quote:

Originally posted by Frankthetank36:
So then why don't you see people at 2000m to counter the guys on the deck, and people at 4000m to counter the guys at 2000m, and people at 6000m to counter the guys at 4000m, and guys at 8000m to counter the guys at 6000m (well, you get the idea)

You do see that.

quote:

Anyway I haven't really seen anyone beyond like 4000m yet.

That's because you fly on a server with wonderwoman enabled and matched plane-sets on each side.

quote:

Anyway I haven't really seen anyone beyond like 4000m yet.

My last 3 or 4 sorties online (spits/109's mod) have been at 9000 meters + and havent gone below 6000 unless I was shotdown or rtb.

Try a different server where the fight isnt a free for all down in the mud.

Well I fly in SoV and there are ground targets, but the level bombers nonetheless fly close to the deck (usually not more than 2000m), making perfect targets. My last sortie (Spits and P-40s vs Zeros and Vals) went up to 4000m but that was the highest I can remember it going up to.

Heh. I flew some 6 sorties today, some 4-4½ hours, and apart from takeoffs, landings and a few of the bounces I came BELOW 4000m only to lure a Spitfire into our airfield's AAA...

9 kills btw, with a single burst shot towards me(by the same Spitfire I dragged to the AAA, already burning a kilometer or so behind me).

Player forced to sit in his cockpit(no wonder woman, no external views) is a must.

After a month or so you'll grow tired of that shoot em up stuff... it's fun to do it every now and then but I can't imagine to be a regular on pit off/externals servers. It is really entry online server... when you learn the basics you move on.

Eventually regardless of your gear you ought to end up on WarClouds, Spits v 109's, Zeke vs Wildcat etc.

Then you will relearn some stuff like employing an actual historical tactics as much as possible because it will make you live long and prosper on such server .

Rarely anyone flies below 3000m on such servers even in early war setups...

So what exactly do external/internal views have to do with the altitude at which the fights take place? Having an altitude advantage is a good thing regardless of views since you can attack them but they can't get up to attack you. And what do you guys mean by wonderwoman?

I did do a couple of missions in Zekes vs Wildcat, but nowadays all the full-real stuff uses 4.09. I'm still using 4.08 and kinda afraid to upgrade because some people have reported problems with the thing not starting at all once they upgrade, and I'm not exactly a computer genius.

Wonderwoman=pit off

If you are forced to always have pit on you cannot switch thru other people's planes positions and look where they are, you can't use F6 or F4 or whatever to lock them or enemy ground targets down etc.

It is pretty obvious that you need some other sort of security and the best way to get it is to fly as historical as possible, those ww2 guys weren't stupid when they insisted on wingmen and saying "speed is life" etc .

Imagine how it must be... locked in really tight space, not being able to see in ANY direction really good, in some planes your rear hemisphere was really obstructed, mist, water condensation, degradation of glass visibility + armored glass blur etc. etc. it isn't wonder just how many of them were shot down completely non aware of enemy presence.
No F6 for them anyway .

quote:

Originally posted by DKoor:
Wonderwoman=pit off

If you are forced to always have pit on you cannot switch thru other people's planes positions and look where they are, you can't use F6 or F4 or whatever to lock them or enemy ground targets down etc.

It is pretty obvious that you need some other sort of security and the best way to get it is to fly as historical as possible, those ww2 guys weren't stupid when they insisted on wingmen and saying "speed is life" etc .

You can use keys to cycle thru other players positions? Hmm, didn't know you could do that :/
Is there also some key that turns on an indicator pointing to your enemies (like in MCFS)? I usually just go external and search for enemies visually and go inside the pit when I want to aim or land.

Honestly I wouldn't mind staying inside the pit the whole time, but the lack of map icons is what really trips me up. I mean, didn't WWII pilots have some sort of navigational instrument? In campaigns the tower can just tell you where to go (are they using radar, or what?), but not online. In particular, I can't imagine navigating across the vast blue Pacific without some sort of aid, just using the heading indicator seems pretty crude.

quote:

Originally posted by Frankthetank36:
Honestly I wouldn't mind staying inside the pit the whole time, but the lack of map icons is what really trips me up. I mean, didn't WWII pilots have some sort of navigational instrument? In campaigns the tower can just tell you where to go (are they using radar, or what?), but not online. In particular, I can't imagine navigating across the vast blue Pacific without some sort of aid, just using the heading indicator seems pretty crude.

That's why they absolutely loved planes with large fuel capacity!
Seriously if you go ahead and read some stuff you will love it, to see just how some of those guys deal with this stuff (latest book I read dealing with subject was American Nightfighter Aces of WW2 by Osprey) and I was pretty amazed by some stuff inside... it was written that pilots generally regarded landing on aircraft carrier by night more lethal than actual combat sortie... and I'm not aware that they use anything other than compass and clock in order to safely rtb... they knew where their carrier will be, so they took the correct heading home, luckily the carrier (water trail) can be seen from many miles away... not to mention that they usually flew in wing so there was always someone smart there who could lead the way home . Joking of course... they were all pretty capable guys with decent training and they had faith in their machines of war, often more so than those machines deserved.

So could pilots in real life ask the tower for vectors to the target and base? Also I read something about a navigational instrument in WWII that used Morse code (dots if you were to the right of the target and dashes if you were to the left, or something like that), but it doesn't appear to be modelled in IL2.

quote:

Originally posted by Frankthetank36:
Honestly I wouldn't mind staying inside the pit the whole time, but the lack of map icons is what really trips me up. I mean, didn't WWII pilots have some sort of navigational instrument? In campaigns the tower can just tell you where to go (are they using radar, or what?), but not online. In particular, I can't imagine navigating across the vast blue Pacific without some sort of aid, just using the heading indicator seems pretty crude.

