Glad you are enjoying it Chaz. You have already got further along than I have! I’m not sure about the water…are you at a suitable altitude? Are you loading the water from a lake or just filling the tanks using the W&B screen?
So what you’re saying is, they need more flying boats.
Below 150’ AGL per the manual. I’ve dropped water from a lake and filled at the airport. I contacted the developer. We’ll see if they have any ideas.
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VSkyLabs has just released the He162. It is quite a handful if you get behind the airplane. You have to baby the engine too (or else!)…
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Sounds realisitc! It wasn’t exactly known for being easy to fly.
Which is ironic, since it was meant to be flown by quickly trained pilots who’d only learned to fly in gliders.
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I guess they were not expected to survive for any length of time.
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Desperate times, desperate measures…
I wonder if the Volksjäger concept was more of a PR morale booster, than anything else.
Look here, people of the Reich! Soon every ablebodied german will learn to fly in a couple of weeks and then kill every enemy aircraft that cross the border.
I mean, even if they had managed to design it so it could be flown by anyone with glider training, what good would such a pilot be in combat? There’s much more to shooting down enemy aircraft, than just flying. The airplane is just the platform. A means to an end. But I guess we’ve learned a lesson or two, since then…
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I think the lessons were already learned, but most of the experienced LW pilots were no longer available, and as you said, desperate times. I can’t imagine what it must have felt like to be a young, inexperienced pilot, strapping yourself into one of these things…knowing that in the next 30 minutes you would be going up in a hastily constructed aircraft, powered by a newfangled jet engine that has to be treated with finesse, only to throw yourself against a well armed bomber formation, protected by fighters flown be far better trained And more experienced pilots (at this point in the war), and then, if you survived that, you would have to try to land, with a jet engine that takes forever to spool up should you need extra power. To top it all, if you somehow survive all that, your reward is to go and do it all over again.
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Well, they dismissed the idea and more experienced pilots flew them. It was hard enough for them.
But my point is why on earth did they even consider such a peoples fighter program, in the first place. They had enough combat experience to know that it would never work.
That’s why I still think that the idea behind is was born out of a PR stunt.
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Got to meet a gentleman who piloted an He-162 at Planes of Fame about 8 years ago. He was 17 when he was shot down and captured. According to him the planes were flown from the factory by inexperienced pilots, like him, to the front line units. That way if the plane had defective workmanship it would not kill an experienced pilot.
Will have to find his story again because if I am not getting my individuals mixed up, easily done after seeing so many guest speakers at PoF over the years, he eventually ended up in the US Navy.
Wheels
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My wife’s uncle was a kami kaze pilot. (No kidding!) I know we don’t think of Nazis as being suicidal and the same way we might see the Bushido Japanese. But I think by the end of the war a similar desperation was setting in. Her dad used to talk about all the great goodies that his older brother got up to the day they last saw him. When the common people were suffering from all sorts of shortages and sacrifices, the kami kaze guys had women, booze and all the food the family could want. If you didn’t think too much about the ultimate end, it was a pretty great gig.
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I do remember reading once about a program towards the end of the war that encouraged Luftwaffe pilots to point their (usually older IIRC) reinforced Bf-109’s at bombers and bail out, hoping the planes would hit a bomber or two on the way. Was he part of that program?
Sonderkommando Elbe
The series dogfights did an episode on the group.
Luftwaffe’s Deadliest Mission
Wheels
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I’m reading a book about the JG7 flying the Me 262 in '45. Although I think that there was a similar bit of fatalism, every mission might have been considered suicidal. Days facing 1000 bombers with 700 escorts would not have been extraordinary. The 262 it gave them hope that they might be able to inflict some damage, but they were under no illusion about the final outcome. There was an extreme amount of experimentation in determining the best way to stop the bomber formations. For instance, there were several efforts to develop an aerial bombing solution, since the 262 could ostensibly climb to a higher altitude quicker than the escorts. But then the escorts just increased their ingress altitude, and neither the barometric fusing nor radio controlled detonation methods become reliable. It wasn’t until they adopted the R4M rockets that a viable solution was found. Everyone was working to find a technological solution and experienced flight crews were in short supply.
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I haven’t spotted one YET! But I am using a mountainous area with lots of forests and hi-def ortho so I didn’t exactly set myself up for success.
Hmmm. I still am unable to put these fires out. The “spraying” is working. The water level goes down, but the income and netprofit never go up.
I just unlocked the fire fighting element. I used the Caribou as my tanker, and it took a lot of water to extinguish a patch of fire. Maybe the little crop duster isn’t going to cut it?
I am finding the plugin to be therapeutic. I put the news or the Tour de France on audio and run acres and acres of lines with the CBi. It’s constant work to do it right quickly. But it’s mostly mindless work that’s a notch or two above mind-numbing.
Sounds more and more like Farming Simulator. Not very complex ar all but oddly relaxing.
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