Skewgear

Attached is a picture of the U-boat from the DCS mission editor. Look at the guns installed on the tower. That's one 37mm gun on the lower platform and two twin 20mm mounts above. Note there is no bow-facing gun at all. Here is an explanation of the U-Flak boats from one of the more well established U-boat history websites on the internet: https://uboat.net/types/u-flak.htm Note the photo of U-441 towards the end of that article. Do you see that she has three Flakvierlings (quad 20mm guns, one mounted forward of her conning tower) as well as the 37mm gun? What we have is a well armed but regular Type VII, not a U-Flak boat.

The attached text and diagram is from the ED Spitfire module handbook. It shows a head on schematic of the Spitfire IX engine cooling system. Item 1 is the header tank, 4 is the thermostatic valve whose operation is described in the text and 6 is the radiator. If the thermostatic valve in the game is set to operate at 55 C instead of 80 C then it doesn't agree with the module's own manual.

New feature announcement: full statistics! We are delighted to announce that the Project Overlord website now has a full set of player statistics: kills, deaths and bail outs. You can view the stats page here; click or tap the column headers to sort the table. It needs a second or two for your browser to crunch the numbers: http://projectoverlord.co.uk/stats/ The statistics for this month only count deaths from 17th July onwards so the kill/death ratio will look a bit funny until all stats reset at the end of the month. We know there's a large portion of the DCS WW2 multiplayer community that enjoys tracking their progress over time. Hopefully this adds to the enjoyment of Project Overlord.

The U-boat in DCS is not a U-Flak boot. Silver Dragon posted a detailed explanation of why that is. Just because it shoots back doesn't mean it's a flak boat.

Not really. That was a one-off trial which tore the propeller reduction gearbox off the engine and caused the pilot to black out from the resulting pitch up. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160505-the-spitfires-that-nearly-broke-the-sound-barrier

My point is that the sim engine itself may not produce true-to-life ballistics, and the inaccurate figures in the luas may be a dev attempt to work around a known problem. Not saying that's a great thing but without further experiments we don't know either way. The acid test is whether the mean point of impact in-game at a set distance is the same as the MPI in real life. With some effort this can be worked out for a stationary warbird with its tail down. You'd need the starting elevation of the gun, though.

I'll say this: 4YA WW2 / Project Overlord is a clearly advertised offer, a historically accurate DCS server within the constraints of what the game can do. Our server, our vision. Guess what? That vision is popular and shared by a large number of players, as you can see from the Project Overlord stats page. I don't put a gun to anyone's head and say "if you fly DCS WW2 MP you must only fly here". I'd like to see the DCS WW2 community grow. There's a dozen or more public servers out there from the likes of Growling Sidewinder and Grim Reapers. All empty. Go to the people running those empty servers and tell them your ideas for making them popular. You don't want the historical realism thing? You prefer full spotting labels and the F10 map showing every unit on the map? BRAA calls from an omniscient AWACS on the comms menu? Ground units laid out to make funky cool war shiz happen? Base capture, Liberation style campaigns? That's cool, genuinely. All that is great fun. Go tell the empty server owners what you want to build instead. Offer to do it as part of their team. Advertise, grow and maintain a community of likeminded players who use your server. Learn how to manipulate lua scripts and use the mission editor. Come up with ideas to attract new people and bring them into the fold. Plan and execute a strategy to retain your existing players. I'd like to see that happen and speed up organic growth of the DCS WW2 community. Consider also these forums. Each of us is an ambassador for the game we play. Do angry posts ranting at each other make a newcomer browsing here think to himself "this looks like fun, I want to join these guys and spend my leisure hours hanging out with them". Of course not. BTW, Bozon. We're starting work on an August 1944 mission. It has Mosquitoes in France.

In multi player the navigator mostly has to make his own entertainment. You can play about with the radios, aircraft lights and fuel system, and obviously navigate, but that's about it. If the server has radio beacons you can set up the DF indicator for the pilot to follow. Careful cooperation can result in dropping a ripple of bombs instead of a salvo.

