#horton ho 229

[deutschland-im-krieg]

Horton Ho 229 V3, captured and shipped back to the States. This is the one and only time it was assembled. When captured in Germany it was incomplete, the fuselage/centre section was many miles away from the outer wing panels when discovered by US troops. The Ho 229 was the only jet powered flying wing that actually flew during the war.

The second prototype, V2, was destroyed and the pilot killed on its second powered flight. This is the third prototype and was taken to America under Operation Paperclip. It was the world's first stealth aircraft, although its stealth capabilities were only discovered after computer modelling in the 21st century. For more, see my Facebook group - Eagles Of The Reich

[thedalekstumble]

Ho-229 Commission for Sovietrainbow! Learned a lot and got to experiment with different ways of approaching a workflow to producing a model! Also a bit of post processing lol

[usafphantom2]

The Horten Ho 229, late WW2 German prototype fighter/bomber. First flying wing powered by a jet engine. First to incorporate stealth technology.

@ron_eisele via X

[commodorebuzzkill]

Let's do a Game Review because why not?

So, anybody remember Blazing Angels? It was made by Ubisoft in 2006, and featured World War 2, planes, explosions and shockingly bad and frequent racist voice acting. It was made at a time when Ubisoft noticed that Bandai Namco were reliably churning out 1 Ace Combat game per year and making good money doing it, so they said "we need some airplane games like those people." So they set themselves up with a studio in Romania that would have the job of making Ace Combat competitors. Ubisoft Bucharest turned out a total of 4 games (Blazing Angels, Blazing Angels 2, Tom Clancy's Hawx, and Tom Clancy's Hawx 2) before roughly 2010 when Ubisoft as a whole decided to give up on competing with Ace Combat, as Ace Combat wasn't earning a huge amount of money anyway. Ubisoft Bucharest was then closed, and Ubisoft has yet to make any arcade air combat games since then. That being said, I still enjoy playing it from time to time, because I can make things go boom in an exuberant manner, and shoot down hoards of axis planes.

I first played it in 2008 when I got my first console , and my memories on the whole were and are largely positive in spite of the game's failings. My friends and I would whither away hours playing the various co-op modes, particularly onslaught, which is essentially a competitive hoard mode, pitting the players against an endless supply of enemy aircraft for a set period of time to see who could rack up the most kills for the fewest losses. Insanity can ensue if you set the time limit to 30 minutes and select the Spitfire IX, which is stupidly overpowered, and come out the other end having shot down 331 enemy aircraft, and being able to gloat over your less experienced buddies who don't have their own copies of Blazing Angels to build up their skills.

At the time, I remember the back of the game's case showing an advertisement for Blazing Angels 2: Secret Missions of World War 2, complete with cover art depicting a de Havilland Vampire being pursued by a Horton Ho 229, and I thought to myself "looks neat, might get that some day."

High School came and went and I never played the sequel. Time passed, and now the tired 30 year old shell of the young, spry, and charismatic young man decided to buy himself a copy on a whim one day.

So, having heard Japanese pilots saying "You shoot even worse than you fly!" in the voice a 1950s cartoon would have given to any character from Asia a good ten billion times, you are probably wondering: Did they fix the shitty voice acting?

Yes they did. It's not Witcher 3 or anything but you don't want to grab a pencil and forcefully puncture your own ear drums. Baddies generally speak German or Japanese in a manner that seems comparable to, you know, real human speech, rather than say, your racist uncle doing baddy character voices while reading a bedtime story about how the badass Americans blew the squinty eyed Japs to Kingdom Come for being the evil, treacherous bastards they are. So Hooray!

Also, the graphics have gotten an upgrade and generally look cleaner, brighter, and better textured than those of the first game, and just to put a cherry on top, the game has a fun, campy story with a reasonably entertaining cast of characters, even if it does jump the shark from time to time.

Gameplay sees a bunch of updates as well. First off, the player can choose from a selection of aircraft for each level of the single player campaign, a feature that the first game lacks. Second off, through getting kills and completing objectives during each level, the player earns points which can be used to purchase upgrades for the next level, improving the firepower, protection, and speed of all their planes.

So, improvements all around! Go buy the game and have fun right?

Wrong.

This game is perpetually frustrating, though you will keep returning to it like some abused lover seeing the promise the game has. You think to yourself "Well, next level will be better!" over and over and over again. So, where to begin with the game's failings.

Let's suppose you're in a dogfight, and you have a mission objective of, I don't know, escorting your buddies as they escape from a secret Nazi air base. You have to shoot down enemy planes, so, using your understanding of literally every other arcade air combat game you have ever played, you open fire with your machine guns.

