Oh man.

Every time I sit into a DH2 I tell myself: this time I'm not gonna spin. Start engine, lift off.

Few minutes circling around the aerodrome, taking some thousand feet. As I try to make a sharp turn, the plane lose its asset and in the best chance I get back flying somehow straight. In the worst chance it totally lose it and start spinning down.

Wait, not just in sharp turn. Even with a turn rate inferior to that of an Albatros DII (tested) I am not only unable to get off the german from my tail. I lose asset and I start spinning. If the german starts firing me and I close the turn tight, it spin. It's very frustrating.

I can only perform a downward split-S to evade, but not out-turn him. I cannot out-turn an albatross DII with a DH2? There must be a way to turn faster than that and not stall the plane.

I was thinking that my joystick setup sucks, it can be that. Only way I car turn down with a sharp angle is to point the nose slightly downward, and keep it down while turning. This way I can turn at a faster rate, but I lose so much feet that when I got the boche back in my sight it's way higher than me.

The lack of maneuvering tutorials hurts, also. I could use those from similar game, but won't cut it maybe because probably the flight models are not the same (?).

Bye, gonna try some more spinning.

Zifnow - welcome to the meat grinder. It's always painful when you wind up in an inferior aircraft and the enemy has every advantage. While the general rules are to always maintain both a speed and altitude advantage, that is under ideal conditions. As you are finding out, conditions are not always ideal when the enemy has a better plane.

I have found that I can extend my lifespan considerably by turning into my opponents as much as possible until their superior turn radius gets them almost within range of putting their guns on me. At that point I roll over and dive under them (to reduce the time their guns can get a bead on me) and then try to regain whatever little altitude I can while turning back into them again. Clearly this gets harder and harder to do the more opponents you have trying to get their sights on you, but I've come away from 6 to 1 odds on several occasions with at least my hide in tact if not with any kills to my name.

Feathering the throttle when making turns can also help considerably. If you reduce the rotary engine torque while trying to make a sharp turn, yes you lose some speed but the upside is an increased ability to maintain positive control of the aircraft, which ultimately affords you a smaller altitude loss than if you end up in a spin. It's a delicate balance to be sure.

WOFF does an outstanding job of modeling how utterly hopeless the war sometimes felt up there when both outmatched and out numbered (Bloody April sucks) and literally every mission is really just about survival until better planes arrive.

You can see in the campaign encounter below that while in my N28, I'm not able to out turn my Albatross antagonists, so I constantly turn into him (and soon, them) as much as possible, climbing for a little altitude when possible, taking shots of opportunity if they present themselves but flying almost purely defensively, which includes dumping altitude as needed to stay out of their biting gunfire. In typical WOFF fashion, everything starts off well enough - even getting a kill. Then everything goes to hell in a hand basket in a matter of minutes and it's 6 to 1 odds against superior aircraft.

Thanks Hellshade,

I just realized that the DH2 is not supposed to out-turn an Albatros DII. I was confident it could do that from MvR report about the encounter with Hawker.

It is wrong, the Albatros DII is superior in every aspect except probably the roll rate. Easy to blame the joystick eh ?

After all it was MvR gaining Hawker tail from behind and above not the opposite.

Looks like my "field experience" was the same as Hawker. Keep speed until you can to turn tight, and try to disengage. After you have no more vertical space available to do that, the Albatros will just shred you to pieces. That's gonna be a hard job to survive that campaign lol.

Chin up Zifnow! If Hawker wasn't in an older plane and behind enemy lines where he had to think of gas constraints, it's very possible the legend of the Red Baron wouldn't be what it is today because it might have ended with that fight.

That said, Hawker did put up a hell of a fight while in his spinning incinerator against an Ace. That means you've still got a fighting chance against the less experienced Albatross pilots. Just avoid anyone with a special paint job!

Yeah, but he was never able to bear his guns on him, except probably the initial pounce. Missed that opportunity, he was toasted with his DH2.

