[NonWonderDog]

Good Job on the the gunsights ! they look alot better . I do have a question that maybe you or someone can help me with . On the early 109's ( E-1 thru E-4 ) and Me-110 C , they used the Revi 3 D gunsight
for reference the Ta-183 uses this sight in game , is there a way to copy this gunsight to the 109's / 110's ?


Thanks in advance
Bolt

I was under the impression that the Revi 3c/3d gunsights (the only difference was the voltage) had been largely phased out by 1940, and that Revi C/12C and C/12D gunsights were fitted to Bf 110Cs and Bf 109Es during the Battle of Britain. I could be wrong about that.

In any case, the gunsight in the Ta-183 is an Askania EZ-42. It's supposed to be a gyro gunsight, but the functionality was never implemented by Oleg's team. There's a mod on AAA that makes it work like the K-14, although that's not quite right either--the real thing had a single reticle masked by an adjustable aperture, with the back of the aperture cleverly mirrored to project the ring. I haven't worked out the scripting and vertex animations I need to make it work yet, but it's on the list.

The only Revi 3c/3d in the game is the horrible model in the B-239. It doesn't look anything like the real gunsight, but that's what it's supposed to be. I've replaced it with the gunsight from the J8A, for now. The one in the Swedish Gladiator looks like a Revi 3a/3b, although I don't know why the backup sight ring is so tiny (it's supposed to be 445 mm in diameter). The Japanese Zeros use the type 98 gunsight, which is a nearly 1:1 copy of the German Revi 2b. The Revi 2b and Revi 3b are extremely similar; I have no idea what the internal differences are.

I plan to take the type 98 model and make a Revi 3d out of it, but it's a very low priority right now. I won't do it until I remodel the US gunsights, and I don't plan on doing that for a while either.


If you just want the reticle, J8A/reticle.tga and J8A/reticle_glow.tga are the right scale. You'll have to paste them in the middle of 1024x1024 targas for them to show up the right size in the Bf-109, however. The Bf 110C shares its cockpit with the Bf 110G, so you can't just copy files for that one.

[Luke5skywalker4]

These are definitely excellent. Will you also be adding other nations, like Japanese, Russian, etc. ?

[Slikk]

+1 for the Russian ones. They really need a makeover.

Slikk

[Dudok22]

yes russians would be cool! and italians too

[VT-51_Razor]

NonWonderDog, thanks for all your great work here. As a dedicated Turkey driver, I especially appreciate the new F2A cockpit for the TBF/TBM. I am curious though, why the canopy doesn't open. When the first AAA mods came out, and the Turkey had an SBD-5 cockpit, the canopy did open. Then, when they changed it to the B-239, you would still get the "canopy open" message on the screen, but it obviously didn't work. Then somewhere along the line, that stopped coming up when pressing the canopy key (I do it out of habit I guess). I just assumed that, once a cockpit that normally has a functioning canopy was put into the Turkey, the canopy would again be usable.

Regardless, it's just great to see a US Navy cockpit again. Thank you very much!!

EDIT: Never mind, I found out where the problem is :oops:

[VC-81_BOLTER]

I love your mod and I understand the work involved making them so many kudos! I was wondering if you could offer some help with a problem I am having. I seem to be missing the folder NWD_Reticles in my MOD directory. I may be wrong on the naming convention but reading through the thread I saw reference made to a folder named so. The mod worked fine for quite a while but suddenly one day stopped working for me. I now have no gun sights at all!

I played around with things and have managed to get some of the sights back but at the cost of loosing the TBM cockpit. I downloaded and reinstalled the mod to no avail. With the mod totally disabled I still have no gun sight and with the version switcher set to 4.08 with no mods enabled at all I again have no gun sights.

I keep a complete copy of my game folder as a back up for this kind of contingency but I would rather solve the issue. Is there a specific file or folder I could copy over from my back up folder which would replace the gun sights?

[nuk3m]

the UI1.2 has just released, and m just wondering if it will work wih the UI1.2[/code]

[-)-MAILMAN-]

The F4U-1 & Corsair Mk I used a Mk 8 gun sight.

I have a quote from 1st Lt. Kenneth Ambrose Walsh, USMC, VMF-124, Guadalcanal. He became the first Corsair ace. He arrived at Guadalcanal in February 1943 and flew F4U-1 Corsair "white 13".

"When we were accustomed to the area, and knew our capabilities, there were instances when the Zero was little more than a victim. I came to know the Zero, and I learned how to attack it. Being in my seventh consecutive year of front line flying , I knew how to fire the guns and how to use our Mk 8 gunsight. The guns were bore sighted to 1000 feet.. The electric sight had rings covering so many mils. 1000 ft equaling one mil. If the Zero covered 40 mils, you knew he was 1000 ft away."

