-Hawkeye-

Changed my votes because I upgraded to Windows 10 over the weekend. The last question is a biggie; I answered no to compatibility problems because in the end I have none that are known to me right now. That wasn't the case at all initially, however. First, I had no sound. Sound card is a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Champion PCI-e (could that name be any longer???). None of the software would open, said it couldn't find any device. The card showed being installed in the device manager. Then after a couple of reboots for other reasons, an updater came up for Creative products which recognized my hardware and software and said I needed updates, so I ran that. After the reboot I had basic sound, but still none of the software worked. This is a huge thing since this card has a million settings and 3 different modes, and you won't get any quality at all without proper settings. I started researching on the internet and found out everybody with these cards was having trouble with Windows 10, and there was some guy who made some 3rd party drivers that were supposed to work. Supposedly Microsoft was "working diligently" with Creative to get workable drivers. I didn't want anything to do with the 3rd party drivers because people said even those would lose their settings. I sort of gave up for the day and began considering rolling back to WIn7 (they give you one month to do this). Trying to get Win10 to update itself proved to be very frustrating. It's not like before when you could just go to control panel and force it to check for and install updates right now. Basically you so to a separate place (illogical) called "settings" and from there you can ​check ​for updates and it will show you if there are any (I had at least 15 or so) but it just sits there thinking it's going to do it eventually and you're supposed to be too stupid to worry about it; there was no way to make it do it NOW. Back in the Control Panel there's a section for "Security and Maintenance" in which you can tell it what time you want it to do maintenance (in one hour increments) so I set it to the next available hour and waited. Nothing happened so I put my machine to sleep, went to bed and hoped for the best. Next day I checked I checked the control panel again, and saw that there was now a button there for "run maintenance now". I don't know why that appeared, whether it was the result of an update that occurred, or just time that had gone by. I pressed the button, then went back to the Settings area and saw that the updates were actually downloading and installing. Once that was all done, it seemed like if you "check for updates", it seems to download and install them at that time. In any case, a lot was updated, and once the reboot was done, the sound did not work at all anymore. I read some more on the internet and found a post where one guy said that you had to go to Device manager, disable the device, then enable it again. This worked for me to get the basic sound back. At this point I gave up trying to let Windows fix itself with regard the sound. I went to the Creative support website, and lo and behold there was a new driver posted for my card series that said it was for Windows 10. I didn't have much confidence that it would work....surely this must be the driver that Microsoft was already using, right? It went through what looked like the same update process as it did before....recognized my hardware and software, and ran an installshield. After the reboot, I looked over at my hardware, and the red lights came on on the front of my sound control panel! Everything for that works! Have to go now, will add the REST of the story later...

Great news. Thanks!

Lee, do you have "CMStart.exe" in the Startup folder? IS there a "Startup" folder in Windows 10? That's a shame.....I have 2 CH controllers.....the software is old and I'm sure it will never be updated. Have you tried a compatibility setting for the above? Maybe a "Run as administrator"? It sure would be a pain to have to download the profile into the controllers every time you are going to use RoF

Great job on the wording and questions. Better than I would have done! Thanks! I hope there will eventually be more input from pilots who are actually using Win10 already!

Got 7, missed 4, 9 & 10 I knew the Corsair's knick name and could have guessed that the bowler had the same name, but I never heard before that the Beaufighter had that name also, so that threw me Didn't quite understand the question correctly on 9, I thought they meant for you to state what the mistake one side or the other made in their actions in the dogfight. As for the answer they listed, I wouldn't consider that a mistake as such because my opinion is that the movie makers did that intentionally for whatever reasons.....liability or trying not to directly offend anybody who had lawyers. As for 10 I've never heard of it and never would have guessed it. I guessed a Hawker type. If I had seen that plane, though, I would have mistaken it for a North American F5 series, due to my extensive ignorance concerning most jets. Number 7 is pretty famous to WWI buffs, but did you know that the same "claim to fame" also appears on a GERMAN corporation product? Name it.... Answer In engineering, hydraulic systems, in terms of energy transfer or "work", are 100% efficient. I don't believe any other type of system can claim that.

@ Ludwig, do you think having 27% less horsepower than standard (you said it was an 80 HP, right?) had an adverse effect on it?

