PWCG P-38 Lightning Strikes Co-op Campaign

[FoolTrottel]

25 minutes ago, Crash said:

I have been doing touch and goes in the P-38, and most of the time the landings are not too bad. Occasionally I get the nose-wheel bounce and I cant see any real difference in my approach speed or rate of descent. Any tips?

If the nose wheel bounces, do not go stick forward! Try and let it settle down all by itself.

[Crash]

Thanks FT. It never occurred to me

[DD_Fenrir]

The Bounce occurs because of either:

a) carrying too much speed

b) too nose low on touchdown

c) too slow

The majority of bouncers I saw the last time I was observing the 485th landings were due to a combination of a) & b), and the two are connected; with a too fast approach your nose is lower meaning the nose wheel will touch first. It's rebound will rotate the nose up, adding AoA - and ergo lift - whilst you still have airspeed. This causes the balloon.

You instinctively push the nose down - and it puts you straight back into the cycle again; your nose wheel touches first, it's rebound will rotate the nose up, adding AoA, you balloon, you instinctively push the nose down... etc.

You will continue is this pattern until you run out of flying speed or the nose-wheel breaks, whichever comes first.

The key here is pushing the nose down - don't.  If it's a big bounce, power up and go around. If a moderate bounce, hold the nose high attitude (as long as it's not too high!) and use a small addition of power to manage your rate of descent to terra firma.

Try to memorise the position of the gunsight reticule above the horizon when parked - this is the attitude the aircraft should be in just prior to touchdown.

[Crash]

Thanks, I hope other flyers are able to improve their landings

[FoolTrottel]

42 minutes ago, Crash said:

Thanks, I hope other flyers are able to improve their landings

you can safely limit this to "485th flyers"  ... or maybe 485th "flyers" 

[Crash]

Bumpy landings now sorted. 6 greasers in a row

[Crash]

Will be there

[Painless]

Reporting for duty skipper. 😎

[BluBear]

Reporting for duty - updated 402 skins to follow for download pre-mission chaps. Hope to have them up by 8.30pm.

[Reggie]

Very sorry to report chaps I will not be able to attend tonight due to home issues. Apologies for the short notice, I shall miss your peerless company 😢

[BluBear]

3 hours ago, BluBear said:

Reporting for duty - updated 402 skins to follow for download pre-mission chaps. Hope to have them up by 8.30pm.

New personalised skins for 402nd available here chaps, please could all pilots download:

 

 

[FoolTrottel]

[Painless]

Seems we had a bit of a milk run 485th. Still worth noting that we all managed to land (very nicely indeed), all aircraft and pilots undamaged.

Congrats to 402nd, looked like the you boys caught the Bosh with their trousers down this time !

[DD_Fenrir]

Thanks Mick, and sorry you had a rather pedestrian experience. Alas, them's the breaks with a dynamic campaign, if I could ensure some sort of targets I would but I have zero control over that aspect.

Debrief is ready...

Well 402nd certainly had the lions share of the luck today, with the boys 485th left hungry for action.

Having been directed to Aachen to strike rail targets in and around the city, on arrival the 402nd found pickings moderately slim. A single train with only a handful of wagons was observed in the wrecked station and a few AAA guns surrounded the station area. 402 made short work of these but just prior to completion E/A were spotted to the Southwest - on inspection these became 6x Ju 52! However, just as Leakage White flight were about to engage, Leakage Red Leader reported enemy fighters above Red Flight over Aachen - White flight disengaged from the Ju 52s and headed back to Aachen. However a flight of P-51s of the 354th FG covering us, and they apparently made short work of the enemy fighters, the only moment of worry being generated by a single Fw 190 which dived towards and through White flight but whom inexplicably carried on all the way down to terra firma and crashed with a spectacular fireball into woods West of the city.

Now free to engage the transports, the 402nd took off to the Southwest and encountered the '52s formed in two flights of three and a merry party ensued; 2nd Lt. Bertram Finknottle downed two of them for his first victories - nice way to break a duck Bertie! The rest fell singly to Lt. Arjen Efftee and 2nd Lts. Casey Baker, Fenton Rea and Dennis Mcfly, the latter on his first mission.

