Which single seat scout has been the most difficult for you to fly and master so far? For me it's been the Dr.I. I'm still trying to learn how to turn and fight in that one without getting the damn "helicopter" effect.

Rather suprisingly, I learned the Sopwith Camel pretty quickly and for me it was a lot easier to learn than the Dr.I.

Scout-wise? The Camel or Dr.I are generally accepted to have the most...interesting flight models . You'll find flying the Dr.I much easier if you have rudder pedals (or a twisty stick at the very least). Check one of Requiem's masterpieces for instruction on turning rotaries: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gniHY-IGxJ4

Cheers,

Fafnir_6

If you find the Camel easy then you're a natural PM!

That's funny (not as in Haha, but as in Ironic) Panzer,

...and I've come across this a few times now.

I can fly the bejesus out of the Dr1 like nobody's business... but put me in a Camel, and I'm my own worst enemy!

I cannot dogfight more than a few tens of seconds before I'm fighting to recover from a spin, just to fly a few more, and do it all over again! Weird!

The ironic part is, I've met many that are very comfortable in one (Camel/Dr.I) and stoooopid lame in the other.

I would be very curious to see if it is dependant on weather you were left or right-handed or something equally silly.

...I also wonder if there are folks who feel proficient in either, and if they are ambidexterous.


But yeah, for me, Camel is, by far the most difficult.

Definitely the Camel for me too.

Camel is harder for me.

I'll "depart" in both planes, but the DR1 will try to "save itself" if I let it; the Camel I'm convinced was secretly sabotaged by someone named Manfred or Willi or Werner, and will try to kill or injure its pilot at the first opportunity

What has helped me for both aircraft is going in and "tweaking" the response curves for pitch and roll, to make them less "twitchy".

Best wishes.

Edit: I should add that even though it is harder for me to fly, I prefer the Camel. I can turn almost as tightly as the DR1, and the Camel is faster, so I have more options (to escape!) if needed .... as long as I don't crash! I am getting better in it....

I normally fly the SE5a but when I fire up the Camel I find it quite easy to get kills with, the DR1 is a great mystery though......

For me the hardest ROF planes to land are the Nieuports. They had a rep for being difficult to handle on the ground in rl though, some training units used them as a final test of pilot skill before letting the students loose on front line crates.

Dr1 and Camel performance more than make up for their trickiness so that they are actually quite easy. Most difficult is the DH2.

In Rof, of course - reality sure was a bit different.

For fighting ?
The Dr.I is the most complicated for shooting, in RoF.
The Camel is a stable gunning platform, in comparison.
But then i generally hate rotaries, there's a good reason they were never used again, after WW1.
I find the D.H.2 not so difficult, when it's 1:1 against an E.III you have a good chance, just never use the rudder.

For landing ?
The Gotha, immediately followed by the N.17.

Against two-seaters ?
No chance in any german plane. A streamlined Albatros cannot catch up with a full wired barndoor two-seater with smokestacks, loaded with bombs like an RE8. In RoF, that is.


Most difficult i find the SPAD XIII, it cannot turn, its rudder make it lose energy, you cannot SEE anything from its cockpit. The only chance is to spot an unaware foe and dive on it, shooting - and then dive-fly away, fast. I find this "thing" the most idiotic construction, apart maybe for flying air races.

Greetings,
Catfish

Dr.I, Camel and N.17. Although I can handle them pretty well in SP, as soon as I take them in MP I'll strat to spin all over the place...it really shows that I'm much more nervous when flying against human opponents

Gotha. If I manage to get the damned thing airborne it frequently does not stay that way. The difference between max speed when loaded and stall is not all that much. Once control is lost it's game over. Forget landing it.

Thanks for this video link. I'll check it out today. I don't have rudder pedals but I do have a twist rudder on my stick.

For what it's worth I'm left-handed.

I know the term "boom and zoom" is rather silly to apply to any WWI aircraft but that's the way I fly the Spad XIII. It's definitely not a turn fighter and if you are slow and low in the Spad XIII, that usually means death.

The SPAD really did use B&Z tactics, they just didn't call it that. Somewhere I saw a WWI "how to fight in a SPAD" manual - it was really just a page or two of diagrams - and it put heavy emphasis on vertical maneuvers.

B&Z is a relative term. It just means using speed over agility. You can B&Z with any plane, but obviously it will be less successful in say a Dr.I than an SE5a! For each conflict from WWI to Vietnam, the planes that were fastest and less agile were natural B&Z'ers vs the slower more agile planes of the time. Post-Vietnam that became less important, with the Syrian slaughter over Bekaa 30 years back probably being the last time anyone tried it.



The Jedi Master

SPAD13 is a fantastic plane that is also very forgiving and does not have as much uncontrollable osculations caused by rudder input as SPAD7.
Dogfighting all Alabtroses, DVII (not "F"), Pfalzes is a dodle. Not jump in and run away, but sustained dogfighting - when you understand that SPAD not only has great top speed, but also has climbing rate that is up to 40% better than any of its competitors above. And just cut their trajectory in climbing turns - Albatroses will not stand a chance. Now, if Dr1 or DVIIF appear - now it is a boom and run away time:)

DR1, N17 and Camel are all very hard and much harder to learn than SPAD.

Any aircraft is easy if you only choose the softest matchups. The real test of the DH2 is against another human in an Albatros D.II.

Hardest Scout: Camel

Hardest aircraft overall: Gotha at full load. Keeping the darn thing airborne without autopilot is a lesson in frustration...it just refuses to fly by the rules.

All of them.

Dolphin>Camel