Sounds well informed, zapatista! :)

So then... you should do your job and report it to bugtracker ;)

Always wondered, when compared to the – for example – Spitfire, the same kind of narrow track, same (almost) the Wingspan, similar airplane configuration, dimensions, engine power, etc... What is the reason why it is said that many of the 109 suffered an accident during landing?

Then I realized...

Usually the 109 landed after the fight, but the Spit's pilot hung on the Chute :twisted:

:-P

The 109 was also knock-kneed. If I'm right, when the ac "leaned" towards a tire, that tire ran in an arc opposite the lean, exacerbating the problem.

The Spit chute had no such tendency :)

I agree.

About the "track record" part: some years ago I posted in Ubizoo an idea for SoW.

It was about storing the pilot's data in a main server, to keep their progress, Kills, KIA ect... with the mere purpose of assigning to every pilot a "Level" who is going to limit his access to server or determinated planes.

I had this idea from America's Army server management, where in every mission some points are added (or subtracted) from the player's total. Some server are limited to expert players by this "level"...

Of course the entire idea was around the virtual death of the pilot (after a defined number of KIA, too much planes lost ect...) being the complete reset of his stats and so finally people would fly caring for their virtual life.

Add your career and your personal planes' wearing...

That would be cool, anything that makes people fly with a care to their virtual life and aircraft can only add to the realism as far as I am concerned.

the right question to ask about these high 109 losses, is why did the germans not correct this problem or do something about it to fix it ?

the answer is rather interesting, as another poster summarized it well:

I would not want such a system. For starters I am not interested in some centralized online server keeping my data (which would be a fine tool for publishers to milk for advertizement "optimization") nor would I want a mere computer to determine what I can do with my installation and what not.

And lastly ... You can jump through endless hoops, try intricant schemes and develop complicated systems and you will still fail to make people fly with more regard to their virtual life. You will not be able to change the majority nor should you even try - the only solution is to find likeminded people and play with them.

Out of curiosity, how is that really different to steam?

Obviously it needs to be a server setting: like the VAC protection... you can disable it :-)

Of course, this is the solution I'm using with IL2... The only "great" problem is that it's difficult to meet new players even if have your same interests.

It's a beta patch. It could be release, for a large universe of people (PC's) test, and find possible bugs. :)

It might be difficult to use the data from several servers, but a single server or multiple servers from the same hoste (e.g. REPKA, ATAG) could log the flight hours of each player and have a script that causes random aircraft failures with a increasing chance for every flight hour. It's more difficult to log the misuse or overheating of the engine (this would require a lot of server cpu time), but simply logging the flight hours would be very easy.

I do not think, that extended global stats would be good for such a game and shouldn't match to the communities nature. Like in every casual game it only adds different classifications of players, which indicates who is a good or bad player. And even if you do not really want to see it, u will get influenced by this data. I do not like the idea, that this happens here and a pilot, which u normally like due to his efforts to the comunity or something else, would be excluded from an event due to his skills.

Sure: U always try to balance a game, but to take statistics into consideration is the wrong direction in this community.

Even in other games the raid to be the best or achieve every gimmick is somehow motivating, but stats always have influences on a comunity. And although everyone should know it better and knows, that stats are not always saying any truth, u will soon see clans just getting pilots with top stats.

I see it in WOT, where they referred to stats to build the best performing clan, but now, they see, that they have to have a much closer look caused by various circumstances. But many people still think to be better than others. Now, u see professional clans firing their "best" players, cause it was just a statistics interpretation fault.

I hope, that such a global statistic will never reach the sims. Stats in an event to provide some guys a medal is okay. But not a complete performance check of the player.

+1. Stats are better for campaigns.

stats are a great thing imho for online flying... its always a good thing to see your K/D ratio being affected by how your flying... nothing worse than to see pilots jumping into aircraft to just kill then be killed kill then be killed ect ect...

But just for each campaign or obligatory server stats, which u can look up on the clanpage of the host.

Never a public picture of your whole playing activity, that others can look up. I think, that nearly noone of the good old, helpful and friendly community wants such a dwvwlopment, where u get rated by your skills. This game is more about clans, who are well organised and everyone has its role and you are always flying with 2. I for example am a wingman. How should I improve my k/d rate, if my lead gets in the fight first and u cover him? Everyone wants to get lead or a higher position in the clan and are referring to their egoistic skills?

If u think, that this will be a good development, than you are perhaps wrong in flight sims.

U know without stats, where u need to improve skills. Better take tracks from your missions and analyse. That is by far more effective!!!!

