Article Type: Retrospective
Article Date: June 07, 2002
Product Info
Product Name: Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe
Category: Air Combat Sim
Developer: LucasArts
Publisher: LucasArts
Release Date: 1990
Sys. Spec: Click Here
Files & Links: Click Here
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Secret Weapons Of The Luftwaffe (SWOTL) was amazing for the time of 1990. While Their Finest Hour: Battle of Britain preceded it by a year and was pretty good for the time, SWOTL promised more even more exotic aircraft to fly. Is something coming familiar on the horizon?
In 1990, flight sim characteristics were relatively simple when compared to today’s complex program engines and files. It was much less “real” but there were no hard core flight simmers to lament the fact. Everyone was just getting into it. It had joystick support but all rudder and throttle control was keyboard. That was fine as much of the time you were making elevator turns and generally were into a static throttle setting during combat. There were difficulty settings that gave easy landings or you could choose not to land at all. While the flight models weren’t all that scaleable to experience you felt good on the hard settings later.
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SWOTL box & manual cover  |
What you got for the $50 price tag was either 5.25-inch or 3.5-inch floppies. You got 5.25s but could trade them in to Lucasfilm Games for the 3.5s. I believe both disk versions were once boxed. Included was a superb 225-page manual spiral bound with two foldout color maps. Over sixty pages covered the actual history of the air war over Germany. There was an interview with a historian over eighteen more pages. Sixty-four pages were devoted to explaining actual and simulator flight characteristics with all the keyboard functions for control described. All the real aircraft stats were shown along with combat tactics. Throughout the manual there were quotes from combat personnel.
If you flew for the US you could do a tour of twenty-five missions—fifty on the hard/long setting. You got the P-47C and D razorbacks. With an interior view change tweak you could make a bubble-canopied D. The P-51 came in the B and D models. PLUS you could fly the B-17F and G, man every gun and they had a bombardier station! No separate sims just for it. You got it all. This carried over from Their Finest Hour where you could do the same with five German bombers.
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| You could man B-17 bomb and gun stations |
The German side had the Bf-109G-6 and G-10, the Fw-190A-5 and A-8 plus the Me 163B 1-a rocket plane, the Me 262A-1a and A-2a jet and the fabulous Go 229A-0 (the Horten design was built by Gotha). Aircraft colors were changeable to a limited but historically accurate degree.
There were V-1s to attack on the ground and in the air if you could catch them. Even V-2s were in the game. You could destroy them on the ground if you were lucky since once they lit-off they were soon gone.
The really great part was that you could choose your armament. On the American side this amounted to rockets or bombs only but the German planes had the proper sub-model gun armament to select from like the real field modifications that actually existed.
Good Lord, how dicey it was to intercept B-17s in the Me 163 and meter out your fuel and ammo. If you had any fuel in the tank and landed you exploded.
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| SWOTL manual: rate of climb compared |
Intercepting 163s was a chore but possible. You got swell kills if you followed them home. As their unpowered glide slowed you could close up and get them. And you got the feel of the real thing since if you waded into B-17s as a German you didn’t worry much since you bailed out over friendly territory.
The American side always had to sweat the return at least to mid-Channel to be able to fly again the next day. You could choose to commence the mission already in the air or start the engine and takeoff. There was a scalable time compression key to use as desired. Long return runs made it an important feature once the plane was set straight and level. There was no popping to the next waypoint.
I can’t relate the sweat factor I felt as pursuers hung on as you tried to egress Germany punching up time compression a bit to see if they fell back or not. Turn and fight to risk more damage or dash for the Channel? If I had a healthy plane my favorite tactic was to climb to maximum ceiling above theirs and relax.
Upon return you got a complete breakdown of your percentage of hits as to rounds fired and an ongoing list of which types and how many of each you shot down in the air and on the ground. Gun ballistics were not realistic other than the need to lead. The hit figures accumulated throughout your career too.
There were good historical missions on both sides and single mission’s victories added to a pilot’s tally. I scored thousands of kills among my pilots. I estimate that I accumulated some 2,000 hours flight time.
No, scenery detail was not much to talk about, but it was scalable too so once combat began you could cut back ground detail to concentrate on the enemy planes. In fact all other detail was primitive compared to today, but it was fun relative to the state of the art. There were ground targets and ground fire to content with.
Sound was healthy even compared to the later Dynamic Aces titles.
One of the best features was the fact that you could direct individual AI pilots in your flight to attack specific enemy aircraft. There was none of this random “a little help here” and no one shows up. If you had other pilots that you began careers as and you got many kills, you could place them in your flight for better AI performance. You could pause and look at each plane in the scenario’s speed, altitude and such.
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| In the game it was even more detailed |
That leads to using the wonderful map. It was fully zoom-able to a tremendous degree and was filled with every named city, airfield, V-1, V-2 site and each factory facility be they aircraft plant, oil refinery, ball bearing factory, engine plant or rail center. Yes, that much detail. I have yet to see one better. You never got lost. You had a key to tell if you were over friendly or enemy airspace.
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| Seven industries were managed |
This brings us to the strategic campaign mode that took me a couple of months to get into. The regular part of the sim kept me well occupied. Yes friends, we’ve all wanted to be able to have a dynamic campaign where the Germans could win. SWOTL had that. In this mode you could minutely direct your resources, which came from factories on each side. If you lost planes you had to wait till the factory built them then they had to be transferred to you or to other bases. If you got hit by the enemy at a base waiting for planes that only had ground defenses you could fly over there and assist the AI Dispersing your planes could make you thin at times. The ground structure damage was dynamic. If you flew over a damaged factory a few days later it was still at a less than 100-percent.
