Borduria Invades Syldavia Part 2 - Interwar Air Rules

I knew it! Just after saying in my last post that I could not find my camera I found it under a pile of my art work. No, I'm not going senile, at least I hope not. I just have a lot of STUFF and am so often busy contriving my next wargame scenario that once I put an object somewhere chances are it will remain hidden for several days or months!

Anyhow there were only three additional photos on it but here they are. They show the air part of the battle. My Heidi 200 pursuit plane arrived first and went on to bomb, with its single bomb, a medium Syldavian artillery piece out of existence and then to machine gun his infantry anti tank infantry group. Then it reacted t the arrival of the Syldavian Mattivov Pursuit plane...

BELOW: The Syldavian fighter plane arrives and is here seen flying over the Syldavian tank column.

                                     The Bordurian plane completes its mission and prepares to head home.

   

  The Bordurian pilot, Joseph Crabiv, noticed two things; he was almost out of fuel and the  enemy plane was heading over Bodurian lines. It dropped a bomb on The Bordurian elite shock troops and then headed to the back of the Bordurian lines to machine gun the general's staff car! Joseph drew his plane up behind the Syldavian and let losses with the machine gun, but too late to save his general. 

The Syldavian pilot, Clovan, Andropoff, hadn't abandoned a plane yet and he wasn't going to start today. Even as his engine spouted flames he looked for a straight stretch of land and took his plane down. He landed not far from the burnt out enemy staff car. Black uniformed Bordurians poured out of some nearby forest. Clovan turned and pointed his service semi automatic pistol at them. He got off two missed shots before sub machineguns peppered him with bullets.

RULES:

Fighter planes  can move a minimum of 80" and a maximum of 100". Mat and I decided to allow for three turns with at least 24" between turns. The rules allow for three phases that I have interpreted as game moves before they have to finish over friendly territory or be forced to land in enemy territory (where they an attempt to evade capture. First phase is arrival on the board (or garden) for which we allowed 40 inches in from the edge, phase three is completion of mission ad phase three is return home. We decided that if a plane was machinegunning enemy positions it was at low altitude and could be fired at with anti aircraft guns, which were, in our cases heavy and light MGs. Mat's plane lost a number of its 15 hull points, finally reduced to over 75 % which forced him to dice to see if the pilot parachuted out or took it for a forced landing. (If he was an ace pilot he would attempt to land without dicing for it). There are also rules for testing when 50% are lost. By the way, a nice touch is that for each hull point lost 12 inches of movement are lost.

Mat and I didn't write down mission objectives or follow closely rules for change of altitude. We may do this when we are more familiar with the rules and use more planes.

Paul Wright uses smaller scale planes but I prefer to use 1/32 or 1/35 (like the figures). The fighters are not meant to be bombers but we decided to equip them with one bomb each. A mechanism in Funny Little Wars is to throw a ball of paper above in the air and count where it drops. Another is to pick a desired point of impact and to dice for direction and scatter. We used Games Workshop scatter dice.

Models: For the Syldavain plane I had a toy metal American fighter plane (the name of which evades me) and for the Bordurian one I had a toy plastic plane which takes a battery and is meant to spin around, I think - I haven't attempted to do that but I did cut off the plastic loop at the top of the plane where it was meant to be suspended. So far the metal plane lacks canopy and pilot. and the plastic one lacks a paint job. I made a stand for the metal plane by using a tube from a tube of fantasy figures, hot gluing it to a honey container lid and that to a piece of stiff card. Inside the tube I first glued rocks and sand to counterpoint the weight of the plane. I also drilled a hole in the plane and stuck some hanger wire which went through a hole in the top of the tube. The stand ended up looking a bit intrusive but it worked. The plastic plane I stuck with some spare used chewy to a fruit container. (I did need the stands in a hurry.

Next Post: The effectiveness of the various ground forces. And the use of actual projectiles to create casualties.