They had pistols though. The first aerial combat engagements were fought with pistols.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/first-aerial-combat-victory-180952933/
They would also carry a little basket of hand grenades sometimes, and toss them out of the airplane to fall on any troops they saw down below.
It was a fucking wild time lol. No radios, open cockpit, no artificial horizon. If you flew into a cloud you just lost your orientation and fell out of the sky and died. They just went up there.
Didn't you need like a fraction of training to become a pilot? Also imagine running into birds or bad weather, rain would probably feel like a soft top car at best
It also was the era where the pilots of some types of combat aircraft suffered more losses in training accidents than in actual combat. While they were fighting a world war.
Crazy Icarians, biting their thumb at the gods
I also like the bonkers phase between the "just take a gun with you" era and the synchronizing gears. Seems to have boiled down to three or four ideas:
We also had:
5. Stick it on top of the wing, firing roughly forwards and hope for the best (Nieuport Scouts)
6. Mount it on the side of the cockpit at a jaunty angle, shooting outwards diagonally away from the propellor, and attack the enemy diagonally, like you're a pawn on a chess board (Bristol Scout)
That does make a lot more sense than my brainfart of plane jousting...
Well, actually...
On September 7 [1914], Russian Pyotr Nesterov was the first pilot to destroy an enemy airplane, but he did it by ramming his Morane into an Austrian Albatros. Both air crews died as a result.
So the first kill was a type of Kamikaze? Surprisingly unchivalrous for what I’ve read about early military aviation.
I honestly feel like a videogame about two pilots flying complete shitbox aircraft from 1910 and trying to shoot each other down with handheld guns could be really fun. Make it so that the planes are barely powerful enough to stay aloft, never quite trimmed right, and constantly get rotated by the propeller torque. You should have to constantly deal with the plane being shit to keep it in the air, so that any time you spend aiming or reloading your gun is time the plane is risking stalling or losing altitude that will be difficult to regain. Maybe you can choose between a pistol that leaves you with one hand to keep the stick on course and a shotgun that does not. Play up the knightly jousting vibes by letting everyone paint their planes bright colours and having a soundtrack like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56gPx67GVXE
Even just an “early aviation” flight sim would be great. I recently went down a rabbit hole researching how US air mail worked in the 20s and 30s, before cockpit radios were really a thing. They constructed thousands of giant lighted beacon towers and concrete arrows on the ground to help pilots navigate.
something in between Kerbal space program and return to castle Wolfenstein.
a dude pedaling some kind of whirly gig bicycle aircraft chasing proto fascists floating uncontrollably in a balloon of their own design.
There were plans for a whole series of Kerbal games for boats and trains and planes.
All gone, like tears in rain.
This is obviously WW2 but if you want something of similar vintage and fairly realistic there is https://il2sturmovik.com/
Not quite early, but man am I feeling nostalgic now for "Jane's WW2 Fighters" on PC back in the late 90's. That game was awesome.
That sounds like hell on earth.
Doesn't sound too bad to me.
loved this game when i was a kid https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Baron_(1990_video_game)
Not quite the same but we've got red Baron: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Baron_II
Huh, it's weird looking at that category of "World War I flight simulation video games" at the bottom and seeing that they basically just stopped being made after the 90s ended
The decline of simulationist-oriented games after the 1990s has been a disaster for the human race
It's not an exact match, but that is reminiscent of the first Guns of Icarus. Sadly, it seems to have been delisted, but maybe this is a modernized version?
If you do look into it, don't go for Online. That one was no fun.
That looks fun! I do love airships regardless of how terrible they are at most things in real life.
Oddly enough I think the idea might have been on my mind because I've been playing Mechwarrior 5 recently. While the setting is, obviously, completely different, the controls actually work out somewhat similarly to what I'm imagining
I haven't played this version of the game, but in the original, you don't really directly control the ship. Instead, the ship has a destination and you (or a friend) run around operating stations of the ship, some defensive, some offensive, some just requiring maintenance.
Hope it fits your interests and that, if so, you have fun.
Now I want this too.
I bet this is doable in DCS. The game already has all the physics necessary, you just need to make a mod that makes you fire a pistol where you’re aiming.
Didn't they shoot at other with amall arms like rifles and pistols?
Not just that. they used to drop flechettes - iron needle non-exploding bombs - on people lol
[loads pistol with malicious intent]
Eagles! The eagles are coming!
And they're cousins, so this is gonna be really awkward at the next family dinner.
Reminds me of a novel of a rebellion in a poor country. The government actually had an "air force", consisting of two two-seater training planes and a small freight plane intended for the training of parachuters which did not exist.
They started to defend their country first by dropping hand grenades, and when they ran out of those, they used the freight plane to drop gravel from great heights onto the enemy troops.
That reminds me. Did anyone else play “Crimson Skies” on the XBox or whatever? That game was a blast.
Loved that game.
It’s on gamepass
If you play "Wings Over Flanders Fields", you can start early war, and fly the early unarmed two-seaters, and let your observer take pot shots with a rifle, whilst the enemy attempt similar. I think you can put it on autopilot and do the shooting yourself.
It's a bit of a shit to get it running in Linux, unfortunately, but it's possible.
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