Please forgive my 'newbie" question..... I am not an expert flight sim player, but I know the basic concepts and the general historic abilities of the planes I fly in the sims.
Perhaps someone can tell me how to dive in a Fokker DR1 without shedding its wings. I realize that these WWI aircraft are not as solidly built as a metal WWII aircraft, but I cannot dive my triplane in WOFF without the fabric skins starting to come off. And once they start to come off, it continually gets worse by the minute while doing any kind of maneuver (unless you only fly straight and level from that point on), until wooden sections of wings start to depart.
Now I know that diving in a DR1 should be possible, as I see other DR1's (piloted by AI) diving in a rapid 70 degree downward dive to attack an observation balloon, and they suffer no ill effects. But even if I try to make my dive more shallow, and cut my throttle down to zero, my speed still quickly goes to 250, and I have to pull up before I suffer damage.
If I see an enemy several hundred meters below me, the only thing that I have found to get down to their altitude is to go into a series of tight 360 degree turns with a downward tilt, so that I do a corkscrew spiral losing altitude as I go. The tight turning bleeds off speed, obviously, but this maneuver takes more time than I'd like, so I'm wondering: is there another maneuver, method, or tactic that I could use to attack an enemy below me?