There isn't a Spitfire with a 6-bladed airscrew, unless you count the Seafire F.22/24, which doesn't exist in CFS3 anyway. The MkXIV and subsequent Griffon-engined types had 5 blades...
<Strokes chin thoughtfully...> You know, I wrote a program to post-process our vibration test measurements here at work, and one common problem is skipped points or other numbering issues - and when the program detects such an issue, it pops up a standard Windows error dialog with the message "Doofus 'ENGINEER' can't count!" Apparently this is oh-so-true...
And as for me "Chewing them up", well, I was just being honest picking my screen name...

again. And while we're on the subject of blushing, did you notice I misspelled Lt. Stigler's name in the thread title? I wonder if anyone at the admin level could fix that?
The AI's seem to have it correct, though, they do seem to dive out of the picture quickly- as you said, I try to pick the "aftermarket" models in ETO to fly against. Probably IRL they'd then scoot for home, but constrained by QC, these poor drones just then hang around at low altitudes like plums for the picking. But thanks so much for the additional tips, it sure helps. My brother-in-law says we'd need to have a C-130 flying behind us to hold all the ammo we fire in one round of QC! I'm trying to work through the flying lessons in FSX, and I know all about the control surface functions, the aerodynamics of lift, all that jazz, it's just a matter of getting hands, feet and head together to actually fly. I pull up into stalls a lot, I try to turn too tight, my poor (AI) wingman must simply get lost!
So yeah, I'm real thankful for the new system - I'm 10 years from retirement, the kids are grown, we finally have a
few sheckels ahead of us, and my old box was an Athlon 3200 with 2GB of RAM and an AGP 8x graphics card, the old parallel ATA 133 hard drives... I work from home some days, and I'm a happy now - I do stress analysis, and a problem that took 1 hr 45 minutes on my office machine solved in 6 minutes on this one, and 20 minutes on the fastest machine in the office.
So I hope you can get a new box soon. One thing I really love about this rig is the TrackIR - being able to look around at will is fantastic, and it takes that function off my poor uncoordinated hands! Plus you can look around a lot more than you ever could with the hat switch, as the TrackIR does all 6 types of head motion, so you can look up over the cowl, or get your head closer to the canopy to look straight down, etc.
Still, the difficulty of it all just makes me respect the fellows who actually flew these machines just that much more. Granted they had a slight control advantage in actually feeling the g's, etc, but still... criminee, I don't know how I'd get by without the tactical radar and the red/blue tags on the other planes.
Okay, I gotta go justify my salary. I'll get a write-up to you as soon as I can.
Thanks again,
Tom