A full house gents! Nice work on the clean-up - the Krauts will be smarting that loss, though sending groups of transports out in broad daylight and CAVU conditions, one wonders whet they expected. One assumes a measure of desperation on their part...

Gathering the squadron back together Lt. Per Fesser led the group to Eupen to see what they could find as there were still unused bombs hanging off the racks of some of their aircraft - it would be a crime to waste them. Fortunately a train, some howitzers and a smattering of  AAA guns were discovered and despite the obscuring of the targets by heavy smoke in and around the town the squadron set to and left the majority of the targets smoking wrecks. However, Bertie Finknottle was in for some excitement when a AAA gun disabled his right engine. Fortunately he was able to feather the engine in good order and, after some discussions as to whether to make for Bierset or try for home base, took off for Florennes with Red 3 covering. At this time, Lt. Per Fesser called a general regroup and RTB, with White Flight taking the opportunity to strafe a AAA gun and an artillery position as they crossed the front.

Finknottle made a beautiful singe-engine landing first and  the remainder of the squadron landed without incident at Florennes.

The 485th saw little of any remark on their patrol near Houffalize, but Lt. Artiesbi managed to vent the squadrons collective frustrations on an AAA gun near Malmedy. All landed safely.

No losses today gents - and it's not often we get to say that, so a very big positive in that regard.

Another gong has been awarded! Congratulations Lt. Arjen Efftee, it seems your superiors hold your flying skills in some regard as they have deemed you fit for the Distinguished Flying Cross. Well done that man! Drinks are on Arjen boys! Hold up....Where'd he go....?

Weather is looking ropey for the next couple of days, but we are expecting conditions to clear on the 24th October. [to be flown on Sunday 20th September]

[BluBear]

Well done 402, a succesful mission indeed! Most enjoyable, despite flying with a constantly shaking MSFF2.

Once again though, none of my destroyed ground targets are being registered, which is most strange:

Our initial bomb run on the minimal targets at Aachen as you mention was effective. The game registered locomotives/wagons and a platform (I think?) for me at the time, I certainly saw them go up and Wingy had eyes on the attack if I recall. I also knobbled a couple of AAA guns in and around Eupen for sure.

I've flown 9 missions now under two alias' and definitely hit ground targets on at least half of those, but PWCG has not ever registered a single ground kill for me.
How does it gather that data?

This is purely a bug-fixing endaevor you understand

[DD_Fenrir]

I think I may have found the problem Chris. After PWCG had not registered your air kill last night, I decided that I had to go start digging through the file structure and manually edit the entries to award you the Ju 52 kill. In the process I noticed a small typo; when entering your persona name I had inadvertently put a 'space' at the end. Don't ask me why but it happened.

I suspect this has something to do with why your kills are not registering. I have corrected the error and hopefully next mission things should start recording properly for you.

My apologies mate, my mistake, though I had no idea of it or the ramifications and it was only by chance that I spotted the anomaly. Fingers crossed that the fix sorts it.

[wingflyr]

1 hour ago, DD_Fenrir said:

I think I may have found the problem Chris. After PWCG had not registered your air kill last night, I decided that I had to go start digging through the file structure and manually edit the entries to award you the Ju 52 kill. In the process I noticed a small typo; when entering your persona name I had inadvertently put a 'space' at the end. Don't ask me why but it happened.

I suspect this has something to do with why your kills are not registering. I have corrected the error and hopefully next mission things should start recording properly for you.

My apologies mate, my mistake, though I had no idea of it or the ramifications and it was only by chance that I spotted the anomaly. Fingers crossed that the fix sorts it.

Again I concur that Chis had those G T and I also had G-kills on the game score board not record.

 

 

 

[FoolTrottel]

Cools! Good show all!

Goes to show we all should be aware of peculiarities during this campaign - and report them in debrief - or rather here in the thread like Chris did... 

It could be nothing as in a quirk in the game, or an observational error - it could be something else that is fixable! 

 

[FoolTrottel]

1 minute ago, wingflyr said:

Again I concur that Chis had those G T and I also had G-kills on the game score board not record.

 

 

 

Me thinks you need to do some more database checking on them trailing spaces Tom ... there are more pilots that have flown multiple missions, like Dennis, with Zero ground kills. Funflak as well... might be worth looking into!