New mission launched: 22nd June 1944. - new front line design - active naval and artillery bombardment throughout mission (trial) - new moving ground target (trial) - total 9 ground targets - dynamic airfield supply network - mission objective point system - long term smoke after bomber raids - 100% historically accurate ground target locations drawn from RAF and USAAF operational record books and mission reports - 2x historically accurate B-17 bomber raids - 1x 99% historically accurate A-20 raid - controllable AAA guns with Combined Arms - new briefing format (trial) The team has worked hard on this one and it's making more use of DCS mission features than ever before. Personally I'm proud of the A-20 raid which almost exactly follows the original navigation log (heading, timings, speeds, heights, waypoints) of the 416th Bomb Group's raid on Cherbourg on 22nd June 1944. It doglegs mid Channel for gameplay reasons but that is the sole deviation from reality other than aircraft markings. Even then a future update will see each bomber getting its accurate markings and positioning in the formation. What you see is what really happened. Elsewhere we've got a moving ground convoy advancing on Caen that needs to be stopped. Its location and route are drawn directly from original records. This is the first moving convoy in 4YA WW2 and if it works well, we'll be livening up all our missions with similar features. Here's hoping the community enjoys the mission!

Allied strike tasking orders were delivered as six figure grid references on the GSGS maps issued to both RAF and USAAF airmen. Here's the one covering most of the DCS Normandy map. https://digitalarchive.mcmaster.ca/islandora/object/macrepo%3A8474 As you'll see from the scale on the X axis, a six fig grid on these gives a 1km X 1km square. In DCS Normandy a lat long coordinate given to the nearest minute yields a box about 2.5km X 1km, as you'll see by turning on the relevant F10 map overlay. You're working with coordinates that aren't far off what pilots actually used back then. We've talked about using grid references from the F10 map and have begun introducing them along with the lat/longs but it would be a stretch too far to give 6 fig grids for those, I think. There's always the 4YA WW2 training server if you want a quick mud moving fix. Targets on that are marked with red smoke, it's hard to miss them!

I'll give this a bump. Trying to fly an accurate WW2 photo recce sortie* in the Spitfire leads to engine over cooling and seizure when you try to descend from 21,000ft. The increased airflow and minimal power setting for the descent means the lack of rad shutoff valve causes problems that don't exist on the real aircraft. * https://projectoverlord.co.uk/blog/2022/05/15/the-most-historically-accurate-objective-in-4ya-ww2-recon-4th-june-1944/

I wonder how much the drag curve data in the lua is fudged to provide roughly believable behaviour within the DCS flight physics engine. It's no good feeding it precisely accurate figures if the engine's calculations produce inaccurate outcomes. Would be good to experimentally determine the ballistic arc of the 50 cal ingame and compare it with experimental real world data from similar barrel lengths, which is easy to come by for .50 BMG. I'm not familiar with how DCS handles muzzle velocity, having never poked around in the weapon luas, but I imagine that's defined somewhere. This post is really quite eye opening about the gun heating and dispersion model as well. https://forum.dcs.world/topic/139404-super-slow-50-caliber-rounds/page/9/#comment-4976782

Good idea. Could get interesting modelling the D-5's habit of the fin tearing off during snap rolls, though. A P-51B/C would be the best for historical scenarios based on the Normandy map. Maybe in the same way as we have the Fw190A and D, two separate but closely related modules.

This should already be happening. Maybe our randomisation of new mission lengths has accidentally lined them back up again. Will check. This week's release of our 5th June mission should help, though. From the 4YA Discord (link to join is in first post of this thread): Mission 5th June 1944 D-Day Night V1.22 - now in the regular rotation! We are now launching our night mission as a 2-hour long intermission in our usual mission selection. Experience the challenge and thrill of night flying, and the excitement of taking part in the first hours of D-Day. Mission features: - Night time - check your DCS gamma setting in the options menu - Illumination for airfields can be requested using F10 radio menu - Large-scale C-47 wave of the airborne landings, following their historically accurate route - Allied bomber raids carrying out historical missions - Large invasion fleet, to be found and attacked by the Axis side - Historical ground targets for Mosquito squadrons deep behind enemy lines