BTW, just for interest's sake: collimator [kol-uh-mey-ter] /ˈkÉ’l əˌmeɪ tÉ™r/ SpellSyllables Word Origin noun 1. Optics. a fixed telescope for use in collimating other instruments. an optical system that transmits parallel rays of light, as the receiving lens or telescope of a spectroscope. 2. Physics. a device for producing a beam of particles in which the paths of all the particles are parallel. Origin of collimator 1815-1825 1815-25; collimate + -or2 Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2015. collimator (kÅl'É™-mÄ'tÉ™r) A device that turns incoming radiation, such as light, into parallel beams. Simple collimators consists of a tube having a narrow, variable slit at one end and a convex lens at the other. Radiation entering the tube through the slit exits the lens in the form of parallel beams. Collimators are used to establish focal lengths of lenses and to measure the distance of distant objects whose position is known. See illustration at spectroscope. The American Heritage® Science Dictionary Copyright © 2002. Published by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved. Cite This Source

I've heard that for some reason, probably because the end of WWI was not certain at the time the US entered the war, that France had a lot of the Gnome 160 HP engines as surplus, and shipped them to the US both before the war ended, and after, to be used in planes that the US may have planned to develop. Apparently more than a few have been found and returned to running condition, so really if a plane is to have a genuine rotary engine at all, the odds of it being a Gnome 160 are pretty high; often it's either that, or nothing. I saw a documentary recently in which different aspects of the Camel and Dr.1 were compared. The Dr.1 seemed to have a throttled rotary, but the Camel definitely had a Gnome 160 in it, and that was just one of others that I've seen that used that engine. At least in a Camel it could be seen as being similar to a Bentley equipped machine. Also I'd imagine that the owners of today's replicas would appreciate the extra horsepower available over the original engine, as an extra margin of safety (if not reliability).

Agreed, the long range shooting was all from the days before they added the increased bullet spread. Used to be that a Dr.1 could turn and continue shooting at an escaping SPAD and disable his engine enough to slow him down to the point you could catch up and finish him off. Man did that PISS OFF the SPAD pilots You can still land a bullet now and then from long range, but it does little to down them, although for some reason the first bullet generally causes a stage one wound to the pilot.....a point of complaint by many on the receiving side.....it will certainly discourage them from coming back, as will the occasional slow fuel leak you can inflict. Personally I've never spared the bullets in the German planes, as 1,000 is a lot to work with, and often you know exactly what you've got left to work with, unlike the Entente crates. I've always tried to inflict as much damage as possible while the enemy is within my ability to hit him; furballs offer an opportunity to get a lot of kills in a single sortie, but I'm not in those situations often at all. My favorite thing is to try to combat multiple enemies at the same time while trying to maintain a position of advantage, if the enemy will cooperate by being stupid and not extending away while I'm engaged by others, climbing, and returning to shoot me while I'm focused on others. In those situations, if I find a good opportunity to hit a plane hard I'll try to blow his wings off in one pass if possible. My opinion is that there's an appreciable difference in this sim of people's ability to see their bullet trajectories. Captain Darling told me his secret to good gunnery was mainly to watch his tracers, and I always thought "what tracers?". My video settings have always been as good as I could get them on the 32" 1080p 60 Hz monitor I use; I like the wide field of view but the detail, while quite good, is certainly not as good as some other pilots. Even when I watched Barton's video that he posted I could see the bullets in the video more than I can in the game. So for me I am highly dependent on aiming points and judgement of where and how far ahead I should be shooting. Practicing this helps a lot and seeing the damage appear on the enemy plane confirms correct aiming, and eventually becomes second nature after a while; but it is clear to me that I might be doing better if I ever upgrade, which I'm probably due for. It's hard to decommission a machine that works perfectly in all respects and runs the game flawlessly, though.

I guess on all those twin-gun planes the Germans would have had to look down the gun sight of either the left or right hand gun. This is a view you can easily set up and save, and I used to have that programmed for each plane it applied to, like a saved zoomed in view to use for long-range accuracy shooting, like when chasing somebody. Even though those views are probably still working they've fallen into disuse for me. Perhaps they really "shot from the hip" most often if careful aiming was impractical. That may be the reason Boelke and MvR always said not to bother shooting from beyond 50 meters range.

The "wise men" have determined that the cost vs. benefit is not advantageous at this time. Perhaps another time!

Not a fan of the collimater sights because the base is large and obstructs your view when you need to aim ahead of your opponent. Otherwise it helps if you use 6 dof but the telescopic sights do the same thing and generally obstruct your view a lot less. Fokker Dr.1: as you said, crossed wires Fokker D.VII: approximate middle of windscreen (horizontally and vertically) Fokker D.VIIf: midpoint of top edge of windscreen Fokker D.VIII: midpoint of the imaginary line formed between the horizontal cross hairs of the two machine gun sights All Albatros' and Pfalz D.IIIa: top of radiator cap All other German, the built-in gun sight works great, including the DFW.CV gun sight on the left side of the engine hump I fly using only 2 dof (actually 3) which keeps your head perfectly aligned horizontally and vertically but of course sacrifices some realism. Some others I have talked to also do the same, but it is by no means an absolute necessity for success. S!

That's no Oberusel or LeRhone, is it now? Gnome 160? Quite a bit suped up if that's the case.....

You are just plain a good shot, Barton! Wish we had seen you more in FiF. Great job!

And really, the S-22 was an import from a separate sim that RoF sort of absorbed. Then I think they added the S-16 in order to make the Eastern Front map more viable; they had done some preliminary work on the S-16 earlier and I think they just carried it on through conclusion. Not exactly the planes most people were hoping for.

Is that a statement, or a question?

Congrats, Blue Team and Mueller as their commander! You guys brought your "A" game, fought tough when things were close and brought home the win. Great job!

S! Hardy, it was a lot of fun. I was in the F.E.2b which hit you in the head-on pass, and a little more later. Your gunner shot my right wing off, right after he shot down the S-16 on your six. Great sortie! You got credit for 4 enemies downed or killed. Excellent work!

I like the regular D.VII, most people hate it but it can be tuned up to be quite decent, and it has excellent firepower, but against something like an S.E.5a it is at a severe disadvantage in almost every respect, which is nothing like it should be. The D.VIII is buggy, it is well known that the engine will kill itself without any help from you above certain altitudes; at low altitudes it can be a lot of fun but the engine fragility surpasses every other (already fragile) German plane engine. The devs are never going to fix it, and that's just plain sad, so basically it's like a non-plane in the game. What they did to the Dr.I and Camel is also a crime, they can still be the kings of the heap in low-level furballs but as for any other uses, they have little value anymore, even though at one time they were my favorite planes. If you put people in a position where they are forced to fly them, you are going to see a lot of pilots getting killed or eliminated in them; very few pilots have the expertise to stay alive in one. Maybe it would be a good idea to have a poll to see how many pilots would actually want to fly either one of them. Back before they changed them there was a channel map scenario FiF, and few enough people flew them then. Is it time to redo that whole thing again?? Personally I hate the channel map scenario; if you are in a German plane then any damage you might take over the water guarantees you are done for the night. You could be 5 yards from gliding into the beach, and not make it. I guess what goes around comes around, though, since we are flying both sides now.

Nice pictures Hardy. I've always liked the J99 paint schemes! S!

If you were actually at Pnchdpokt as you say, I might have seen the aftermath of that engagement in which I spotted one of the N17's egressing from that drome. After giving chase me and two others shot those two down east of that airfield. At the time I could not figure out why an N17 would be low over our field. The thing that drew my attention to him was the ground defenses shooting tracers at him. Later he joined his partner and they both fell to our guns, but not before killing Kaiser first. They gave a good account of themselves. If it actually played out the way I think it did, sorry we did not get on the scene a few minutes earlier. Great video, as always! S!

Redman on the Red team. It has a certain symmetry to it.

The rumor of reduced power on the Roland is false. As we all know, the damage models of all German planes are WAY too tough. Therefore, it will now only take 1/2 of a bullet to oil the engine of the Roland, instead of a whole one. This makes the Roland one of the toughest German planes to down. The rest will continue to oil themselves, for no apparent reason.

Great work Blue team, with a hard job to be done. 10 points in the last session, and 9 before that is fine work. Thanks for hanging in there! S!

Love all the pictures, Hardy; it really tells an exciting story. Great work!