Hah, rookie mistake. In Blazing Angels 2, your primary weapon generally sucks. You generally have to chew on enemies for a while to kill them using just your machine guns, and oh, by the way, literally every single plane in the game has the same crappy machine guns as its primary weapon. Instead of having the fun diversity of firepower present in the aircraft of the first game, planes will have 2 or 4 light or heavy machine guns, pretty much never corresponding to the total number of guns on the real aircraft they represent. Flying a Spitfire mark V? 2 machine guns. Flying a Mosquito? 4 machine guns. An IL-2 Sturmovick? 2 heavy machine guns. An Me-262? 2 heavy machine guns. A Lavochkin La-7? 4 machine guns which are wing-mounted for some reason. The major difference between heavy and light MGs, in case your wondering, is that yes, heavy MGs do put out more damage, but overheat after extended firing. And the damage output is still nowhere near as high as that of the hard hitting planes of the first game.

Really, the weapons you have that are worth a damn are pretty much always your secondary armament. Many varieties of secondary weapons are present, such as cannon, high velocity cannon, rockets, missiles, bombs and torpedoes. All of these have limited ammo, which can be replenished by killing enemies with ammunition icons above them. These guys are really what your normal guns are for, getting more ammo for your secondary weapon.

This is very irritating, because whenever you think of a World War 2 dogfight, even in a campy story involving Nazi rocket ships, planes are shooting each other down by rata-tat-tating away at each other with gunfire, not firing anti-tank rockets, or bizarrely slow firing cannon. It just feels "wrong".

The game's control scheme is more or less the same as it was in the first game, but either my skills have degraded to total uselessness, or they've made aiming just a little bit more difficult. And I would like to call attention to the overall weirdness of the Blazing Angels control scheme in general.

In most air combat arcade games that use a controller, there will be 2 option for your controls. In what is often referred to as the "classic" or "arcade" control scheme, 1 control stick will control practically all motion for the plane, and rolling and turning will be rolled into one. Move the analogue stick to the right, and the plane will roll 90 degrees and then turn to the right, and vice versa. In what is often called the "advanced" or "expert" control scheme, the controls more closely correspond to those of a real plane, with separate yaw, roll, and pitch controls.

For whatever reason, both Blazing Angels games try to have both control schemes at the same time. On the Xbox 360 (I don't have a playstation) the left analogue stick behaves like it would in an "arcade" layout, moving the plane up, down, left, and right, but the plane still has roll control from the right analogue stick. If you've been playing Ace Combat 7, or Project Wingman, or IL-2 Sturmovick Birds of Prey (a fantastic and criminally underrated console air combat game btw), you easily forget what kind of control scheme the game has, and you'll have a lot of trouble orienting your plane. It will also result in weirdness like your plane turning very tightly without rolling at all.

Lastly, there's the single player campaign. I haven't played multi-player, given that I have no-one to play it with, and frankly, I don't enjoy the game enough right now to want to play it with someone else. If I could describe the difficulty curve in this game in one word, it would be "punishing", then again you can take my words with a grain of salt because as I said before, I may just suck. That being said, the game gives a couple levels in which you can orient yourself, then immediately flings you into the deep end. The difficulty curve feels quite steep, because most of the time you are fighting against either a punishingly short time limit or defending a target that needs protection and has a very short life expectancy. When that isn't the objective, the new objective is frequently: suppress the defenses of an enemy airfield, land there, abandon the plane you started with for an enemy plane, and then use that plane to complete the next objective. Often times, the plane that you start out with on missions that follow this pattern frequently would have achieved objective #2 just fine, but the game wants to stick you in a JU-88 or a Kyushu J-7W Shinden so just shut up and accept that you only got 3 minutes to fly the Pe-2 or De Havilland Mosquito, just say goodbye to them. Another odd feature, and one that kind of bothers me to be honest is that I would say a majority of the missions in the campaign feature the player flying a captured axis plane by default, and often for no given reason. For example... you have to defend San Fransisco from a combined Nazi-Japanese submarine attack using V-1s and submarine launched MXY-7 Okka suicide planes using an Me-163 Komet rocket fighter which just so happens to have guided air to air missiles. Hang on a minute, a level that involves what now? If you have a story about some pilots carrying out secret missions in remote areas to stop some strange secret weapon from being used or constructed and then say, destroying the paperwork afterword to keep anyone from knowing these missions ever happened, that's one thing, but if there was a giant aerial assault on fucking San Fransisco in broad fucking daylight in front of like 2 million people, I'm pretty sure it would be hard to hide something like that. Isn't that stretching plausibility a little too far? Or did World War 2 look very different in this world?

Some games give you challenge with each level, but leave you wanting more as your skills improve, enticing you with their plot, or giving your work payoff at the end of each level. Others just seem to hit you with a sledgehammer, and you only persevere out a grim determination not to be beaten. This is one of those.

