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Final Approach - B17 Flying Fortress: The Mighty Eighth
By Len "Viking1" HjalmarsonCrew Management and Navigation
Crew management is critical for both morale and efficiency. If you don't take care of your crew, morale and performance will suffer. Secondly, if you don't attend to a wounded crew member, he will likely die. That is bad for morale, but it will also mean that you'll have a rookie on your crew on the next flight. Naturally, being a smart commander, you want to bring your boys home safely, and you also want them to grow in skill and contribute to successful missions.
Crew management is made simple by the intuitive interface developed for B17. There are actually five navigable interfaces that help you maneuver inside the Fortress, issue orders, and move to an external view. A sixth interface allows you to move from bomber to various fighters once you are outside the Fort.
The Icon Rose
The first interface allows you to issue movement orders to your various crewmembers. You select a crewman by left clicking on him. The icon rose pops up when you right click on any crew member. The central icon is the instruction you are issuing, so in this first image the "walking man" tells you that clicking on any of the surrounding icons will send the Navigator to that station where he will take over.
Clicking on the central icon changes the instruction and so the central icon. The change will depend on the context.
For example, in this image you can see three icons: a parachute, a hand, and a fire extinguisher. Following their convention, the central icon with the red LED tells you that the command is a GRAB command. If you click on the fire extinguisher, the crewman will grab that tool. If you click on the chute, he will bail out.
More Icons
Grab the Extinguisher
Other types of commands can be issued in the same way. With heavy use, guns will jam. In this case you can use the "C" key to return to compartment view, and then right click on the gunner to bring up the icon rose. Clicking on the middle icon will toggle icons until the "repair" wrench appears. Clicking on the gun icon that appears above will then attempt to unjam the guns.
Crew View Icon
The second icon interface that you will use a great deal is the Crew Views Panel. This panel is accessed by scrolling your cursor to the right central area of your screen. The CV panel allows you to move to an Aircraft (external) view, the Crew view, the Action view, the Instrument view, and the Window view. Let's look at an example of one position and all the views that go with it.
