CFS3 ETO campaign report - RAF, Battle of Britain

[33lima]

Even as I press home my own attack, the first Heinkel to be hit is already going down.

But I've got my own business to take care of...

...which seems to be going tolerably well, whichever way you look at it.

Suddenly, all that changes. Rounds whack into my kite. As I break up and away, I see with a shock that my left wing tank is an inferno of blazing fuel!

The Heinkel is likely doomed, but clearly, so is my own aircraft!

Time to get out of it!

...to be continued!

 

[33lima]

I waste no time in bailing out.

It's long way down...

...and as I tumble through space. I have what seems like plenty of time to wonder if my 'chute is going to open.

Which it thankfully does...giving me a grandstand view of the pursuing 109, which is what really shot me down! Talk about being caught napping! I should have kept my height and watched out for the escort, while others tackled the bombers. Lesson learned!

Fortunately I seem to have been picked up and on return, I'm congratulated on a successful mission!

 

[Daiwilletti]

Thanks for the report! Great screenshots I was especially taken by the bailout figure trying to do a turn and pike

 

[rince33]

Hehehehe, If you are gonna bail out you may as well have some fun during the process.

 

[33lima]

17 Squadron, North Weald, 13 July 1940

Not so much 'North Weald' as 'North Weird', this mission, but be that as it may...

...it starts as a conventional scramble down to the south-east, off Dover.

There's a layer of thin cloud at a couple of thousand feet. Anyway I've replaced the map with the mod for WotR, and although the colours for land and sea are somehow reversed, it's still a big improvement over the stock CFS3 map, drawn as it was by an [insert insult of choice].

The boys catch up quite quickly...

...and I level off once well above the layer cloud, at which point it's time to cut to the chase and hit the 'warp' key.

I come out pretty well at the target area, a lot higher, and turning on the TAC, soon get a pointer to the Huns...

...who are now in for a surprise. Me too, as it happens...

...to be continued!

 

[33lima]

There they are, down to our right, against the clouds! But what manner of Hun are they?

Pointy wings, so they could be 110s...no, too big and too passive. They couldn't be, could they...?

Yes they could, and they are.

No point trying to tell them they are too early in the war to be here. Maybe the history books got the service date wrong and the invasion's been brought forward, who can say? Ours not to reason why. They're Huns and we came here to attack them. So that's what I order the boys to do. This time, I stay above to watch out for the escorts. I'm not going to get caught like that a second time, not me. So I have a grandstand view as the squadron begins to tear the big, lumbering Me323s to bits. Literally.

That'll teach them to adhere to the tech tree's proper timeline.

...to be continued!

 

[33lima]

No escorts show up so I go in for my own attack, aiming for the leader and trying to avoid those I ordered attacked earlier. Spent .303 cases rain down from my first burst.

This is my target, who has the temerity to be leading this bunch of flying targets, and to be flying level with a large sestion of one wing missing.

He soon learns the price of his terrible folly, to adapt Olivier's Crassus from Spartacus.

That's one leukoplast bomber that will need rather more than a packet of sticking plasters.

Now, where are the others? Surprisingly, there's still four of them left. And either I've lost a lot of altitude, or they've gone up like lifts.

Stranger and stranger!

...to be continued!

 

[33lima]

When I try to climb up after the Me323s, I realise that I wasn't imagining the sound of several hits on my kite, which refuses to go up...

...and as the power drains away and the prop spins to a stop, levels off...

..and then, inevitably, goes down...

...and down.

Mission ended, I'm credited with two Huns shot down - I must have put a successful burst I don't remember into one of the Huns I flew past to get at the leader.

A kill's a kill, but I told you it was a bit weird. How to fix it, I don't know, but I hope to find out, before I run into escorting Fiesler Storches.

 

[Daiwilletti]

Well, given the afforementioned techtree, maybe it would be no surprise to see Fiesler Storchs! But of course the techtree does not control what spawns. That is down to the individual entered service and left service entries in the aircraft xdp files. The install I've found needs the most work on entered/exit service dates, to stop inappropriate stuff spawning, is MAW.

For ETO Bob, there is a lot of British stuff (AI Spitfires and Hurricanes) that IMHO does not enter service early enough so I usually tweak the xdps for a dozen or so AI fighters. There is the occasional Bf-109E that hangs around into 1941 (or even 1942?) which seems a bit unfair given what they come up against. If you can run the Ca-Gen 1-2.xls utility (found here at SOH), then you can quickly scan the entire ETO aircraft list for anomalies in the entered and exit service dates.

 

[Led Zeppelin]

Yes and moreover, it is also possible to set allow spawn to 'n' to prevent an aircraft to appear at all.