[BluBear]

6 hours ago, FoolTrottel said:

Me thinks you need to do some more database checking on them trailing spaces Tom ... there are more pilots that have flown multiple missions, like Dennis, with Zero ground kills. Funflak as well... might be worth looking into!

Interesting. If that is indeed the issue, would it be possible then to retrospectively rerun the reports of past missions to retrieve lost claims? You know, in the spirit of a backlog in the intelligence unit, lost files from the observer corps or something?

Obviously if it's a ball ache I'm not bothered, I haven't the foggiest what's involved. It's more important that the bugs are ironed out for future missions.  

[FoolTrottel]

7 minutes ago, BluBear said:

Interesting. If that is indeed the issue, would it be possible then to retrospectively rerun the reports of past missions to retrieve lost claims? You know, in the spirit of a backlog in the intelligence unit, lost files from the observer corps or something?

Obviously if it's a ball ache I'm not bothered, I haven't the foggiest what's involved. It's more important that the bugs are ironed out for future missions.  

Great idea, but I think PWCG will not have such an option built in - it would mess up current results for sure - should one be able to re-run it through PWCG then probably air kills will be counted yet again - as well as ground stuff kills that had been registered the first time ... though that may not be a bad thing ...

And now for the manual way: Read log files and retrieve the kills that way.

Sounds good in theory, until you find like 165 log files for one mission, and I took this small bit out of one log file just to show it's really not doable:

T:0 AType:15 VER:17
T:173873 AType:12 ID:1402880 TYPE:M16 Half-track AAA gun COUNTRY:103 NAME:m16 PID:-1 POS(111287.6875,136.1675,184716.0625)
T:173873 AType:3 AID:-1 TID:1402880 POS(111287.6875,136.1675,184716.0625)
T:173968 AType:12 ID:1393664 TYPE:M16 Half-track AAA gun COUNTRY:103 NAME:m16 PID:-1 POS(111287.6719,135.9392,184705.2813)
T:173968 AType:3 AID:-1 TID:1393664 POS(111287.6719,135.9392,184705.2813)
T:174142 AType:12 ID:8192 TYPE:BlocksArray COUNTRY:103 NAME:BlocksArray PID:-1 POS(0.0000,0.0000,0.0000)
T:174142 AType:1 AMMO:explosion AID:8196 TID:8192
T:174142 AType:12 ID:726016 TYPE:Flak 38 COUNTRY:201 NAME:flak38 PID:-1 POS(82003.2578,503.8732,200700.9844)
T:174142 AType:1 AMMO:explosion AID:8196 TID:726016
T:174143 AType:2 DMG:0.0899 AID:8196 TID:726016 POS(82003.2578,503.8732,200700.9844)
T:174143 AType:12 ID:8192 TYPE:art_position_small[47891,0] COUNTRY:103 NAME:BlocksArray PID:-1 POS(0.0000,0.0000,0.0000)
T:174143 AType:1 AMMO:BULLET_USA_12-7x99_AP AID:8196 TID:8192
T:174146 AType:12 ID:8192 TYPE:BlocksArray COUNTRY:103 NAME:BlocksArray PID:-1 POS(0.0000,0.0000,0.0000)
T:174146 AType:1 AMMO:explosion AID:8196 TID:8192
T:174146 AType:1 AMMO:explosion AID:8196 TID:726016
T:174147 AType:12 ID:8192 TYPE:art_position_small[47891,0] COUNTRY:201 NAME:BlocksArray PID:-1 POS(0.0000,0.0000,0.0000)
T:174147 AType:2 DMG:0.0010 AID:8196 TID:8192 POS(82003.2578,503.8732,200700.9844)
T:174147 AType:2 DMG:0.1007 AID:8196 TID:726016 POS(82003.2578,503.8732,200700.9844)
T:174153 AType:12 ID:8192 TYPE:art_position_small[47891,1] COUNTRY:201 NAME:BlocksArray PID:-1 POS(0.0000,0.0000,0.0000)
T:174153 AType:1 AMMO:BULLET_USA_12-7x99_AP AID:8196 TID:8192
T:174153 AType:12 ID:8192 TYPE:BlocksArray COUNTRY:201 NAME:BlocksArray PID:-1 POS(0.0000,0.0000,0.0000)

 Or maybe ... well, Fen's got a proper good brain that he knows how to use properly ... so ... who knows?