I think, that you should try out flying with a wingman, because it seems, that you are just playing for yourself. U will never get better, because flying without wingman and trust in his skills is not combat flying. Solo flights can train you somehow, but the most important thing is to get better with a wingman and develope together with your him.

A good lead is not directly a good wingman and vice versa!
And: What do you want with k/d ratio? What about your briefed tasks? Or do you fly just for a dogfight? U will never see the good pilots doing such senseless dogfights or join such servers! They will fly clan events or at least will appear with 2 pilots and nail every solo flyer on the servers.

Due to the games performance, most pilots never play CoD so far. After fixing, i think, the first bigger clans will rethink their former decision in not flying CoD and will join us. Clanevents will hopefully soon take place and solo flying on their server will simply do not make sense anymore! :)

no no i totaly see your point ... i was just talking from my past 13 years of exp in my belovid flight sims.... i for one feel that K/D stats are one of the best ways of becomeing a better pilot, myself along with squad mates wing up all the time, so thiers no lone pilot here.... ;)

All I gots ta say is WORD

http://images.cheezburger.com/comple...808869bccc.jpg

Yes... and pilots of virtual squads actually fly in public servers for training purporse, during the days in which there is no team event.

I agree that focusing on your own K/D is one of the better way to become a better pilot: you learn how to fly with teammates, when is the right moment to attack the enemy, how to attack him without being in danger. My squad focuses mostly on KIA/MIA numbers of the pilots.

As bomber you have wait for other bombers and your primary target is coordinating with the escort.

These kind of pilots will try to take a role in the mission, they will not act as lone wolves if they aren't forced to (dogfighting at 500m).

The most annoying things in public servers are to be attacked during landing procedure by a single suicidal pilot that is going to die in one minute because of AA or the fighters around the airbase, furballs, the hateful shoulder shooting.

As the community is already splitted in arcade gamers and the ones who love simulation, a method to filter the hotheads is very welcome in my opinion.

Wurd

I may have overread it but, when is the patch being released?

Friday

Two weeks, maybe.

It is not that I contest the basic statement of yours about the ground handling of the 109 but could you provide some links to support that over 50% of all 109s were lost during landing and take-off? Personally I would just say that I simply cannot believe that the armament ministry accepted a plane to be produced for so long with such a horrible statistic. Seems to me very unrealistic. 50% means that every second 109 was lost due to accidents during landing or take-offs. Why should any armament ministry accept such a thing? There had been enough parallel designs of fighters to phase out the 109 if it really had been so bad.

To complete the image I also think that the Spit is still far too easy for take off. It is a pain in the you-know-where to make it turn but the torque seems still quite easy and doesn't concur with anecdotal evidence for take-off imho.

About the 109's landing... Some have said there was a problem with the toe out configuration of the landing gear.

But anyway in Russia the landing fields usually were a disaster (they had to uncover the wheels because of the mud) while in the western front as Hartmann said to Hitler there were young pilots ordered to fly in every kind of weather: of course they usually failed to takeoff/land.

That 50% statistic has been bandied around a great deal over the years, but I've never seen any hard data. I think it's been over-egged, or too much is placed on the 109s takeoff characteristics.

Bearing in mind accident attrition was quite high on all sides thanks to wartime pressures of training - particularly at times of high casualties, timetables cut and students rushed throught etc -and perhaps some technical failures due to rushed workmanship or maintanence, I think you'd find any accidental loss rate, allied or axis, higher than peacetime.

However, the 109, I believe is easier to takeoff and land in both Il-2 and CloD than it's real life counterpart.

I have a rather neat quote from Mr Charlie Brown; he's a modern day pilot who flies all sorts of warbirds and has many, many hours on 109s, and NOT just buchons. So many in fact that apparently he's quite in demand from collectors who have 109s that need flying, particularly test flights after rebuild or major overhaul.

I bought a book a year ago which goes through the entire test flight program of a Bf109E - yes, I said an E - and it some excellent information that clarifies a great deal. For the moment we'll just look at the T/O characteristics; I leave the rest to Charlie:


Hmmmmmmm...... familiar, eh......?

I think I remember reading 10% loss...its been awhile though

Well, it's not that I did not read about the landing difficulties and I do not put this in doubt. I also believe that the losses due to accidents were indeed higher than in peacetime and probably significantly higher. I also read frequently that it is due to the narrow landing gear.

Mh. Now the thing with the narrow landing gear I have a problem: The Spit has a narrow landing gear too, and perhaps even narrower (the landing gear of the 109 is slightly bent outward while the legs of the Spits are just straightforward parallel).

