So who all out there shot "me" down on Saturday afternoon? I bet you didn't know you were actually flying against ...
Well, let me set the stage.
On Friday morning at the AW Con, I'm sitting at my computer in a mostly empty con room at 10:00 am, pretty hung over and in a bad mood.
Jordi, the AW Con organizer is talking to a guy that just walked in and says "Hey Bob, what handle do you want on your name tag?" This guys answers "Mouse will be ok".
Now, the names "Bob" and "Mouse" aren't familiar to me. But something keeps tickling my brain. Hmmmmmm.....
All of a sudden it hits me like a ton o bricks.
Its Robert Shaw !!!! The guy that wrote "Fighter Combat, Tactics and Manuvering". The fighter pilots bible.
To make a long story short, I start to talk to him and he's a great guy. Real easy to talk too. I end up having lunch with him that day, and talk alot of "fighter stuff" over the next 3 days with him. In one of our talks, we are talking about all the different sims on the market and AH comes up. I mention that I play it, and he says he flew the beta offline, was impressed, but hadn't tried it lately. So I offer to let him fly my account and see what he thinks.
So Saturday morning we fire up AH on my machine (in a room with 120 other computers running AW) and he starts to get a feel of my controls, and the game offline. In about 5 minutes he was flying better landing patterns than I can.
First sortie out, I put him in a Zero at a field that has a low fight over it. But by the time he gets to the fight its over. So he flys around trying to figure out what all the buttons on my CH stick and throttle do (
thats about 7 4 way or 8 way hats, and 15-20 buttons) Needless to say he wasn't paying attention and I wasn't either, when a P47 zooms out of the stratosphere and blows him up (oops my fault was showing him how to check the map). Mx22 scores a kill.
Second sortie out, Bob being the typical fighter pilot wants revenge real bad. So he takes up a P51 (by now we have drawn quite a crowd). I hadn't eaten breakfast, so I leave him to fly a little and come back to find out that he scored a B26 kill, and shot up a Spitfire (smoked it) before getting dumped in a typcial convention network dump when someone tripped over a extension cord that supplies power to a network hub. No kidding.
Third Sortie, I convince him to try out the Yak-9U. By now he's just getting a very basic understanding of how I have my controls setup, but he's flying VERY well. He gets a kill on a N1K2 (perfect planform cockpit shot, one short burst, one kill) and then tangles with a 190A5 for what seemed like forever. Beautiful fight to sit back and watch. It ends up in rolling scissors on the deck with about five cutbacks by both pilots, when he losses sight of the 190 because he hits the wrong hat switch on my stick. RAM scores a kill.
So here is a guy that has a total of about 45 minutes of stick time in the game total, flys 3 sorties, gets two kills, and then just barely gets killed by a pilot that must have over 300 hours in the AH 190.
And to top it off, he was embarassed about how "bad" he flew.
In fact I was talking to RAM on private after that, about how good the fight was, and I was about to tell RAM who he was flying against, when Bob said "don't tell him it was me, just tell him it was a friend of yours".
Jeez
I would hate to see how "bad" he was after a few hundred hours in a favorite plane. A real natural.
So if you ever get a chance to talk to Robert "Mouse" Shaw, don't pass up the opportunity. He's a great guy.
Of course after that, I had to let a bunch of other people fly AH on my machine for most of the rest of the day.
Now, if I can just talk him into joining the squad.....
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Vermillion
**MOL**, Men of Leisure
"Real Men fly Radials, Nancy Boys fly Spitfires"