HSFX has taken your mod and included it as part of the the Hsfx history mod in HSFX 4.1 which puts a Mk8 sight in the F4F-3 Wildcat and the N3 sight in the F4U-1 and Corsair MkI. There is no way to isolate this mod to deactivate it. Someone created a mod for default reticals to be placed in the JSGME mods folder. When activated it is supposed to replace your mod with the default game reticals. So far this has not worked for me. I have been forced to create a mod for the default gunsight for each individual cockpit (F4F-3, F4F-4, F6F-3, F6F-5, F4U-1A) to get the default reticals back. The problem is I have searched and searched the .sfs files and the hsfx.sfs files and I cannot find the 3DO/Cockpit/F4U-1 or CorsairMkI or F4UCORSAIR1 file like I did for all of the other Corsairs and USN aircraft. Could you please tell me where you found the cockpit file for this aircraft so I can extract the .mat, .tga, .mask files to put the default Mk 8 sight back into the F4U-1.

I know you put a lot of hard work into your mod, but it just isn't for me. I use 6DOF and I have to constantly recenter the TrackIr 4 to be able to see the close range (100 Mil) ring which makes it like I am zoomed in and reduces my FOV. Unfortunately it is embedded in the Hsfx history mod and if deactivated you can only fly the stock game.

[New Kle Ahr]

Hey NonWonderDog,

installed your mod using UP2.1 but now the ReVi moved to the left and got turned. This only happens with the two '44 Doras, any idea?



The reticle is nice, btw.

[New Kle Ahr]

No one???

[-)-MAILMAN-]

For what it is worth I just did an experiment comparing the Default MkVIII USN gun sight reticle and the NoWonderdog MkVIII USN gun sight reticle embedded into the History Mod of HSFX.

Here is a quote from 1st Lt. Kenneth Ambrose Walsh of VMF-124 at Guadalcanal which at the time in February 1943 was flying F4U-1 Corsair which used the MkVIII gun sight.
"Being in my seventh consecutive year of frontline flying, I knew how to fire the guns and how to use our Mk 8 gunsight. The guns were boresighted to 1000 ft. The electric sight had rings covering so many mils, 1000 ft equaling one mil. If the Zero covered 40 mils, you knew he was 1000 ft away."

Here is a quote from Lt. Cdr. Roger R. Hedrick, XO of VF-17 which at the time in November 1943 was flying F4U-1A Corsair which used the MkVIII gun sight.
"We had our guns boresighted to 900 ft - at that point the wingspan of the Zero filled the 50 mm ring of our gun sight."

I went into the Quick Mission Builder and selected the Pacific Islands map. I chose the F4U-1A for my plane and I chose an A6M2-21 (12.0 m or 39.37 feet wing span) as a friendly flight so I could fly behind it without the AI pilot trying to evade me. With each version of the gun sight I closed to a range where the wing tips of the zero touched the edges of the inner ring (50mil diameter) and paused the game. I had the range icons turned on and this is the results I got.

NoWonderdog MkVIII Gun Sight:
Range when Zero wing tips touched the 50 mil ring: .12 - .14 km = 120 - 140 meters/393.70079 - 459.31759 feet

Default MkVIII Gun sight:
Range when Zero wing tips touched the 50 mil ring: .27 km = 274.32 meters / 900 feet /300 yards

My convergence for MG is set for 274.32 meters since I mostly fly US aircraft with wing mounted .50 caliber mg. Using the Default / Stock MkVIII gun sight puts me at the convergence point of my guns when the Zero wing tips touch the 50 mil ring.

NoWonderdog's gun sights are brighter and much cleaner than those that came stock with the game, but does not appear as accurate. I don't know what criteria Nowonderdog used to make the size of his USN gun sights especially the MkVIII. Maybe he tried to scale it to the size of the gun sight housing or the reflector glass in the cockpit or maybe he made it so the 50 mil ring matched his choice of mg convergence I don't know. What I do know is that the stock MkVIII sight accurately reflects the range of the Zero when its wing tips touch the 50 mil ring as being 900 feet.

Additionally NoWonderdog's USN gun sights put a MkVIII in the F4F-3 instead of the N3 gun sight and puts the N3 gun sight into both the F4U-1 and Corsair MkI instead of the MkVIII gun sight.

I hope that in the next version of HSFX that either the creators take this into account and make NoWonderdog's USN Gun Sights an optional mod instead of making it part of the History Mod or put the default gun sights as a mod in the generic mod enabler so we can decide which we want to use. Ideally it would be great to have the brightness and clarity of Nowonderdog's USN gunsights, but the accuracy of the default/stock USN gunsights.

There is a defualt mod that is available, but if you choose this you do not get a gun sight if you choose the P-400, P-39D-1, P-39D-2, P-39N-1, P-39Q-1 and P-39Q-10.