You now may reply: yeah, the torque in the 109 was stronger. This may be true - but only during full power (not gradual power increase) take-off. Never during landing as the power during landing was usually cut down to very little or even idle.

Brown's statement says clearly that he was not familiar with the type and expected a different behaviour. Of course this may indicate that rookie pilots may have had problems to handle this crate. But I really would like to recall that many spit pilots reported on a strong tendency of the spit to break away too during take-off.

I do not contest that the take off of the 109 should not be left as it is (for reminder) but I really think that a 50% loss rate and even "only" 30% appears to me too high and probably a myth as I really cannot believe that the 109 remained the main stay of the German Air Force throughout the war with this kind of flaw.

Er,I think you have misinterpreted and I suggest you re-read. I can tell you that for all the hours that Bf-109G-2 Black 6 was in the air, Charlie Brown was behind the stick for more than half that time. He's familiar with the 109. This was his first test flight in the E. He said the almost complete lack of longitudinal stability at tail-off was familiar - i.e it was a charactersitic of the 109G and was also inherent in the E. What is different is that the E does things at lower speeds, which one can presume is from the lower weight of the E variant compared to the G.


Any WW2 era fighter is of 1000+HP on an airframe under 10 tonnes is gonna be a handful at full power and the low end of the speed range - the sheer physics of forces says so - the difference lies in the aerodynamic power of the control surfaces at these speeds to compensate or correct. Clearly the 109s are lacking. Sure the Spitfire could bite but it remained longitudinally controllable and had effective rudder down to walking speed. The fact the the 109 is 'almost completely unstable longitudinally at tail up' even with propellor driven airflow over the tail surfaces speaks volumes. Even in the air you have to work the rudder hard during maneouvres to keep co-ordinated (source: Me109 - One Summer Two Messerschmitts DVD).

When adequately trained and experienced flyers are allowed near the 109 it's a capable aeroplane - Erich Hartmann alone demonstrates this. However what this shows is that to get it off the ground and back on it again requires attention, a good experience of flying tail-wheel aircraft and of airmanship in general. These are things which a peacetime air force or one that is riding a cresting wave of victories can readily supply in the training syllabus. However, these are not characteristics I would associate with the backbone of the Luftwaffe by 1944. And the reason the 109 wasn't replaced by then is because no one in the 3rd Reich had the foresight to work on a successor back when it counted; they thought the war would be over and won by 1943!

Oups, my mistake, I should have been clearer. I wanted to say that he was unfamiliar with the E type, not with the 109 in general.


As I said I (I am repeating myself): albeit I do believe that the 109 was tricky I do not believe that it was so tricky that 30% of all losses (from 1939-45) pertained to take-off and landing accidents because of the 109 being tricky in this phase.

I concede that the accident rate will have risen towards the end of the war in 44/45 when only badly trained youths were litterally thrown into the air against the bomber flows but we're talking here about the early stages (BoB). It does not say anything about the 109 being intrinsically dangerous, simply tricky. If the 109 would have been so inherently dangerous during take-off and landing it would have been it from the start throughout all stages of the war. If it would have been that dangerous the armament ministry would have done something about it and be it requesting some modifications to the 109 design (for instance increasing the tail surface could have been a countermeasure). Nothing in that direction was ever undertaken indicating clearly that there was no importance attributed to take-off / landing difficulties thus indicating that the problems were not so significant to justify any modifications.

If the accidant rate increased towards the end of the war it can only be attributed to the training level of the average pilot not to the plane itself.

Again (repeating again): It was surely not easy to take off and one may discuss if it is too easy in game but I do think that this bad reputation of the 109 being dangerous to take-off and land is unjustified and a modern myth.

Well then crow, it looks like we're singing from the same hymn sheet. ;)

I particularly like this, and it sums up my feelings on the matter too.

I just want to add, that what made the 109`s take off and landing characteristic really bad was not only the fact that it had a narrow landing gear setup, but in the same time the struts and the wheels pointed outwards. Because of this the pilot had a very narrow margin to make fails. The slightest out of horizontal plane during take off and landing resulted a violent break out to the sides.

The spit had similar wheel distance but it had parallel landing struts, and that made it much more forgiving.

On the top of it during take off there was the huge torque from the engine, what tried to roll the aircraft at slow speeds (so exactly what had to be avoided considering the pointing outwards wheels). If you put the two problems together then you know why it required such a great attention to handle the 109 during take off.

Of course it was not magic, but it required full attention and no mistakes.