 

[33lima]

I just located the 'spawn weeder' utility, thanks for the tip. I did find another one which allowed 'spawn?' to be set easily to 'N' in the .xdp files of planes you don't want to spawn at all.

I get it that CFS3 was built for a paneset which all flew offensive missions and its campaign system therefore didn't need to worry about the likes of Ju52s, Fi156s, Dakotas or Piper Cubs. And that scripted missions can presumably exercise more control. But whether by allocating units to bases and planes to units, or some such method, it's surprising that user-made campaigns can't exercise finer control over which planes in a given install can appear, or what they do when they do show up.

I shouldn't really have Gigants in a western Europe install, so I can happily set them not to spawn. Ditto for any other aircraft which may be fun to fly in QC but not what you want to see on campaign penenetrating enemy airspace in formation in any period, like the aforementioned Tante Ju or Storch. Even if that would kill a scripted mission for Eben Emael or the like, I'd rather have that than a swarm of Ju52s pottering around above Hawkinge etc.

 

[Daiwilletti]

Don't worry, 33Lima, the spawn="n" setting does not kill those aircraft specified in scipted missions! That is why it is a good option to put your storch as spawn="n", because it is really a good plane for scripted missions, but not much else. IIRC the USA equivalent spotter plane is used a lot around ANZIO missions, but it doesn't pop up as a random spawn (what is that plane? An L5 or something?). You could say that the Lysander deserves similar treatment.

I like your idea about campaigns exerting a bit more control. CFS3 was brought out in a rush (I suspect partly because of a need to cut crippling development costs) and this is one of the areas that with a bit more time could have been sorted out. The WOFF team has spent a long time trying to implement more control over campaigns, because of the lack in CFS3. There are a few things that could possibly been tried in stock. There appear to be some default settings which, depending on where the file is located, affect campaigns or QC missions. I came a cross a mention of a basic parameter which, if listed in the install, affects QC missions, but if listed in the appdata pathway, affects campaign missions. Some sort of campaign parameter. I hope I've written it down somewhere. The WOFF team would probably know, but are focused on their commercial products.

By the way have you found a thread on the game.xml hacks I found in the CFS code by trawling through old crash dump reports? The best one is to increase the QuickCombatFriendlyRadius from default to something like 800 or 10000 meters, so that the flak from neighbouring airfields isn't always banging away at you when you dogfight in QC. But there are also parameters to control the number of ground spawns or ship spawns. For a computer suffering from a high load from implementing Gecko's wonderful seawater mod or Xjouve's massive new terrain mesh, a cap on spawn numbers might be very useful. Sorry I've strayed far away from your thread topic - I'm high on steroid meds at the moment and find it hard to shut up!

 

[33lima]

Thanks for the tips Daiwilletti, keep 'em coming! No bad thing anyone reading this also gets these insights into what I'm reporting seeing. I will ID the planes in my install I don't want to spawn on campaign and set them not to, maybe fixing the apparent mistake in the 323's service start date while I'm at it. Before flying my next campaign mission.

Much tho I always found the CFS3 'frontline clicker' campaign system odd and too anonymous, I've had sufficient fun with it in this campaign to multi-install a second clean CFS3.1, so I can have one for Firepower and one for my other compatible CFS3 add-ons. Before ETO at any rate, I always liked the D-Day one best, for the very reason it seemed to me to make the best effort at getting historical squadron-based campaigns out of the CFS3 engine, with the Mosquito one a close second, while Memphis Belle reasonably enough relied on scripted missions. D Day I couldn';t get to instal right though and I never found a solution - perhaps I should have searched or asked here instead. https://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3212769/CFS3_D-DAY_1944_ADD-ON_-_Vista

EDIT: all .xdp edits done. A fair number I decided I didn't want to see spawning on campaigns were already set not to. Fixed the service entry of the three Me323s as well as setting not to spawn - it had been a date in 1940, which I moved to 1 November 1942.

 

[33lima]

17 Squadron, Beaulieu, 14 July 1940

If anyone noticed I've missed out 13 July, this is because I scrubbed it after discovering I had forgotten to set the Dornier 24 flying boat not to spawn - which it did.

So I decided to give up on that and move on a day. We had also moved airbase, to Beaulieu in the west. This is a Battle of Britain airfield I'd never heard of - probably because it was a WW1 base that wasn't re-opened until August 1942, so Wikipedia tells me. The good news is that it's quite close to the coast near Southampton. So I won't have far to fly, to get at the Huns.

It's approaching 07:00 when our eight operational Hurricanes are scrambled to intercept a raid approaching Portsmouth.

A quick check of the controls and I start her up. I can't readily take off with the canopy back in the usual fashion, because its animation is linked to the little cockpit door on the right. Pity.

Anyhow, it's another fine morning and we're soon climbing up in stock CFS3 ultra-loose formation.

