Lunchtime Dogfight

When I wrote 'Spandau and Lewis' I deliberately kept the gunnery simple - twin-guns and single-guns was the extent of it. I didn't want to mess around with the subtleties of drum vs belt ammo, or overwing vs synchronised. One set I used to play even factored in the difference between synchronised and interrupted guns (the former was slightly more efficient).

But the games of the past few weeks have suggested to me that observer guns - usually a single drum-fed gun on a pintle mount, are probably too effective, being the same as a single fixed forward-firing machine-gun. The problem was that I didn't want to downgrade them too much, and there's only so much granularity on offer in the game.

However pondering it this morning I came up with an idea. My solution was to make use of the mechanism I use for gun jams of rolling one different coloured dice when shooting. When a plane fires it gets, as its base, one red dice and one white dice, needing a 5+ to hit if a single gun and a 4+ if a twin gun. The red dice is a possible jam if a 1 is scored. Bonuses add more white dice. Penalties subtract white dice. But you always roll that red dice.

I decided that I could class guns as fixed (which will generally be the pilot's gun, if any) and pivot (observer guns). I calculate the number of dice firing as normal, but the scores to hit vary:

Twin Fixed - 4+ on any dice scores a hit
Single Fixed - 5+ on any dice scores a hit
Twin Pivot - 4+ on the red dice scores a hit. Other dice hit on a 6
Single Pivot - 5+ on the red dice scores a hit. Other dice hit on a 6

(A twin pivot is little better than a single. From reading a few accounts, they didn't seem to be that popular with cews, who would remove them and just use single guns. You got more firepower, it's true, but it was heavier to swing around in the slipstream of a moving plane)

Put another way:

Fixed Gun White Dice or any Red Dice: 5+ to hit (4+ if twin)

Pivot Gun White Dice: 6 to hit

This lunchtime I put it to the test with a straight dogfight between a couple of Bristol Fighters and a couple of Albatros DIIIs. This gave me all three main types of gun (twin guns for the Germans, and a single pilot gun plus observer gun for the British), but on planes that were relatively evenly matched. The Bristols have all-round firing, and are faster, but the Germans have more power to recover from manoeuvres and greater firepower to the front.

Inevitably the fight started with a head-on pass.

The Germans failed to turn as tightly as the British, and found themselves with no targets. The Bristols always had a target, albeit with their less-effective observer guns most of the time. The Germans took a few hits but also ended up with a gun jam on one of their planes.

The Bristols initially chased after the German that could still shoot, safe in the knowledge that his companion wouldn't be able to support him. But eventually the fight split into two, with a Bristol pursuing each German machine. With one machine unable to fight, the Germans had got badly out of position, and the British were soon all over them.

The German with a working gun was chased all over the board, but steadily shot to pieces by the Bristol's single Vickers gun, and eventually crashed.

The other German failed to clear his jam - unable to fly straight because of a close pursuit he only had a 1 in 6 chance each turn of clearing it. But the pursuing Bristol couldn't shoot straight, and the Albatros escaped serious damage. Eventually, with time running out, the Albatros ran for home. The Bristols got in one last ineffective burst before the German escaped.

The observers did score hits in this game, but they didn't feel so deadly. Their firing is annoying, and might score the odd point of damage, but it's the front-firing guns you want to avoid. More importantly there's less of a feeling of equality of firepower between a fighter's armament and the defensive guns of a two-seater. I might run this again with a couple more planes on each side, before trying some games with proper two-seaters and see how they fare.