Get The Gothas!

Having painted some big bombers it was time to try them out in a game. In previous bomber scenarios I've hurled a whole load of fighters at them and maybe given them a few escorts, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. However I've been browsing the Wings Of Glory Aerodrome, as it's a great source of information for WW1 air-gaming, even if it's targetted at a specific game. I was especially interested by THIS POST (which I hope you can see without having to subscribe). This looks at each bomber raid on London, and covers how many bombers went in, what types and the British response in terms of aircraft involved. What you realise is that attacks on the bombers were very uncoordinated and piecemeal, and I wanted to reflect this in a game.

For this scenario I decided to have two Gotha GV bombers which had to run the length of two 3' boards. The RFC/RNAS response would be randomised, both in terms of how many planes were involved and what types they were. For the solo game I ran I rolled 2D6 and took the lowest score (I think I'd treat a score of '1' as '2' though). This would be the number of aircraft that would intercept the bombers.

(If this was a two-player scenario I would have both players bid for how many intercepting fighters there would be, from 2-6. The player who bids the highest plays the bombers. Obviously you dice off on a draw.)

At the start of each turn I rolled a D6. On a 5+ a British plane would appear. There was a modifier of  +1 each subsequent turn until a plane arrived. Then on the next turn I rolled for the next plane starting again on a 5+. So up to one plane could appear each turn.

I used the scatter setup from the Random Threat Scenario, and had the planes appear 3D6" from the lead bomber.

The type of plane that appears each time is random. I based it on the mix of planes that were involved in the June/July raids, as well as what models I have without particular ones being used as a proxy for different types.

1 - Sopwith Pup (use Sopwith Camel model)
2 - Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutter (use Bristol Fighter model)
3 - Bristol Scout (use a generic scratchbuild)
4 - BE12 (use BE2 model)
5 - Armstrong-Whitworth FK8 (use RE8 model)
6 - FE8 (use DH2 model)

That's the fun of 1/600th - the models can be used as other planes without too many eyebrows being raised.

On with the game!

Here are the bombers, ready to go. They both had experienced crews. I rolled for this but didn't allow them to be Aces. 

I rolled three intercepting aircraft.

The first British aircraft appeared immediately - a Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutter with an experienced crew.

The bombers moved to cover each other better, and ended up out of position as a second British plane appeared before them - a Bristol Scout.

The Sopwith zipped in and attacked the rear bomber of the formation. The bombers shot back.

The Sopwith kept up the attack, but wasn't really making an impression on the bomber.. The Bristol made a pass from the front and scored some hits on the lead bomber. As it swept past the second bomber the German front-gunner took a shot and damaged the Scout's engine. Unable to maintain enough speed to pursue the bombers, and with oil and fuel leaking, the Scout broke off the attack.

This left the single Sopwith taking on the bombers. It kept in a tailing position on the white bomber, but was starting to take a few hits.

A second Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutter appeared, but it was a long way off. Would it get into the action in time?

The bomber did its best to dodge and weave and even managed to see the Sopwith overshoot at one stage and get a clear shot on its tail. Embarassing.

As the Sopwith turned it's observer raked the Gotha with a burst from the Lewis ...

This killed the front-gunner and the pilot, and the Gotha went down!

The two Sopwiths now closed up in an attack on the second bomber

This was not a sensible move on the part of the first Sopwith, since it had taken a fair amount of damage from the white Gotha. A fantastically lucky shot from the tail-gunner of the red Gotha scored enough hits to down the Sopwith.

The other Sopwith closed in on its target, but time was running out. The pilot poured fire into the bomber, and even saw some structural damage. 

But it wasn't enough. The Sopwith broke off the attack as the second bomber escaped.

The random element of this scenario made for a lot of fun, and both sides got a kill. The bombers are very hard to take down; you are unlikely to get one simply through accumulated damage; you really need to maximise your hit dice and hope for critical hits. Still, it seems to reflect the real difficulties pilots had historically.

In this game, and some earlier unrecorded lunchtime games) I have been trying a few changes to the rules.

Sideslips - I have changed these so that instead of the sideways component being additional to the main move, it is now part of it. When you do a sideslip you move the aircraft at least half of its movement straight forward. Any remaining movement is made to the side, up to the maximum amount rolled.

Damage - For some time I have felt that planes are too easy to shoot down with accumulated damage and that maybe the number of hits they can take should be increased. I actually looked at a few other rules and did some rough and ready calculations on how many bursts of fire you'd need to use to bring down certain types of planes (excluding critical hits), and found that Spandau & Lewis gave a rather low figure in comparison. To that end I have upped the number of hits a plane can take by about 50%. I'll update the rules at some stage with the new figures. As it is I have several planes I want to add to the lists at the back anyway.

Multiple Guns - I had a rule that if a plane had two guns that could fire into the same arc, they could only use one of them on a particular target each turn. I have changed this so that they can fire a second (or even more) shot from guns into the same arc but that any shot after the first takes a -1 dice penalty.

(Basically my simple firing arcs allow the Gothas to fire their front and rear guns into the side arcs, so they could, in theory, concentrate their fire on a single plane. This makes that just a little harder. Multiple planes firing on the same target is already covered by the modifier for there being closer aircraft in the same arc.)

Crew Hits - I'd kept crew hits fairly simply until now; a critical would hit one crew member with a 50/50 chance of killing or wounding them. But with multi-crew bombers in play I felt that maybe more than one crewman could be hit at a time. So now I am trying this method:

A Critical Hit of 1-2 is a Crew Hit. One randomly determined crew member is hit. If the plane has more than one crewman roll a D6. On a 5+ a second randomly determined crewmember is hit. Roll again until you either fails to hit a crewmember, or all crewmembers have been hit. Each crewman can only be hit once. Then dice for each crewman hit - on a 1-3 they are wounded and on a 4-6 they are killed. A previously wounded crewmember is automatically killed if hit.

So basically a crew critical may only hit one person, or it may hit several crew. This is what happened to the Gotha in the game above; the shot hot the lead gunner, then the rear-gunner and finally the pilot. The front-gunner and pilot were killed and the rear-gunner was wounded. Obviously in the case of a single-seater there's only the pilot and it's a 50/50 whether they will be killed or wounded, but it changes how two-seaters and above take crew hits.

With regard to the above scenario, I want to try it with the giant Zeppelin-Staaken next, and then look at adding in some rules for actual bombing attacks and anti-aircraft fire.