I have now posted version 2.0 of "Vampires of Guadalcanal". The campaign has been subject to a big overhaul.



Firstly the campaign has been upgraded to 4.11 standards, which includes new take-off standards (mainly in pairs) and patrol way-points. And yes, you will meet the Ki-45! (And your opponents will use the new AI, so beware!) Have also added five new missions (all with a random element), where you fly the P-38. (The 44th Fighter Squadron converted to the P-38 late in the autumn of 1943.) So now the campaign consists of 18 missions. I've also added skins, tweaked a number of old missions and fixed typos etc.

You can download it here: http://www.mission4today.com/index.php?name=Downloads&file=details&id=4042

Thanks for looking!

Nice to see an update for one of my favorite campaigns.

One question on the Ki-45. Did you find any information that the Ki-45 was used in the Solomon Islands or are the missions with the Ki-45 fictional?

A part of 1943 the Ki-45-equipped Sentai 13 was based at Rabaul, which puts it in the realm of possibility that it was used over Bougainville. (Before transferred to Wevak in New Guinea.) But, yes, it is pretty speculative to include that aircraft in this campaign.

Cool! I'm going to check it out for sure. I've been working a bit with this map recently...how do you approach the massive size of the map? I'm finding if I go for historical missions they do end up being an hour or hours long.

Quite simply by using the "Time compression" feature. Because most of the missions are long hauls over water.

There scale of the map IS a problem. Note for instance that it is quite impossible for P-40's to reach Bouganville (not even with droptanks) which they did in reality, on escort missions. So in those historical missions I've made the target Munda instead.

At the moment I am working on a DGen campaign on the Solomon Islands map and I have the same problem. The range of some planes in the game is much lower than it was in reality. I did some tests with the G4M1 and noticed that in-game it has only 1/3 of the range it had in reality when flown by the AI or on autopilot. I am not sure what the reason is. Either the fuel capacity values used by the game are wrong or the simulated fuel consumption is much too high.

The issue of incorrect aircraft endurance has been noted by the SEOW community. In fact, as an example, when we ran a large campaign recently that included the Solomons maps we found that the Betty endurance was seriously low, as juri noted above. Since our mission lengths were 3 hours in that particular campaign, we really needed much better modelling of fuel consumption in the aircraft involved. For example, it was well known that Zeroes had extreme endurance compared to Allied fighters of the time. HSFX consequently released a mod that corrected the endurance of the Betty and several other aircraft to historic performance. In the end, we could fly from Bougainville to attack Henderson, do some recon and return to Munda within the 3 hours limit.

Note that "historic performance" does not mean that you take off and fly at full mix and 100% throttle for 6 hours. You still need to fly at economy settings to get proper performance, and that is a whole new ballgame for most online pilots. Personally I would like to see this issue corrected for all aircraft in IL-2, but it would take a lot of work and would be lost on many people.

Cheers,
4Shades

Thanks for the info 4shades. Where can one find that special mod?

Not sure now, it may even be in HSFX v5.0.1 Expert mode. However I am pretty certain that it will be in HSFX6 which isn't too far away.

Cheers,
4S

I ran into the same thing with my original attempt at True Pacific on original DGen. One reason why I sometimes put carriers closer to targets, even on "historic" files.