-)-MAILMAN-

[kumpel]

I have repeated your procedure for a few aircraft, and my conclusion is that NoWonderdog must have used a wrong assumption for his work in relation to the ring size of gunsights. His rings appear to be twice the size they should be.
It seemed to be a practice of the USAAF to refer to the ring radius in their manuals (eg. Aircrewman's Gunnery Manual), yet as your first quoted comment indicates, the pilot's practice was to use the diameter as a measure of field coverage. The latter is only natural as one would not use half target to match the ring radius. There are numerous references to ring diameter, rather than radius, in various descriptions of gunsights and their use.
The USAAF must have changed their approach at some stage, as the navy/ground attack reticle from SDB-5, marked "100 mils" must refer to the diameter. It has two rings 100 and 50 mils and an additional vertical scale in steps of 10 mils (20 mil steps would have been quite useless for a gunner).
From what I managed to find out, the MkVIII gunsight used 70 mil diameter ring (with gaps), while K-14 gunsight used 70 mil fixed ring, with the gyro marks worked on the basis of 50 mil diameter convergence.

[kumpel]

Small addition to my previous post. If you want to check the accuracy of your reticles, here is a simple tool to help:
http://www.filefront.com/17212066/Reticle_cal.zip
To use it you have to add the included mesh in your aircraft hier.him file (as per provided example).
It places a 30m x 30m square in front of your aircraft at a distance of 300m. The pattern represents squares of 100 mil, 70 mil and 50 mil, as per definition of this unit of angle.
The pattern is oriented correctly for P-47 and offset vertically up by 0.9, what is more or less a typical viewpoint location in an aircraft.
If you see it on a side rather than in front, it needs to be rotated by manipulating the orientation matrix parameters.

[NonWonderDog]

This is annoying. I just found the new site, and everything here is wrong.

I scaled the reticles using the cockpit measurements and some simple trigonometry, not by choosing my favorite conversion range and eyeballing it. All the reticles should be correctly scaled (within 1-2%, at least) for "gunsight view." Since they're not actually projected at infinity they will change size a bit as you move forward and backward, but the stock game had this problem too. There's also a bit of a question of how to measure the radius -- I think the army measured to the inside of the ring while the navy measured to the outside of the ring, or something like that. Maybe it was the other way around, but it was all within the (considerable) margin of error.

In any case, the navy reticle is absolutely correctly scaled. As said, the ladder marks 10 mil increments. There are five marks per ring radius, giving us a ring radius of 50 mils. This is verified by gunsight manuals, gunnery manuals, plane manuals, photos looking through the gunsights, absolutely everything you can think of. The default reticle was too small. A lot of this mod is guesswork, but this I'm absolutely sure of.

I've actually never seen diameter used in a period source for WWII gunsights, army or navy. In modern stuff the word diameter is often said by a pilot or inserted by an editor, but I can't find it in anything actually from the war. All the period training manuals tell you to use the radius to measure distances. They even abbreviate it as "rad." They tell you to measure lead in rads. They give you tables for distances of various planes in rads. When your quote says "the wingspan of the Zero filled the 50 mil ring of our gun sight," he's saying that it filled the 50 mil radius from pipper to ring (or he's forgotten in the intervening 50 years; I give pilot quotes about small technical details exactly zero merit).


The sights on the bomber defensive guns are definitely wrong in this mod, though. I didn't have a source, so I just threw in some 50 mil sights. It turns out that all defensive guns are based on 35 mil rings (with additional 70 and 105 mil rings for some sights) instead. I'd found manuals with all the data and sight pictures, but I never got around to fixing them. Since I never reinstalled IL-2 after my OS upgrade, they're not likely to get done. The army MkVIII on the P-47 might have the wrong reticle, too; I don't think I ever found a source.

As for me changing gunsights, I just matched the reticle to the 3d model of the sight. If the British Corsair had an N-3 installed, I gave it an N-3 reticle. I had planned to change a couple of these, but oh well.

[kumpel]

If, for example, your 100 mils ring matches a 100 mils target (irrespectively of its distance) - radius or diameter - then your reticles are of the correct size. They were actually designed for eyeballing application, so this should be the ultimate test.

This is one of the manuals:
http://www.mediafire.com/?yzjwn3mjdne
which explicitly describes when a radius was used (target speed estimation) and when a diameter was used (target distance).

Concerning the navy reticle, if the large ring was 200 mils in diameter, it could have been seen as about 90-100 mm circle from a typical viewing distance of 450-500 mm. The Mk. 8 gunsight had a glass about 95 mm wide (3-3/4" x 5-1/8" x 1/4"), such large reticle would never be visible in its entirety. To see the entire reticle, 300 mils wide end to end, one needs to get as close as 280 mm to the gunsight. Also, if the "100 MILS" writing referred to the radius, it would be more logical to place it on one side of the center line rather than in the middle and above the 200 mil circle. Still, the sight could have been designed that way.

Do you actually have any explicit reference to the ladder marks being spaced 10 mils, or ring radii being 50/100 mils?
It would be nice to get hold of some of them, just to avoid any confusion in the future.