I'm glad to see such a huge support for this game! I downloaded it off of GOG.com, and have been playing ever since. Such in-depth! I started looking into mods for this game, and Google brought me here. However, it would appear that some, if not most of the links provided are discontinued sources. Would love to see if anyone has anything still available.

I think one of the trickiest part of this game is trying to hit the targets. I don't know if I'm just lacking in the skills department as a bombardier or what, but most my crew dies in plane vs plane crashes, or worse, two dead pilots. I was reading here about a Campaign, but have yet to find one. I've done the single aircraft mode and the multiple air craft mode, but those just seem like selectable missions. If those are the campaign modes, I need more practice then. I can get about three in (all "Complete Misses" of course) and then I'm just outta luck with any good crewmen left.

Anyways, I'm rambling on. Love the game, love these type of games, hope to check out more like it.

welcome aboard!
 

Deranged!:Kaleun_Salute:

Welcome! :up:

Is the bombs-away site still around? I do remember downloading a few things via there recently.

As far as collisions and crashes, after flying what's probably a few dozen missions, I did the math to keep track of losses etc. and I realized that on average your chance of dying in a mission was a lot higher than in real life, and that the enemy fighter AI was unfortunately not that smart at avoiding crashes and often not good enough to be a threat, except as a kamikaze of sorts. I also found that flak is more deadly than it should be.

So as a compromise, I found that the most "realistic" if you want accurate results would be to turn plane collisions OFF (as much as that sometimes creates silly planes bouncing across the sky), turn the flak accuracy down to low or medium at most, and set enemy AI fighter difficulty to highest. With that, I found the game a lot more enjoyable and challenging and turning out with much more historical mission results. You always have 18 B-17s flying in that box formation in campaign missions (6 from your squadron, 12 from two others in your wing), and in the long term the average should be no more than 2 bombers lost per mission. If you're constantly losing much more than that, it's not really realistic.

As for bomb sighting, practice practice practice! The bombsight is actually extremely accurate, probably even more so than it was in real life. Numbers are important, but really the important thing is just to make little adjustments by feel as you're approaching the target and keep making them so that the target is as stable as you can get it in the sight, all the way till release. And remember the goal is not laser accuracy, you just need to be close enough. With a little bit of practice, the game's sight is forgiving enough that you'll learn to get that "close enough" pretty much 100% of the time.

Welcome to SubSim Deranged :sunny:

Thanks for the warm welcomes, y'all and big thank you for the insight and advice, CCIP! I will try the new setup!

As far as the bombs-away site, I clicked on quite a few and they all came back with 404 error messages.

I have'nt played this Sim in ages. The one thing I never liked about it is you can't save the game at any time. Other than that, it's a good Sim.

To be fair, I'm pretty sure this is true of the vast majority of flight sims. I think one difference here is just that the average B-17 mission tends to be quite long :hmm2:

On the other hand, it does have a very functional time-skip function for those of us in a rush :yep:

Yeah, until the Navigator is lost. :O:

"I don't know where we are!" = No time skip for you

There is a save game/load game feature. When you are on the office areas, ESC will bring you to the Options menu. In there, there is a image of a floppy disk. That's where you can save and load games.

I know about the save after the mission, you just can't save anytime you're flying. The creator of the sim was very adamant about that. Says the real life flyers couldn't just quit in the middle of a mission.

I loved playing this sim as an air-gunner: great realism in the way enemy a/c attacked and peeled away. One thing that always bugged me though (and I tried in vain to get rid of it) was the intrusive noise of the turret motor.

Its happening! Microporse is remastering its whole series of B-17 games. It is also making a new one! cant wait to get these.