Proper navigation is part of the fun.

Seriously, it takes time but you learn to plan your route, pay attention to heading and airspeed, notice prominent geographical features and always always remember which way home is.

Regarding upgrading to 4.09 and the mods just be sure to make a copy of your vanilla install and youre covered if anything goes wrong but it is pretty simple.

And what's REALLY tricky is finding enemy ground units. Ships are pretty easy but on that Spit vs 190 mission I mentioned earlier I also flew a Mosquito and spent like 5 minutes in the sector that was supposed to have the enemy tanks. Finally found one and fired, destroying it in half a second with my 8 guns only to find that it was friendly >:/

It is hard.
Usually when you see no AA you can suspect friendlies, if you see half-trucks you can suspect German ground units, if you see tanks with rounded turrets you can suspect allied tanks more square - Germans also by camos... sometimes even by markings, crosses!
Camouflaged (net) artillery is trickier, but greenish is generally allied brown/gray axis... generally. You can tell but it isn't always easy as you will sometimes lose your advantageous position in order to get really low to inspect the troops. That is most dangerous especially with enemy fighters around where you really don't have much time to lay your eggs.

quote:

Also I read something about a navigational instrument in WWII that used Morse code

Even today NAV stations are ID'd using morse code.

The code was an identifier for the station so the pilot knows he is recieving the correct signal.

If you turn to the VOR frequency for KISM - Kissimmee Gateway you will hear ".. ... --" or the code for the airport identifier, ISM.

There were several models of NAV/COM used during the war and each country had their own variants. Most used either a needle deflection or a tone to give the pilot a bearing.

In IL-2, it's impossible to do true navigation as a real pilot would. You have no plotter and E6-B flight computer, so you have to ball-park a lot of things.

Thankfully the maps are small enough that you can fly across most of them.

There's a little trick with US planes:
The compass shows both your heading, and the heading you should be on to get to the next waypoint. This is shown by a thick line, and two thin lines parallel to each other. Just superimpose the lines, and be careful that you are not going 180 degrees of where you should be.

Over land, just practice matching what's outside to what's on the map. And be sure to memorize/write down where the target/home base is.

Eventually, you will become better at open ocean navigation too. I remember a certain Iwo Jima mission on Zekes vs Wildcats where I took a Dauntless ( easy meat anywhere else). Rather than flying straight to the island, I circled to 4000 m. Then I went around to the point where I could no longer see land. I was able to attack from the totally opposite direction. No one saw me coming and I was able to run back to the carriers unmolested after dropping the load. No one would let you do that in SoV

For me, moving to closed pit was a very hard time. I literally felt claustrophobic, and a sort of anxiety of not being able to see outside my plane. After a bit I got used to it. I fly all my offline campaigns full real, and I would never go back to Wonder-woman, even if it's enabled by the server.

I suggest having the stick in the right hand, and the mouse in the left. It's awkward at first, but now it's second nature.

Be sure to check your six often. It's not enough to just look with the mouse, but be sure to turn your plane now and then to get a better view, or even kick the rudder to get a full picture of what's behind you.

You will find that in FR servers, players employ more realistic tactics and strategy. It also takes a lot more thinking and focus, and these sorties are the ones that tire me out

quote:

There's a little trick with US planes:

Most airplanes have that feature.

The Germans FuG 25 IFF system was integrated with the radio compass. The controller could set the bearing in-flight on some variants. They also had a "running commentary" on the location of the bomber stream with the controllers calling our position, altitude, and cardinal directions of the USAAF bombers.

Almost all aircraft have some sort of bug or lubber line on the Heading indicator and while there are some subtle differences among the different countries they all worked on the same priniciples.

What you do not have are the plates and charts required for the approaches.

Here is the approach plate for Stout Field from the USAAF Instrument training manual 1943.




Stout field no longer exist so I cannot show you the same approach today, but I can show you a similar non-precision approach at KRMG:

http://204.108.4.16/d-tpp/0910/00855VD19.PDF

Here is a brief overview of the system used by the USAAF:

quote:

Originally posted by Romanator21:
There's a little trick with US planes:
The compass shows both your heading, and the heading you should be on to get to the next waypoint.

That was in IL2 from the very start, even the demo, only for non-US planes that had it like the 109's.

You can bleed off an opponent's energy by:

Climbing more than he does.
You will get more E if he doesn't climb as
much, but you will be slow. That's dangerous.

Making him turn to try to shoot you.
Of course, this isn't going to be much use if
you have to turn more than he does.

Making him chase you.
The longer he chases you and the faster you go,
the closer your energy levels will get.
However, an experienced pilot will keep his
altitude as he chases you.

Well I am indeed having problems downloading 4.09, so I can't use the full-real servers again. Posted this in the 4.09 thread too:

Went to this site:
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=10276

and tried downloading it from like the only site it had listed that actually let me download. After like a minute it said "not responding", so I used Ctrl+alt+delete to get rid of everything. But apparently 4.09 was actually there on the desktop, so I opened it, tried to install it, and got a message saying "some files are corrupt, download a fresh install" or something like that. So I tried downloading again, just let it sit there (even though it was "not responding" again), ate breakfast, and came back to find that it looked like it had been downloaded (and I did NOT have to use ctrl+alt+delete this time), and when I tried to install it, I got ANOTHER message saying "some files are corrupt, download fresh install".