Cheers
MM

If you read the reports from finnish pilots you'll find that they didn't find the 109 difficult at all.
Maybe because they, against their training by the germans, kept the tail on the ground as long as possible, keeping the longitudal stability this way until the airstream on the rudder made it effective.
Same with the landings, as long as you made 3-pointers there was no problem, they said, and of course lock the tail wheel, but this came with the later 109's.

I read the Finnish pilots were horrified when the saw fresh German pilots landing on 2 wheels. The Finns always practised 3 pointers.

Maybe that the Finnish pilots were over-modelled? :cool:

Hhaha - will I need more than 4 cores?

Glad to hear of the Blenheim fix - thought it was just me!

(-£ 250 later for new HOTAS and throttle quadrants)

The question is simple : When will be this patch released ?

I'd say not today, tomorrow more likely but 2 weeks be sure.

:)

That's fine and all Klunk but you need to change your guesstimate from 2-3 weeks to indefinitely (2 weeks be sure) if you want to be 100% right.

lol..true.

Could you please explain why the slightly outward layout of the landing gear would have caused such a behaviour? This does not correspond to my understanding of mechanics which says that the outward layout would have made it more stable around the roll axis with out of plane movements because it in fact increased the lever with respect to the roll axis. So a 109 landing on one of its front wheels would have fallen easier back on both legs than a plane like the Spit.

Well it would seem to me that if one wheel touches before the other, its 'toe out' would pull it in that direction before the other wheel touched and bit.

Updates!
 

<Rant>
I don't mean to use bad language (Wings Of Prey) but I would HAPPILY take some incremental updates.
Until you read the forums you would think that Cliffs of Dover had been abandoned.

At least with (pardon the French) Wings Of Prey, every second time I start the thing "Hey New Update!"

With CoD - 7 MONTHS since the last update. Even the old IL2 is on a faster update schedule.

My rig should run CoD, but it's a slide show.

<repeat> Bang head on wall</repeat>

RELEASE ! RELEASE ! RELEASE !

</Rant>

<sigh> at least the new IL2 4.11 is nice.

Surprisingly I have to agree. My thinking is they could not release frequent patches because they hired a new graphics developer who had to spend several months learning the code and only then rewriting it. It is reasonable that they could not release anything within those months because the game was essentially in a completely disassembled state. Now when the major rewrite is hopefully done I suggest we persuade Luthier to target for monthly official patches with more frequent betas. This is 100% realistic and very efficient for the development team as well because allows to receive quick feedback and avoid wasting time. E.g. BIS which is a small team too issues ARMA2 beta builds sometimes every 3 days (see dates) http://forums.bistudio.com/forumdisp...-PATCH-TESTING (BTW working with the community issue tracker on everyday basis https://dev-heaven.net/projects/cis/wiki/CIT)

decay mentioned another small dev team which does the same, issuing weekly betas, hot-fixes to patches at 23.30 on Friday nights and then posting support forum messages at 04.00 in the morning.

Ilya, now when engine rewrite nightmare is mostly over, your team can do this. There are too many issues community waited to be fixed for too much time. Frankly speaking it took too long already unfortunately. Without priority bugs fixed first in CloD, sales of the sequel will be less than 10% of CloD sales. http://www.il2bugtracker.com/project...ues?query_id=1

On the other hand with weekly betas and monthly patches sequel sales can be high even if 2 publishers push its release too early when it is only 80% finished. This would allow you to keep the team within 1C and work on the next project. CloD sales were not as bad as critics reviews because credibility in community was high. Now credibility can be rebuild only with actual product support, not only Friday pictures unfortunately. We can not expect community to be prepared waiting 14-18 (or more?) months after the sequel release again for priority bugs to be fixed. Not possible any more as community has changed.

CloD is a great, outstanding and unmatched product but unfortunately bugs and missing standard features are also great and outstanding ATM yet.

@ all: When Luthier posts the patch could you please copy this message to the patch thread if I am not around.

[QUOTE=Ataros;412638]Surprisingly I have to agree. My thinking is they could not release frequent patches because they hired a new graphics developer who had to spend several months learning the code and only then rewriting it. It is reasonable that they could not release anything within those months because the game was essentially in a completely disassembled state. Now when the major rewrite is hopefully done I suggest we persuade Luthier to target for monthly official patches with more frequent betas. ............QUOTE]

If the Graphics rewrite is still in an unresolved state after a few more days it would be much better for us if unrelated changes like FMs etc, could be released now. I haven't run out of patience but if significant changes that don't affect, or won't be affected by, the graphics changes are able to be released I think they should be.