 

Yeah, a lot of this are just assumptions... but given the circumstances and complexity ... checking the names and spaces will do fine!

 

[DD_Fenrir]

16 hours ago, FoolTrottel said:

Me thinks you need to do some more database checking on them trailing spaces Tom ... there are more pilots that have flown multiple missions, like Dennis, with Zero ground kills. Funflak as well... might be worth looking into!

Done. No more trailing spaces found.

 

9 hours ago, BluBear said:

Interesting. If that is indeed the issue, would it be possible then to retrospectively rerun the reports of past missions to retrieve lost claims? You know, in the spirit of a backlog in the intelligence unit, lost files from the observer corps or something?

Obviously if it's a ball ache I'm not bothered, I haven't the foggiest what's involved. It's more important that the bugs are ironed out for future missions.  

No way to do that through automation. I could attempt to manually edit the CampaignLog.json, the 19441021.CombatReport.json and 102370402.json files, which I did for your Ju 52 kill, however at one point when attempting to verify my edits had worked in the PWCG GUI it deleted the entire contents of the CampaignLog, which includes the results for every persona in every squadron - gone! Luckily I had a backup copy, but I had to start the edits from scratch again VERY carefully, and ensured the three matched exactly prior to opening the PWCG GUI again. 

It took around an hour to do the messing around, find out what needed changing where and go back through the lists - then another half hour after discovering the deletion of the CampaignLog contents and having to start from scratch; doing that for multiple ground targets? Sorry Chris mate, maybe if I was single and without sproglet but that's a big ask. I'd also require a list of your targets destroyed from you, where and on what date -  the issue being that the PWCG has not logged the destruction of any target you have attacked; it's not like I can see that target x has been destroyed by "unknown" and just fill in the blanks. They just straight up don't exist in the logs. So I'd have to create them from scratch.

[BluBear]

55 minutes ago, DD_Fenrir said:

the issue being that the PWCG has not logged the destruction of any target you have attacked; it's not like I can see that target x has been destroyed by "unknown" and just fill in the blanks. They just straight up don't exist in the logs. So I'd have to create them from scratch.

Gotcha, as I suspected. Honestly mate I understand don't worry, databases are no fun at all!

So all this time I've been a phantom phlyer, an invisible death machine haunting the enemy ground units:

"Hey Jürgen, can you hear that - it sounds like a fork-tailed devil getting real close, but I can't see anything?"
 "Don't be crazy Schmitt, you're starting to loose your mind from too much looted Jenever. Besides, I have eyes on all the enemy aircraft over to the..."
***BLLLLURGGGGGGH, CRACK CRACK CRACK, BOOM*** As 20mm cannon shells rip through the FlaK 40 emplacement; Jürgen is nowhere to be seen and Schmitt pulls himself out of a ditch with a muddied, bloodied face. An empty bottle of Jenever rolls down the bank next to the wrecked gun emplacement and clinks to a stop on his one remaining boot.

The Phantom P-38 has struck again.

 

 

[DD_Fenrir]

A further complication is I suspect the game and PWCG don't attribute ground kills the same way.

Example: say you and I each throw a bomb at the same ground target  - Chris, your bomb lands first close, but not on; it detonates and reduces the the targets 'health' to 5%. However, my bomb detonates closer a fraction of a second later and finishes it off. Il-2:GBS registers this as a kill to you because you did 95% of the work, you get the message, happy camper, big grin, drinks on Chris.

However, PWCG might not be so discerning - it might be looking at the logs for whose weapon was last responsible for causing the damage to target prior to destruction and hence awards me the kill. Chris sad.

I think this is partially responsible for some of the lack of reconciliation between what the game tells us whilst we play the mission and what PWCG awards. This, with the added complication that none of your kills were registering at all (which I hope to god has been sorted by my tinkering, cos otherwise I am at a loss as to what could be causing the issue) means I'm scratching around in the murk trying to figure out whats going on with this particular issue.

[Painless]

Interesting read chaps, it seems to me that the only “fair” way to artificially balance things retrospectively is to award another 5 confirmed air kills to any pilot of Major rank or above and call it quits 😉👍🏻