Originally posted by Shiva
It wasn't just the HT dweebs. One of the quirks about the old DOS AW was that all of the terrains actually lived together -- if you flew in the right direction from the FR terrain and had enough fuel, you'd reach the HT or WWI terrains. This created even more potential for Evil Con Missions, where Kesmai would turn the FR fuel consumption down to 0 and alt a mass 262 or B-17 raid from FR to HT or WWI -- completely untouchable aircraft raining death and destruction all over the other arenas.
Yeah, that was always a riot
. You had to go to a completely different type of arena to make that work, though.
Here's a story. It happened, IIRC, about the Fall of '95. By that time, there were more players than the arena limits could stand, so Kesmai had the FR EUR and PAC arenas open simultaneously, and the PAC only handled the overflow from EUR where everybody wanted to be for the spits and FWs. On this night, EUR ended up full as usual and there were about 20 folks in the PAC.
Anyway, as you remember, the Bz always had the south edge of the FR EUR map. Well, once upon a time our CO (Sturmer) went afk for 15-20 minutes while flying south. When he came back, he noticed that if you flew south off the map edge, the sector numbers reached 0 and then jumped back up to 20 or so and started counting down again. Sturm didn't know about the other arenas being on the same infinite plane, so assumed the AW world was "round". IOW, if you flew south from Bzland long enough, you'd come into the north part of azland or czland, where the spit factories were. Thus he planned "Operation Magellan" for us to circumnavigate EUR and nuke the az spit factory with Vaders and 100% fuel, then fight our way home.
So we all headed south and eventually reached the coordinates of the az spit factory. Only there was absolutely nothing in sight. No mountains, nothing on the ground, no runways on dar. Just a flat, green, featureless expanse as far as we could see. Some of us bombed the factory coordinates but we all kept going, hoping we'd see something.
After flying a few more sectors, off in the distance about 2 o'clock we saw a couple of small, trapezoid-shaped lakes. We headed in that direction and more small lakes appeared, some of which had mountains in them. And now we saw runways on dar, but they were all in the lakes as well. It was unlike anything we'd seen before.
But there was something familiar about the shapes of the lakes. Then it hit us: they were shaped just like the islands on the PAC map. So we looked at our printed PAC maps and sure enough, our coordinates now said we were over NE czland, which had islands shaped just like the lakes we could see. We had discovered the "Anti-PAC" map, with the colors for land and sea reversed! We even saw CVs sitting there on what appeared to be green grass. It was all very strange.
All this time, we knew there were 20 or so guys in the PAC arena, which is where we eventually decided we'd somehow ended up. But we couldn't see any of them in the air or on dar. Nor could we talk to them on the radio. However, we still had radio contact with folks back in the EUR arena. So we figured we were invisible to the PAC denizens as well. OH HAPPY DAY AND THE OPPORTUNITY TO DO EVIL!! We had nearly a full squad of invisible buffs deep in czland. Muhahahahaha!!! Although fuel was running low by now, we quickly divided up to destroy as many cz fields as possible and then land.
So that's what we did. We never saw any other planes, the ack never shot at us, and we bombed the Hell outta every cz field and CV we had the fuel to reach. Then we landed on runways floating in lakes, not knowing what to expect but hoping it would include whines from the cz that all their bases had suddenly died for no apparent reason
Well, when we landed, we were disappointed. Upon ESC-e, AW burped a couple times and then we were fully in the PAC arena. The colors were back to normal and we could see and talk to people there, but had lost contact with the folks in EUR. Our bombs had done no damage, apparently still being considered by the host to be in the EUR despite being dropped on the PAC map. So the whole operation turned out to be totally ineffective and a waste of $5 or so per man. OTOH, it WAS something of a unique adventure for ignorant dweebs, complete with the thrill of exploration and discovery. As such, we still talk about it sometimes
.