Also, I've noticed its getting difficult to get your hands on original Xbox-360 controllers nowadays, so I find myself shackled to a knockoff which has the most irritating habit of switching itself off if below 3/4ths battery, and subjected to heavy vibration. Another odd feature of the Blazing Angels games is that their level of controller vibration is unusually high. Like, vagina havers could use the controller as an effective sex toy while playing either of these games, and I suppose if you are a determined enough deal hunter, buying a used Xbox 360, controller and copy of Blazing Angels might just be cheaper than a hitachi vibrator, although the hitachi admittedly doesn't use batteries, and either Blazing Angels games will eat the battery of your controller like a motherfucker.

So, if you want a plane game that turns your controller into a sex toy, I suppose you can buy Blazing Angels 2. Otherwise, I wouldn't really recommend it.

[vizrecon]

[itsmajork]

So, tonight I’ve been doing something I’ve wanted to for a long time, and redrawing some characters I was working on for a fanfic years and years ago (and 3d comic before that) called Transformers: 1942.  Basic idea is fairly simple - Transformers wake up in 1942 instead of 1984, in the middle of WW2.  Decepticons side with the Axis powers, while the Autobots side with the Allies.

I’ve had the idea of revisiting the characters for a long time.  I have gone and done several takes over the years, but Skywarp was never one I came back to.  All of the Decepticon jets were rendered as air vehicles I found on the Luftwaffe 1942 site, which were in-development vehicles at the end of the war by the Luftwaffe.  Skywarp was a Horton Ho 229, Thundercracker as I recall had a giant prop in the centre of his fuselage, and Starscream was an Aredo E.555 flying wing bomber.  Skywarp had some funky stuff going on with her head, as can be seen in the colour picture - she looked more like the classic Cybercontroller from Tomb of the Cybermen rather than anything.  Now, I’ve taken inspiration from Nagatoro.

Completely not finished yet.  Transformation might not work out this way, but it gives me something to start playing with.  I want to come back and do some more characters and scenes, but... maybe I should, with a bit of history, as a memory aid.

[absolutelyrandom-blog1]

This game never ceases to amaze me

[peashooter85]

I don't suppose you could add the names of the german super weapons so I could read up on them further?

From top to bottom in order

Me-262

ZG 1229 Vampir 

V1 missile

V2 rocket

Horton Ho-229

Me-163 Komet

Fritz X radio guided bomb

BV-40 glider fighter

Maus

Landkreutzer P.1000 Ratte

Schwerer Gustav

German atom bomb project

Taifun coal dust gun

Triebflugel

Heliobeam

Die Glocke

[mrcoreymonroe]

Plane Facts: Bombers

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First bombing: 1911, just eight years after the first flight by the Wrights Place: Libya (Italo-Turkish War) Payload: specially designed steel bombs containing picric acid. Casualties: Zero First purpose-built bombers: 1913, Bristol T.B. 8 (British) and the Caproni Ca. 30 (Italian) First use in war: November 25, 1914. Maximum Payload: 120 pounds First strategic bombing: WWI, city of Antwerp, Belgium. Other WWI bombers: 1915, Zeppelins, which dropped bombs on towns near London Deaths from these attacks: 557 Max payload: approximately 8,000 pounds Loss rate for Zeppelins: 40 percent Casualties from bombing in WWII: As many as 5 million on all sides Most produced bomber WWII and of all time: Consolidated B-24 Liberator, 18,482 built Top speed: 290 mph Number of airworthy B-24s remaining worldwide: 2 Most famous WWII Allied Bomber: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, 12,731 produced Top speed: 287 mph Bomb payload: 4,500 pounds (long range) to 8,000 pounds (short range) Most produced Axis bomber: Junkers Ju-88 light multi-role bomber First Jet Bomber: German Arado Ar 234 Blitz Number produced: 234 Top speed: 461 mph Biggest payload WWII bomber: Boeing B-29 Superfortress, 20,000 pounds Most famous B-29: Enola Gay Most famous mission: Dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, August 6, 1945 Power of that bomb: 16 kilotons of TNT Atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Power of the Nagasaki bomb: 23 kilotons Deaths from the two bombings: approximately 250,000. Largest piston engine bomber ever: Convair B-36 “Peacemaker” Wingspan: 230 feet (Boeing 747 span, 196 feet) B-36 Number of engines: six Pratt & Whitney Wasp Major, 28 cylinders, 3800 hp each Later B-36 modification: Added jet engines. Top speed: 435 mph First US intercontinental all-jet bomber: Boeing B-52, 1955 Top Speed: 650 mph Propulsion: 8 Pratt & Whitney TF33 turbofans, 17,000 lbs thrust each Range: Up to 10,000 miles unrefueled. First stealth bomber: Horton Ho 229 jet-engine powered flying wing, 1944 Current stealthy heavy bombers: Northrup Grumman B-2 Spirit Top speed: Mach .95 Ordinance payload: 40,000 pounds (30,000 pounds less than the B-52) First sortie: Kosovo, 1999 Declared operational: 2003 Cost per unit: Approximately $1.5 billion Number lost in combat: zero Lost at home: one, in Guam after computer malfunction Fatalities: None. Crew ejected safely.

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