Your posts here seem to be trolling for attention or to start an argument rather than asking genuine questions or making meaningful, positive contributions. However, many more people read than post and this particular question should be answered. We make do with what we have. The DCS plane set is really designed for January 1945, not June 1944. No P-51D, Me109K or Fw190Ds were flown during Normandy, in reality. But if we deleted those from the server we'd have very little left to fly (Spitfire, Mosquito, Fw190A). So we compromise. In reality every German airfield on the map except Evreux was abandoned long before the invasion, but we choose to ignore that in favour of fun gameplay. If Dreux airfield is added with the Paris expansion perhaps we can look again at historical basing. If ED brings out a Me109G we'll certainly replace all 109Ks immediately, ditto for a P-51B/C or razorback P-47.

Shooting at point blank won't work. Your guns are harmonised to fire into a circle at 300yds or so. Fall back to that distance and try again. Remember also that ammo type matters and hits on wings do very little in DCS.

Available. About a third of Me109K-4s per mission have MW50. Usually flying from Evreux or Goulet.

It's slowly getting there - digging out the historical information on photo-recce F-6s takes time. For the moment we're building them in as 400 Sqn RCAF sorties, as we have 400's ORB in our research archive and access to 400's detailed sortie routes via the National Collection of Aerial Photography, although the TF-51D doesn't have an RAF livery so it's a little bit inaccurate... Seeing as everyone has the TF-51D (it's free!) I figure it's a good way of dipping your toe into DCS WW2. The asset pack is a barrier to entry but if you pick it up on a sale it's less of a hit. This link is an interesting quick read about photo-recce Mustang production: https://erenow.net/ww/mustang-thoroughbred-stallion-of-the-air/7.php

Presenting the 4YA WWII server and the Project Overlord mission design team. Project Overlord aims to recreate the aerial battlefields of June and July 1944 over Normandy during the Allied invasion of Occupied France. We strive for as-close-to-perfect historical accuracy as we can get within the limits of DCS. The server runs missions based on particular dates within the Normandy campaign. At the moment these are scattered between different points in time ranging between 4th June and mid-July 1944 but we aim to fill in the gaps as our research archive expands and DCS evolves to let us build more cool new features into our missions. In-game ethos is open play: we build the battlefield and set out mission objectives to complete (bombing, strafing and flying reconnaissance sorties, shooting down and escorting bomber flights, and so on) but what you do on each sortie is up to the pilot. You can also connect LotATC for fighter controller duties, vectoring your fellow players to their targets and away from enemies, and we're rolling out Combined Arms flak guns that can be manned at strategic points around the map. The DCS F10 map shows you the frontline and where the ground targets are. The in-game comms menu shows you target status (destroyed or complete) and can be used to turn on or off our EWRS, which tells you where the two nearest enemy aircraft are at intervals of around 5-7 minutes. Statistics We have a simple stats system on the Project Overlord website: https://projectoverlord.co.uk/stats/ There you can track your kills, broken down into various categories. We're working on deaths and bailouts and hope to have these up soon. The stats page sorts by username as default so you can also see how your squadron mates are doing. At the time of writing we have around 450 active pilots who've scored a kill (the true number on the server is higher than that - not everyone scores a kill!) Scoring We have a server-side scoring system that determines mission victory for each side, with plans to integrate the number of mission wins into the stats server later down the line. For now the in-mission points system assigns lots of points for completing a mission objective, varying depending on how hard each one is; lots of points for successfully escorting bombers (defined as more than 3/4 or so making it home in one piece); and slightly fewer points for destroying units dotted around the map. Points are allocated to each side in-mission. History We are very dedicated to historical accuracy and are polishing our missions to incorporate actual WW2 objectives and sorties as part of server gameplay. Lots of the history can be found online for free but we've also invested in subscriptions to various historical reference sites so we can fully research our mission elements. Here's an example: https://projectoverlord.co.uk/blog/2022/05/15/the-most-historically-accurate-objective-in-4ya-ww2-recon-4th-june-1944/ The bedrock of our research is a library of around 100 digitised operational record books relating to Second Tactical Air Force squadrons of the RAF, downloaded from the National Archives, and the German equivalent for JG27. From these we extract details of raids, sorties and ground targets, and we have a number of spreadsheets with each of these details painstakingly entered and cross-referenced. We also use published historical reference books about the Normandy air war as well as these primary sources. Squadrons and finding a wingman There are a number of active squadrons, or groups of likeminded players, on the server. Details of these can be found in the 4YA Discord (look for the WWII section). If you're not already on Discord it's a little fiddly to sign up but once you're in the 4YA server our WWII channels are a great way to chat about tactics, aircraft operation, ask for help and to hang out with likeminded folk. Click here to join: https://discord.gg/xVsfvpRdpa To join the 4YA WWII server you must have the Normandy map, the TF-51D and the WW2 Asset Pack installed. We're rolling out recon missions for the TF-51D so there is a growing number of tasks you have to complete in that airframe - a great way to check it all out! We also strongly recommend SRS, the DCS radio standalone client. The server is SRS enabled and used for pilots to talk to each other in-game as well as for radar operators and ground flak gun crews to communicate. We look forward to welcoming you into the skies of Normandy 1944!

