PART II: In the US 8th Army Airforces

Now imagine, if you will, that you’re a young teenager lieutenant in the 8th Army Air Corps. Our forces have pretty much cleared the Luftwaffe from the skies over Europe. Our role is to escort our heavies to knock out the Axis’ ability to conduct the war: to destroy their industrial capacities.

On the return leg, we are allowed to hit anything of military value: to fly interdiction, to search and destroy all targets of opportunity. Translation: knock out the support infrastructure, preventing the front lines from continuing the battle effort.

Me and my Mustang, note functional gauges. only.

Well, time is short. I really don’t want to fly the ingress all the way to the target area. So I can hit the CONTROL-n keys and place myself near the action area. Another method would be to speed up the real time clock of the sim (solo and campaign play only), but I have found that this is risky business. You can find your plane damaged by the enemy while in that accelerated mode. Use the accelerated time feature sparingly.

Note too that ALT-p is pause. This allows you to safely view the map with ALT-m and even look around both in and outside of your plane. While you can move around on the map with the mouse, you cannot zoom in on the map. I also stumbled on the fact that when you are setting up the solo mission parameters, you can use the map to click on an airstrip of your choice. This allows you to shorten your flight time also. As you can probably guess, I flew this interdiction mission in solo (single mission) mode.

Scoring big time on Hitler’s life lines.

OK, back to our story line. Here I am, cruising at low altitude in my brand new P51-D Pony armed with 2 bombs and 6 wing mounted 50 cal machine guns (400 rounds/gun on 2 inner pair, 270 rounds/gun on the one outer pair). Needless to say, this is a great all purpose guns platform. The only real draw back is that its 100 MPH slower than what the enemy has, and that the guns are notorious for jamming in high G load situations - due to the long gun belts.

Padlocking your ground target while in the padlock mode.

Tally Ho! There’s a supply train running at full steam. Look at her go with a full plume. Its carrying a fuel tank car, probably badly needed av-gas for the Luftwaffe. A quick check reveals no triple-A gun emplacement. This baby is gunna be like shooting ducks in a pond. The biggest threat will be the flying debris and the proper pull up timing. Let ‘er rip! Ka Bam! Scratch one Nazis choo-choo. Let’s go down for a look see.

The padlock allows me to lock onto ground targets. Used in conjunction with the virtual cockpit, you have a good system to keep situation awareness - and not auger or become captured. I have witnessed one of my wounded P47-C pilots get downed and survive, only to then see him surrounded and captured by ground forces. Very nice touch. I didn’t want to risk straffing them and hitting my unfortunate compatriot.

Click to continue . . .

And you thought going home was going to be a piece of cake?

What’s that? Fast moving Me109 bandits approaching? Dang it all. I didn’t even have time to use my eggs (bombs) yet. Well I’m not going to let this guy spoil my eggs. Let’s see what he is made of.

Just look at that beautiful 109! It will be a pitty to waste her. While the graphics of EAW are not up to the standards of Janes WW2 demo, nor MS-CFS, it is still D3D and Glide acceleratable.

The graphics have a grainy look to them, even a dated quality to them. But in its own way, its beautiful. It almost adds to the vintage nature of this sim. What is important is that the graphics are fast and smooth on the P2 333 with Voodoo2 that I used. All the cool special effects are there (save I never did hear that train or plane explode).

Note the falling away of the spent shells, and the trailing smoke from the firing guns. Release your bombs and you can hear them whistle on their way down. (you might have to use a different unused key, and un-map the default BUTTON2 choice for the secondary weapon release function in the CONTROLS setup GUI). When dogfighting, the fast flybys are awesome.

Wild pony with spent shells streaming and puffs of muzzle smoke.

What I have found in flying most of all the planes that the flight models are VERY good. In fact, try flying the Spit, and compare it to the other WW2 sims. (see Viking1’s Flight Model review). You can get yourself in trouble pronto if you don’t watch your AOA and speed. Departures are easy if you’re in the realistic mode.

Go to Part III