I have seen skins for the b17, b25, b24 and b29 bombers @ combatace but I havent been able to find a way to fly them. Is it possible to fly them or am I stuck protecting them?

Those planes aren't truly flyable in the officially supported software. (There is a way to take control of them from an external view when playing online, but it involves a little trickery.) Custom skins for the bombers have long been popular because in offline mission/campaign mode it is possible to make entire formations where each aircraft has a unique paint scheme. You can easily do this in the Quick Mission Builder as well.

There are also unofficial/unsupported mods for the sim that essentially copy the cockpits of other planes into the AI bombers. I believe that SimHQ's policy forbids members from giving explicit directions to find these mods however.

Ah ok. Seems things are rather different compared to the SFP1 series in terms of modability.

Until recently it was completely impossible. Even so making a heavy bomber flyable in an authentic fashion would involve thousands of hours of work. Nobody has done it as of yet.

Boy.. I tell ya.. I remember when we had to use B-17 skinned Pe-8s to simulate B-17s... when Mustangts, P-40s,Spits,Lightnings,Hellcats,Wildcats,Maccis,Jugs,carriers,jets and a whole lot more were just dreams for this sim...

Their were some B-29 cockpit screenshots swirling around a few years back, looked very cool but they never were put in an update or patch.

Would of loved to fly one of those...someone will make one for SOW thats for sure.

That cockpit was far from ready for integration into the game.

How many flyable planes does IL-2 have now? Isn't it over 100 now? All those flyable planes and still no flyable versions of such famous and standard aircraft like the B-17, B5N and TBF.

No game is perfect though.

Closer to 300 actually.

BTW there could be a MILLION flyables and you would still get whiners on wanting more

Of course.

Heck, I've been whining about a fully modelled Storch and Po-2 since the original IL-2.

A-20? What a waste of time! I want, I need a recon plane; what were they thinking wasting time on some weird twin engine bomber thingie.

Tongue only partly in cheek. For every plane modelled, there's one that's not - and some of us would love to see (and think are indespensable for one reason or another). 500 flyables (with variants; the guys at Messerschmitt never gave up with the tinkering!) isn't very comforting when the one plane someone wants to fly isn't in there.

I want the I-15bis, for example. It was pretty important at the start of the War (and the Winter War before it); however, it lasted just a short time. So I understand why it's not in there. Or would if the Polish plane wasn't modelled.

In fairness, though, the addition of flyables that I've never touched don't hurt the simulation for me. It's not really a zero-sum game on flyable aircraft. The guy that did the Polish plane worked on his own time and would have sat on his hands if the option of inclusion was denied.

The B-17 can be flown externally in a Dogfight map; no hack required. It just has to be added into the mission file manually. Internals are out in the stock software (I dunno what the mod guys are doing).

Since the sim is weak above 6,000 meters altitude and the maps are pretty small for strategic missions, I don't know if it would be all that fun to have a flyable B-17, though.

You bring up some good points Dart. Another thought that grabs my attention with these debates concerning which aircraft are flyable and how many are flyable is how many of us here on SimHQ have flown all of the flyables in the game? I've been flying the sim since day 1 pretty much and while I think I've at least done a "quick mission" with every single flyable, there are still quite a few planes which I've barely touched and perhaps have spent at most 1 or 2 hours flying it in total.

How is that done is QMB Skycat? I find that each group of planes in QMB have to have the same scheme limiting the unique schemes to the number of flights you create.

I know it can be done in FMB by creating each plane manually but not QMB.

Let's say you want the maximum number of planes for an army in QMB. That would be 16 total, broken down as four flights of four bombers each. Each flight gets its own line in the QMB menu.

At the far right of each line there is a button that opens up aircraft customization. By default that submenu only allows you to reskin the lead ship of that flight. You'll have to change the option to plane #2 to assign a skin to that plane, then bring up plane #3 and finally #4. After you've completed that, move down to the next flight and do the whole process over again.

I don't have 1946 installed at this time. Otherwise I'd post screenshots for you.

Having flown the sim since March, 03 with the release of Forgotten Battles (and a bit before with the demo)....Flying without exageration on average 3 hours "daily" (days missed made up for by longer days)....That would make roughly 4,000-6,000 hours that being generous to the lesser (imagine if I had worked instead )....

I'd guess I have maybe flown at best 20% of the aircraft with any regularity, and perhaps only 50-60% at least 1x.

Lack of planes most deffinately not an issue with this sim.....Lack of our "favorites" everyones issue to some degree (be it plane, loadouts, options).

K2

Thanks Skycat I will give that a look.