Mission or Sortie (what should flights be called in SOW:BoB?)

[Avimimus]

Originally Posted by Former_Older

Hi. You seem to be forgetting that "The Americans" are not the ones who named the missions in Il2 " *.mis "

"The Americans" had nothing to do with it. I'm sure the Germans and the Soviets didn't use the term "Mission" on the Eastern front, and yet 1C:Maddox Games, a Russian company, saw fit to use the term "Mission"

I would disagree. The industry naming convention was generally established as "mission" prior to Oleg entering the scene in the year 2000.

A quick stop at Migman's aviation museum (compressing series, ignoring scifi or mercenary themes, and ignoring a couple of cases) shows that during the 1990s:
- At least 47 flight sims had essentially American only content (and were mainly produced by American teams)
- 14 had some U.K. content (does not include apache simulators or late model harriers)
- 12 have some Russian themed content
- 6 are world war one era (and not included above)
- 3 had notable international content

It seems to me that this strongly supports the idea Mission is primarily an American naming convention and has become the norm due to American influence in the industry.

I do agree that it doesn't necessarily make sense to use Commonwealth mission extensions either. I do think correct menus would likely be appropriate in this installment, though. The language is a relatively trivial issue, and as I said, my goal was to see what other people thought.

To think about it, though, the American influence is a bit less trivial: No one considered making a sim about the Great Patriotic War except a few early modders. Almost no one had heard about it, it wasn't considered commercial or even of significant historical interest. At least not until a Russian team decided to do it.

Now that this team has moved on to other stories from the war it is good to keep this issue in mind. I'm not against making another eighth or another pacific sim or trying to diminish the American war effort. But there are things like the night war that need to be covered. Il-2 did so much to get Russian history more widely known its hard not to have hopes that they will manage to do it for ours (Commonwealth) as well.

S!

-Avimimus