Back In The Air

I've been pretty ill the past few days, the victim of a particularly nasty bug. It meant that I missed my regular wargames night on Thursday (which shows how serious it is), when I was going to debut some of my new French aircraft in a game of Spandau & Lewis.

Today I felt recovered enough to consider pushing a few miniatures around a table, so I decided that if the new planes I had planes for weren't getting their outing, at least one of the other might. So I decided to run my basic patrol scenario using a French Morane N. I came up with a list of ten possible encounters and assigned them to playing cards, then created a deck as described in some earlier post I've lost the link to and which I don't have the enemy to find right now. 

Here's the teeny tiny Morane N on patrol. In terms of quality I rolled twice and took the best roll. It ended up with an experienced pilot. 

I used my experimental rules for early mounts. So whilst it counts has having a fixed gun it can only count one roll of 5 as a hit. This makes it better then a single pivot gun but less effective than a properly synced and sighted synchronised gun. 

The first aircraft encountered was an AEG GII. These were basically bombers, but in mid-1915 seem to have also been used to escort reconaissance aircraft on the grounds that they had a gun at both ends. I used one of my Friedrichshafen bombers as a stand-in, which is why it has a later war camouflage scheme. 

A tough nut to crack, but it had a green crew so I went for it.

Of course at that point a Fokker Eindecker turned up. With an ace pilot. Not good

I survived a first pass of the opposing aircraft, but things weren't looking hopeful. I'd quickly decided that running for home was my safest bet. 

Attacked by the Fokker my best strategy was to face it head on where at least the poor deflection would be some defence. We exchanged shots and between us I think we scored a hit with every dice. So teh Fokker was damaged. But so was I. Badly.

I turned for home. I might just make it if the Fokker couldn't score any more hits. 

It scored a long-range hit and my Morane was forced down. 

I set the whole thing up again, with a new deck of encounters. First out of the deck - an AEG GII!

I got the jump on it and scored some damage. I would have scored more had I remembered the positive firing modifier for shooting at a large target, but I can't even remember a set of rules I wrote myself at the moment. 

I turned and chased the big German plane as it fled into a cloud. 

And the next encounter? Another Fokker! This one didn't have an ace pilot, but once again I was stuck fighting two enemy planes that were gunning for me big time. The AEG temporarily left the table though. 

Whilst the AEG was temporarily inconvenienced I chased the Fokker, damaging its engine. 

The AEG came back and a long-range shot returned the favour; my Morane's engine started spluttering. 

I finished off the Fokker.

But turning to escape brought me within range of the AEG again, and a long-range shot took me out. 

An Albatros C-type actually turned up at one point, but basically flew well out of the action so I eventually ignored it. 

Anyway, that was two singularly unsuccessful outings for the French air-force there.