For those without P-51 film, I posted my zipped film (it's still 850K) at
http://dragon-isle.net/kwilhite/flight_sims/SE_Large.zip I did not tape the entire flight starting at launch, so it's not as bad as it could be.
The action starts at about the time we cross over from 11,10 to 11,11. As you'll see, RedStar had us turning all over the place to stay with the bombers, and not outrun them.
During the mission, a group of us in P-51's on RW together drifted back to fly behind the main group and the bombers. It was agreed that I would trail my wingman (I was winging for Tern) by 2K to follow and protect his six. As we dropped back I fell a little behind, but as I was looking directly at him he exploded in a ball of fire! We were confused and talking on RW, and he also typed on the open channel "what happened?" since there wasn't an enemy near him. The interesting thing is that when you watch the film, he doesn't explode, and his icon stays on film, even after you see his comments appear in the text buffer, and see me turning my plane to try and spot the enemy fighters shooting at us (boy, was I confused!).
Since it doesn't show my wingman exploding, and his icon stays on the film, possibly there are packets that tell the FE to do an explosion and not display the plane/icon that is still being smoothed/propagated by the FE, but are not properly handled by the film recorder? You will see Tern's comments appear in the text buffer, which were shortly after he exploded. You will also see other planes smoking and going down, some without obvious enemy icons attacking them ...
Please, no harsh comments on my poor performance.
I was a very confused rookie P-51 pilot, learning rudder pedals (DoA doesn't handle the USB pedals, so I have not used them much). Anyway, after the initial confusion, and hearing that the bombers were in trouble, I abandoned trying to go after bandits and was shot down heading back to the B-17s ...
