Heya folks, been away for awhile and i just got a hold of version 3. Started a fresh campaign flying the DH4's for America and our first mission was a simple recon task with escort. Everything went well and we ran into no enemy craft and headed back to base, with home base in sight we started our descent to land when i head a pop. Looking around at my flight i didn't notice anything out of the ordinary until i looked up at the escort flight to witness one of the SPADs was smoking. Poor fellow tried going in for an emergency landing before his craft bursted into flames and plummeted 300ft to his demise into a field right outside the airbase. It was a sad thing to witness because we were basically home and it was a cake walk. Next mission i flew, we had just lifted then suddenly i see system failure, but nothing seemed out of place so i ignored and continued on. All of a sudden my engine started making clunking sounds and i peeled off to head to base, with thoughts of that poor SPAD which bursted into flames just yesterday. I landed safely and all was well, but where i am getting at is this. Is it normal for these craft to just suddenly burst into flames so frequently? 2 missions back-to-back and I've witnessed this and only seen this happen maybe once my entire time playing before version 3.

You've been lucky before, then! I am not certain, but it might be aircraft-dependent as well. Both in WOFF 1 and 2, I've had careers where I had back to back failures, and I can't think of any career where I flew more than a couple of missions that wasn't affected by failures. (Even more often, I've lost squadron members to failures).

I see, guess I've never noticed this before (except for once). I have seen engine failures occur in which the engine gives out forcing the pilot to land at a nearby base or field. But never turn so violently in which the plane is entirely engulfed in flames. Figured by 1917 the engines would be more reliable than those in 1915.

My SE5 in the DID campaign had system failures almost every other flight! the knowledgeable Mr. Wiggins informed me that it was due to the paint they used on the Hispano engines at the time. It would peel off and cause havoc with the engine. Seems they model the failure rates historically in WOFF. Awesome!

H

Yes WOFF models random failures, and those aircraft that had poor reliability are also worse than others in the sim.

Bad0pel, fly 100 missions then come back and say how often it happens. Random is random you can have 10 in a row then none for 10 years

Same with any oddity in WOFF you need to sample a lot more before calling something really.

Spad V.II's have poorer reliability than the general aircraft - gearing issues (maybe from the paint as Robert says?) same engine with problems as SE5, as do early SE5 and several others (cough Fokker EIV).