You're aware the early production IXEs (Mark 9 with 50 cal) didn't have the enlarged rudder and were identical in all respects (but the guns) to the IXB and IXC, arent you. A few squadrons flew these over Normandy during the 1944 invasion. You might be thinking of the XIV (Mark 14) which had a different engine, guns, canopy, tail and wings to the IX. (Edit to add - or the XVIe (Mark 16) which had the bubble canopy, lower fuselage, larger tail, clipped wings etc)

OK, so it's a Q1/2 1943 airframe judging by the production date graphs here, which I think are reliable enough for a casual discussion. It doesn't make much practical difference: we're still flying a mid-war machine against late war aircraft. Not ahistorical, judging by some of 2TAF flying Mk.IXs until the end of WW2, unless you're specifically trying to model Normandy in June and July 1944 in which case the problem lies with the German airframes. Whether it's a B or C wing is irrelevant, really: both could carry 303s as are modelled in the game. Point of this thread is it would be truly minimal dev work to make the C/E wing option available in game by swapping the guns for 50s and calling it a different version. (In fact that's 2 different versions if you count the CWs, at which point you've got a very close approximation of the late XVIe circa 1945) Possibly the IXE was slightly heavier all-up thanks to the extra weight of 50 cal ammo? Or perhaps it carried less in the same space and therefore kept the same MAUM, I don't know.

At risk of responding to the original point, I'd like a LF.IXe. A handful of 2TAF squadrons had them and it would be nice to mix it up a bit in the 4YA WW2 server. That said, our aircraft is clearly modelling a 1942 IXb. I imagine a late Mk.XVI would be minimal dev effort over the existing IXb. Basically the same aeroplane plus the teardrop canopy and rear fuselage fuel tank.

I believe the roundels and colours are copied from MH434. Everyone knows the markings are wrong but unless ED chooses another reference aircraft, such as MH415... If we could define locked-down custom liveries in multiplayer servers I'd have all the 4YA WW2 Spitfires using these liveries. Much better colours all round than the defaults. https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/3318202/

One of the self-reinforcing problems with DCS spotting is that at ultra-low resolution settings the DCS game engine will show the smallest LOD dot for other aircraft out to 55nm. All the experienced WW2 players know that and have deliberately reduced their graphics settings to exploit this feature. When jet jockeys join a WW2 multiplayer server, they don't know about this exploit and have their graphics set so the game looks nice. That means they lose ~45nm of spotting distance compared with their opponents. Then they complain everyone else is pwning them before vanishing into all that richly detailed terrain. I'd really like to see ED implement a hard cutoff on visual spotting distance at 15nm in all resolutions to get rid of this exploit. It's very immersion-breaking. It would also mean I can turn my resolution back up without becoming a flying pincushion again!

It's all well and good making the point about the glowing balloon implementation of the lights making them tricky to use for their intended purpose, but whenever I use nav lights in multiplayer everyone immediately assumes I've made a mistake and starts warning me I've left them on.