On the German side you had to disperse production so that the bombing raids didn’t wipe you out. It worked well. It was possible to make decoy raids by splitting up your forces. Let’s say you send in a couple of B-17s at high altitude to draw the Germans up there while you ground pounded with you P-47s. And yes, there were planes on the ground to shoot-up on a regular basis.
Then there was the V-1 and V-2 placement. Everything you did took research time speeded up in the sim’s internal calendar. Many sim days might pass between missions so the calendar jumped along. If you wanted to research the V-2 you had to wait for it and then it had to be produced in a factory in a reasonable time span. Then you set them up to each fire at a preset time after they were transferred in. You didn’t have a horde of any advanced weapon or aircraft at once on either side. You got them as they were produced and had to deploy them wisely. You could develop jet fighters real early if you wanted.
This was the beginning of my modding career. I reasoned that if the mechanics of a certain plane in a file was renamed to another plane’s name it would fly like that. It did. It worked for graphics files too. It was a hit and miss experiment with changing hex addresses and characters to make a P-51H fly at 487 MPH at 25,000 feet in the guise of the P-51D graphics. A few people could change colors more but shape mods weren’t possible. We could swap larger drop tanks from other aircraft and extend range considerably to a given plane. It was easy to change armament once the files were broken. A P-51B with four Mk 103 30mm cannon was nasty.
You could fly all the Bf-109 missions in the Fw-190 and vice versa. Me 262 missions could be flown in another plane and you could switch P-47s for P-51s. It was endless. But then Lucasfilm did us one better. They made add-on aircraft released one at a time.
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| Shooting Star will be in CFS3 |
By 1992 we had the P-38H & J, P-80A, He 162A-2 and Do 335A-1. Yes, they stuck with the title. Each disc made the new plane integrate into the sim with single, historical and career missions. This gave us more planes to switch around. The P-80 could now catch V-1s while illegally flying the earlier P-51 missions and it could shoot down V-2s as they climbed before real speed kicked in. Of course it was possible to change to another model’s armament and such with the easy hexing. Each add-on plane cost about $15-20.
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| First time since SWOTL - it's in CFS3 |
The all-around best feature was the ease of building and saving a custom mission. There was no lack of selections to make just what you wanted in altitude, plane type and quantity and position on the map. It had more selections than any since. Oh yes, those 50,000-foot bomb attacks in the Go 229 were awesome. Intercepts with the P-80 at 45,000 feet were great. And the atmosphere was correctly modeled so that the thin air up high felt way different than on the deck. In between it varied too but correct speeds were dead on. You could take a P-47 to 40,000 feet and dive straight down gathering speed till you hit thicker air. There was no proper airframe stress damage done but it was super to see 760 MPH in a dive!
Aircraft damage was visible but not very dynamic by today’s standards. The bullet holes that punctured canopies, wings and fuselages showed in the same places when bullets hit you. But the damage was dynamic enough to affect flight characteristics if a flight control was hit and the engine damage was good by today’s yardstick. If the engine wasn’t hit badly it might heat up at full throttle forcing you to cut back some to keep the gauges happy. More damage? Fire would break out and lick the windscreen. Chopping the throttle could often stop it. Smoke appeared with thickness depending on the damage.
Of course things back then ran in the DOS environment and one had to twiddle around with coaxing conventional, extended and expanded memory with loading mouse drivers and such in DOSHIGH mode. You had to know your DOS stuff to setup and run a sim.
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| Aces add-on |
Many superb flight sims followed but at an average of about one WWII sim every five years since then. You can count the great ones on one hand: Aces Over the Pacific (there was a 1946 add-on with eight more planes), Aces Over Europe, European Air War, and IL-2 Sturmovik. These are the ones that garnered huge followings for long periods. Yes, there were others but none as popular. I count IL-2 since it has the right stuff to live long. There are even add-ons coming!
SWOTL had fourteen planes, including sub models, to fly out-of-the-box and five more were added later. The map was superb and useable. Combat stats in debrief were extensive and complete. A wide variety of missions were to be had with custom missions in a class of their own. You could specifically direct the AI wingmen. The research, production and strategic modes are still unique except for some space combat-style games. The buy-it-if-you-want-it single add-ons have yet to be duplicated, though the time is way ripe with Internet downloads possible today. I know Microsoft did release a couple of single plane adds for the original Combat Flight Simulator though. It had an excellent custom mission builder. It was easy for the bold modders to make changes once the files were mastered. Once you had the proper DOS setup it NEVER crashed or even hesitated on a 486, 386 or even a 286 machine with a 512 Kilobyte video card and small hard drive running 4-8 MB RAM!
Certainly we don’t want to go back to those days in that we have such better hardware now, but SWOTL’s basic premise was, and still is, rock solid and that’s the point. Somebody simply needs to duplicate it feature for feature and put it all together with today’s technology. How many “old” simmers can agree with that?
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| CFS3 screenshot viewer |
But wait. Microsoft has the forthcoming Combat Flight Simulator 3 on the way. From what I’ve seen, I get the distinct flavor of SWOTL from it. It’s not a copy but the general theme is there. Just perhaps, we can put SWOTL to rest in its historical place and get a worthy successor, albeit thirteen years later.
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