The Novice

After doing some "bitching", Mr. McGee finally received a promise to receive the first shift of field-cover patrol the next morning. The promise was kept.

After an early breakfast, the flight of four was ready to go before daylight. Leading the flight would be 1st Lt. Don Mainwaring, on his wing 2nd Lt. Patrick Armstrong. 2nd Lt. Don McGee would lead the second element, but his wingman never made it.

After a couple hours of flying with no activity spotted, they started returning home. While landing, the front half of the runway was covered in fog, and 1st Lt. Don Mainwaring hit too hard and wiped out his landing gear. Armstrong and McGee were waved off until the plane could be moved. Not long after, they were receiving a message from base that Zero's were attacking. Mr. McGee was down to about 20 gallons of fuel at this point. He gambled and headed to the action. He bagged a quick kill, then got himself in a bit of trouble. Having the 3 remaning Zero's on his tail, and having tracers flying past, he jinked and managed to survive. The remaining Zero's finally gave up the chase and he was able to land back at base, where he promptly ran out of fuel. The plane had received some moderate damage. The Zero he shot down was the first confirmed kill for the 36th Pursuit Squadron.

2nd Lt. Don McGee would receive 5 more confirmed kills before war's end, making him an ace.

From now on, all my CFS2 missions will have the FVB2 prefix to designate them as CFS2 missions. All CFS1 missions will remain using the FVB prefix. This just helps me to organize things a little better, and be able to keep track of my CFS2 stuff a little easier.

This first "Historical" CFS2 mission has you in the P39 Airacobra. Depending on which airfile you are using, you may or may not have a close approximation of the fuel level Mr. McGee had to play with. The one I use leaves you with about 20% fuel left at return to base. I can't remember which one I'm using though, and don't think it would be appropriate for me to include an airfile that someone else did the work on. I think I got mine from The Hangar though, and I have provided the link to it below.

Flying this one in real time won't net you the desired results. For some reason I just couldn't match up the timing to make the real-time and the "warp" versions gel. I tried several times, and got it close, but I just could never reach that level of realism I was looking for. So I decided to go with the "warp" version as I figured most people would just hit those X's anyway. It will get you a close approximation of the actual facts. I added some fog that turned out ok, not exactly what I was looking for but usable. I had to settle for giving 1st Lt. Don Mainwaring engine damage on his landing approach instead of him wrecking his landing gear, all in all I'm quite pleased with the results though. It will do fine as a close substitute in my opinion. If you follow him in on his landing approach, you will see what I mean ;-) ***IMPORTANT THAT YOU DO NOT HIT X TO LAND AFTER COMING OUT OF THE FINAL WARP!!!*** Be patient and let it play out, it's the only way I could even come close to duplicating the facts.

I turn off all the "arcade" stuff to get the most out of these missions. By turning off aircraft labels, tactical display, and the enemy indicator cone, you can make missions much more "immersive" and challenging. I also suggest playing at 95-100% for additional challenge. Trust your eyes, just like they had to, it'll help you appreciate just how difficult it must have been to score a victory in the air. They didn't see any nametags or yellow brackets, or have a modern day radar to guide em, so see what they had to work with. I find it much more captivating this way. Try for yourself and then decide. Good luck and enjoy!

I think frame rates should be acceptable on most systems. CFS2 does a pretty good job of making itself playable on many systems. If you find that your frame rates (Shift + z twice) aren't acceptable, you can try running the mission back through the mission builder and eliminate the cloud layers. Might help a little. Clouds seem to put a scrunch on my pc, but they really add to the experience, so I try and use em as much as I can.I did quite a bit of manual editing after I got the workable model up to snuff. I use wordpad to make my changes manually. ***BE ADVISED THOUGHT THAT IF YOU DO SOME THINGS WILL BE RE-WRITTEN BY THE MISSION BUILDER, LIKE THE NAMES OF THE PILOTS IN YOUR FLIGHT***

I use a Midwest Micro PIII 500, with 128ram, and a Voodoo3 2000 agp video card. The mission plays very well on my system, and should on most others as well. If not, sorry, I have tried to take into account a wide variety of systems.***Also I always design and test my missions to be played at 100%, I never play em at anything less***