I've noticed since the last patch that the game crashes to desktop on me more often during screen loading transitions. I get the Windows "rof.exe has encountered a problem and must close" error. Has anyone else been getting this?

My other questions concerns the new feature where enemy balloons will be winched down when under threat of attack. In the real war, could those balloons be winched down that fast? It just strikes me that is seems to happen VERY fast in the game.

Balloons could be winched down at a normal rate of 10m per second, later on in the war, they could be winched down much faster with express speed winches, so I think the in game version is more or less right.
Remember, balloons were expensive and extremely valuable assets to both sides, and technology for balloon units were improved on as with most other aspects of warfare at that time.
Optimum operating altitude was usualy around 3000 to 4000ft, and balloons could be winched down in around 1 minute from those altitudes.
The average life of a balloon was roughly '2 weeks' lol!

You're not alone.
There are 2 kinds of CTD to me.
One is MSVCR80.dll related - quite rare after Viks fix now.
Other is Landscape.dll related - almost each time switching career maps, season related.
You can check what kind of error happens to you, opening msconfig in win start menu, and in tools tab opening event log.

About balloons, i think Trooper is right.

I have noticed the fast winching balloons, and thought "that can't be right!", but 10m/s which is almost 2000feet/m is very close to what I see in the sim.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that early in the war the balloons were hitched to a truck via a pulley and when enemy aircraft were spotted the truck drove off as fast as possible to haul the balloon down (although I might have read that in Biggles).

In the progress of war, the pull down got significantly faster, using strong motorwinches.
American pilots estimated the pulldown speed at 30mph.

Regarding the CTD, I haven't experienced it running ICE Win7 32 bit. All my flying so far has been offline (new at RoF, still learning), so I don't know if that has anything to do with it. You might want to give more details (i.e., OS, settings and circumstances at the time of the CTD) to see if anyone can spot a causal.

It would be cool to see an animation of the observers as it gets pulled down...perhaps something like this...

!!!

Thanks for that info Trooper.

I'm running Windows 7 64 bit and the crashes always happen during loading screens. I've never had the game crash on me during flight.

I decided on Win7 32 bit to give me a better chance at being able to run legacy sims, so I don't have experience with the 64 bit version. Still, I haven't experienced the CTD at any point, including the loading screens. Perhaps others running 64 bit Win7 could chime in and relate their experiences. Since I haven't tried multiplayer, could it be that your CTDs are when loading for online play? Just looking for clues as to what else might be different other than 32 or 64 bit OS.

I've got Win 7 Pro 64bit and rarely have any CTD with RoF. I don't fly online much, more of an issue with time and availability than any thing else, and mostly do single player and my experience with the game has been pretty darn good!

Ok, I did some more experimenting and the crashes seem to happen when I do a couple of career missions and then try to play a quick mission.