We head out across the Solent with the mainland on our left and the Isle of Wight on the other side. A check of the map shows we have a way to go.

Time for a bit of a warp!

...to be continued!

 

[33lima]

At the interception point, a quick check before I drop the TAC's range from 8 to four miles reveals the Huns are up ahead....

...then slipping around behind us. There's nothing visible at our level or above, so they must be below. Around we quickly go, after them.

Flying back to the north-west, I bank right and look down. There they are, barely visible against the dark waters of the English Channel! Two small groups of twin-engined Huns are advancing on a broad front, well spread out. I start handing out attack orders, while concentrating my own attention on the bunch to my right.

I snake down in a curving descent after the Huns, who stay in formation and are evidently bombers - Dornier 17s, in fact. I come in fast and let one have it.

I come in too fast, in fact, my speed having build up in the descent. In the few seconds he's in my sights I get some hits, but not enough.

I'm going to have to do this all over again!

...to be continued!

 

[33lima]

I glance right after breaking away. The Dorniers are still running in towards their target - Southampton, possibly. The nearest bomber, whom I just attacked, isn't looking much the worse for wear.

This is soon remedied - but not by me. As I'm coming in for another pass, one of the boys sets him on fire. I stay out of the line of fire and then save my own ammo, as the Hun is clearly doomed.

I break up and away to clear my tail and take stock. There's no sign of any escorts, so I issue some more attack orders while spiralling upwards. At last a couple of the others still seem not to be engaged, claiming on the R/T not to see any targets or be otherwise occupied. Which from the smoke trail you can see below, is apparently fair enough.

Then I'm heading back towards the coast, chasing down the remaining Dorniers, their track lightly marked by occasional black bursts from Ack Ack fire.

I race north west, suddenly conscious that whatever the Huns are going to bomb can't now be very far away.

Up ahead, with the Isle of Wight to our left, the party is in full swing and I'm soon back in the middle of it. Here we go!

...to be continued!

 

[33lima]

The Hurricane on my left is soon setting a Dornier alight.

No doubt about that one! Beyond and right of the falling bomber, you can make out the four tall transmitter towers of Ventnor RDF station, with the smaller receiver towers barely visible to their right.

I have to give up the Dornier I'm chasing when one of the boys fires on him first. I break down and left...

...and find myself coming up underneath another Hun on that side, that I somehow hadn't noticed earlier. All very disorienting, this air combat lark!

Frustratingly, I don't have time to get in a burst before overshooting so I pull up and left, to come around for a proper attack.

I roll right and look down. The two Dorniers are racing along, their two-tone green paintwork camouflaging them most effectively against the background.

The boys are knocking down these Huns so fast that I'd better get weaving, if I'm going to bag one for myself!

...to be continued!

 

[33lima]

Rolling in behind the Dornier, I can see that he might well be on a direct course for our very own airfield!

With that thought for an additional incentive, I'm soon closing in and shooting him from dead astern.

Pieces fly off the Dornier and suddenly, there's a bright glow of orange fire. I pull up and leave the Hun to his fate, which is now certain.

I level off and assess the situation. From the sound of the R/T chatter, one of the boys is bagging the last Hun. It looks like we've made a clear sweep of the beggars!

Sure enough, the only aircraft now in the vicinity are other Hurricanes. The boys are soon reporting that they're forming up and a look behind from a turn confirms this. Even at this range, the broad wings are distinctive.

Time to go home!

...to be continued!

 

[33lima]

A quick look down indicates that all is well.

So back to Beaulieu we go. Out in the Channel, a small convoy wends it way towards the Western Approaches.

We're so close to home that I fly in real time. When nearly there, I order the formation to split up and make my own curved approach.

Flaps fully down and in we go. What you can't see is that there is a small pale brown lorry tootling across the airfield, just out of sight on the left!

Wings rolled level on short finals, I concentrate on my landing. The navigation and landing lights come on automatically in the ETO Expansion, with low airspeed.

The lorry - an ambulance, ironically - stops well clear of my track to watch my arrival, which by my standards is particularly smooth. So I won't be providing the blood wagon's crew with any trade today.

The debriefing tells me I didn't make all the waypoints but we are credited with sufficiently clobbering the Huns to earn the show being rated a success. My own kill is credited - it could easily have been two or even three, but this is a team game and they all count!

 

[Daiwilletti]

The debriefing tells me I didn't make all the waypoints but we are credited with sufficiently clobbering the Huns to earn the show being rated a success. My own kill is credited - it could easily have been two or even three, but this is a team game and they all count!

Another winning report, 33lima!

yes it is a team game - I often "feed" my wingmen damaged aircraft, to boost their points so that they fly better next time! One of these sorties I may need them!