Do we really need the stove? :)

Only if we keep the coffee pot.
:03:

Are you worried about file size or about the extra weight onboard?
If the former is true, a stove can be composed of only eight triangles, or little more.
Aren't eight triangles worth the joy of free cam geeks? :D

Don't think you can get that close in Free Cam to see details like that.
:hmmm:

Weight is no issue as We will be tossing a bunch of stuff out the windows.
:har:

There are parts you'd never see that we can cut just for being a waste of Game resources.
I absolutely hate throwing parts in a Unit that have no reason being there!

Though, I remember you placing an Easter egg inside your blimp :03:

Furniture as well as bombs :haha:

Talking about airships and details that no one will see, this is my unfinished Zeppelin II (only the gondola plus texture stuff missing):

https://i.imgur.com/VfI1yUs.png

...and here is a detail of one of its engine nacelles (extenal faces hidden to reveal the interior :D

https://i.imgur.com/8sfzvvW.png

I thought that after stripping it down of all the unneeded stuff, it would be cool having it early in campaign to fly over German ports, playing the Horst-Wessel-Lied at deafening volume and dropping nazi propaganda fliers :O:

Yes I did.
Sadly that was a tribute to Babe.
She was my best 4 legged friend and passed away from snapping her spine.
Was it really that long ago?
:o

I still have her picture next to me so I see her everyday.
:wah:
https://www.subsim.com/radioroom/pic...ictureid=11864

So do I with my departed Maremma sheepdog, Martina. I always thought of her as a better me.

Perhaps We include Martina and my other Best friend, Storm, in the new K-Ship.

Babe has been flying since 2008 all over the World!
:yeah:

My God, it's so beautiful ! :o
I've always been a fan of Zeppelins airships ! :yeah:
I strongly hope that you will finish this model one day, so we can enjoy watching to these great machines in the sky ! :ping: :arrgh!:

Good idea!

Yesterday I tried to upload Martina's picture, but for some odd reason my smartphone and my laptop didn't want to cooperate... I won't try again today, in fear to derail kapuhy's thread :)

My model is based on actual plans of the LZ 130 Graf Zeppelin II, an Hindemburg-class rigid airship; the last and one of the two largest airships built by the Germans.

During its short service, the LZ 130 carried out thirty flights, many of which were for propaganda. The last trip took place on 20 August 1939, only 11 days before WWII broke out. The following year, on 29 February, Göring issued an order to scrap it together with the LZ 127 (the firts airship to bring the name of Graf Zeppelin) and with the unfinished LZ 131, their metal being needed by the war industry.

Thank you for this reply. So bad that they finished this way... :wah:

On a side note, the engines look very small compared to the balloon and I know that in SH3, aircrafts' propeller is always much smaller than in reality... :hmmm:

Hydrogen being so dangerous, and helium being in such a short supply, their usage in the military field was out of question and their withdrawal from civil service inevitable. Pity that none of them was preserved.

Everything in my model, including engine gondolas and propellers, was modelled after detailed plans so I am 100% sure about the proportions.
Talking about airships, don't forget that all the propulsion went into actually moving them, as opposed to winged aircraft, where a big part of the power is used for keeping them afloat in the air.

Anyway I am afraid this discussion is going beyond the purposes of this thread. When the time comes I will start a WIP thread for my Zeppelin, and we will discuss it there :salute:

That makes sense ! :yep:

:up:

I won't mind, and neither will my best 4 legged friend :)

...and that's a lovely Zeppelin :up:

---

So, I did some more tests and messed with various parameters this week, and I have some progress with the flank speed bombing issue. Namely, I tried ordering AI to Strafe instead of SetCourseBombs for last phase of the attack, and results were encouraging.

Out of 8 different planes I tested with this setting:

- 3 managed to kill U-boat sailing at flank speed
- 1 dropped bombs but missed
- 2 killed both U-boat and themselves (one by kamikazing and other by getting blown up by its own bomb)
- 2 crashed into sea while trying to attack

The same 8 planes with standard TWoS AI:

- 6 went into endless loop like in my video
- 2 (level bombers) dropped bombs but missed

So, as far as lethality of attack goes, not bad: from 0/8 to 5/8 succesful and from 2/8 to 6/8 overall bomb attacks.

There are serious drawbacks though: told to strafe, planes behave differently. Instead of making a pass, flying away and returning for another attack, they keep very close to U-boat making narrow circles around it, while blazing away with turrets. This makes for very dramatic action if you choose to man AA guns and duke it out, but unfortunately also makes plane lose speed quickly. This is the cause of frequent crashes in tests described above - esentially, either the plane will drop bombs (and then fly away since it has no bombs left) in first several circles, or it will lose all speed and crash into ocean.

There's a "Avoid impact with water" routine in AI scripts, but it doesn't seem very effective. We'll have to find another way to make AI pilots call off the attack if their speed/altitude drops too low. Perhaps it is here that drag values will make some difference (because for atandard AI they made none, I tried setting even extreme values to no avail, still no bombs were dropped).

Another drawback is very frequent altitude changes during strafing - with fast planes it's even kinda cool (and makes hitting them with AA difficult) but with slower ones it just looks dumb. Like drunk pilot kinda dumb.

Yet another drawback - distinction between level bombers and dive bombers seem to be a part of SetCourseBombs command, because replacing SetCourseBombs with Strafe makes all aircraft, no matter their classification, behave in the same way.

Since it seems possible to make AI check target speed as well as depth, I think now that best approach would be to create two bombing "strategies" - one, for slow/stationary targets, will be esentially unchanged IRAI approach, and second, for fast targets, will involve changing to strafing behaviour on last leg of attack, to allow for dropping bombs while minimizing time spent on sucidally narow turns.

As far as the strafe strategy will only be used in certain circumstances, I think we can live with the involved oddities. Some of them are not even so impossible; for one thing, I am sure I have read reports of ASW aircraft killing themselves with their own bombs dropped at too a low altitude.

That said, I will add a couple of quick thoughts:

- is the min_height parameter in cmdr_AIAirplane controller doing anything?

- Is there in SHSim.act anyhing that can be used to get aircraft altitude so that, when their height drops too much they can switch to normal flight or to any other tactic that won't result in a suicidal conduct?

Else, is it possible to differentiate strategies by aircraft unit type? :hmm2: