the ship currently sitting in the Paint hangar is a very special one...... Happily, it will be the first aircraft officially assigned to the virtual 28th Aero Squadron (its new C.O's aircraft), which has finally been activated a year after the formation of the 3rd Pursuit Group! Just a couple days ago we put out the General Order declaring that, for the first time, all four of our v-Squadrons will be active at once. And here's something funny - the 28th's last major dogfight of WW1 saw them come against none other than your very own Jasta 6! The 28th had just brought down a two-seater low inside German lines when they were pounced by the Jasta. Only one aircraft was downed - the SPAD XIII of Lt. Ben E. Brown of the 28th. The American was unhurt, and the pilots of Jasta 6 landed beside him to say hello and congratulate him on bagging the two seater! I thought that was a particularly cool story. ...our own 28th will be, like Jasta 6, open to both EU and US pilots...so you never know, maybe our v-Squadrons will eventually rekindle the old friendly rivalry!