Richtofen cold blood was relevant I think. Yet he had to fire all his ammos to finally place a headshot.

Fate doesn't take skill in consideration.

Hello. A little OT, but just to help you guys out:

1. There was no initial bounce for Hawker. Some books—including Richthofen’s autobiography—have it that No. 24 Squadron attacked Jasta 2 but combat reports and personal reports from Saundby and Andrews confirm Jasta 2 attacked them, not the other way around. From all accounts, Hawker never fired a shot, although it’s often reported he did. But the only source for that is Richthofen himself, and he indicates there was no firing until after the turning portion of their battle, when he fired at Hawker as Hawker began to flee. So while we can’t be sure if Hawker fired any shots, we can be sure that because there is just a singular source for what happened, and that source never says Hawker fired, any report of Hawker firing is made up.

2. The truth behind Hawker’s demise is he lost situational awareness. He was intent on chasing nearby German two-seaters and never saw Jasta 2 diving down on No. 24, as Andrews did. Andrews even disengaged chasing the two-seaters because of the obvious danger but Hawker kept after them, so Andrews followed so as not to abandon Hawker. Thus, when Jasta 2 attacked, from that point on Hawker fought a defensive battle. He was just trying to get away. The round and round with Richthofen was not an attack on Hawker’s part, it was an evasion to lose MvR on his tail. He could have become offensive-minded during that portion but after it was obvious the stalemate wasn't being broken, all of Hawker’s subsequent loops and aerobatics weren’t part of an attack, they were an evasion. His fleeing for the lines was, of course, an evasion. Unfortunately for Hawker, he was up against the most or one of the most tenacious fighter pilots the Germans had, who kept chasing and firing at planes as long as they were still airborne--and sometimes afterwards.

3. MvR's Alb carried 1000 bullets, and bullets are carried to be fired. It didn't matter if the first bullet or the thousandth bullet hit Hawker because at the end of the day, he was just as dead.

Probably a true story there, sir.

So I fired up some QCs in a DH2 (late) vs a single Alb DII with Ace skill and, while I'm not saying it's easy, it is possible to survive with a high chance of success if you don't make any mistakes. Turns out there's a sweet spot where you can turn at almost exactly the same rate as the DII and keep out of the reach of his guns. It's an incredibly delicate balancing act of not turning to wide where he can bring his guns to bear on you and not turning too sharp, where the DH2's desire to spin rapidly comes into play. By walking that fine line as long as possible and focusing pretty much 100% on staying out of his gun sights, his fatigue will eventually set in and he will head for home. That is when if you are a good shot and in the right position, you can bring your guns to bear on him and get the kill.

It's not super exciting to watch (especially the first long turn) but it might be worth watching to see the tactics right down to the end.

'Not called "The Spinning Incinerator" for nothing. It was a 'clutching-at-straws' solution to the Fokker Eindecker. Those super-thin airfoils had vicious stall characteristics. In the DH-2, airspeed is everything. Back in 2005 (or thereabouts) when OFF P3 came out, I was doing some 3D modeling and I had made a DH-2 that I was very pleased with. One of the reasons I glommed onto P3 was the opportunity to fly a real(virtual) DH-2. When my OFF P3 disc arrived, I fired up the DH-2 and had an afternoon of frustration and heartbreak. Stall, stall again, stall again. At last I tried some others. They were nearly as bad and I concluded that this game just wasn't going to be much fun at all. It wasn't until I'd been hanging out on the OFF Forum for a while that I learned that prior to 1918, just about anything flying was hideously under-powered and out to kill you. Most planes were more dangerous than the enemy. Even when better engines came along. 50% of pilots who died in Sopwith Camels died in flight school.

One of us around here (it may have been Olham) said that the best way to dogfight in a DH-2 was to keep circling. In the first half of the circle, put it into a shallow dive and build up speed. Then pull up and convert that energy back into altitude. That way, you're keeping your energy up without sacrificing too much altitude.