The captain shoos the lot of you down the tethers, annoyed slightly by all the dawdling going on. He ignores your complaints about his dawdling, because he's the captain and therefore an important person.
The flying boats have the observer and pilot seats side by side. The machine guns are a model familiar to any military person, though their bulky cooling shrouds have been removed. The ammo pans and the bombs are stowed in a box beneath the observer's seat, stacked neatly. The boats themselves are mostly laminate glued onto a hardwood carcass, with a few thin metal plates for protection on the inside of the cockpit. The wing has three beams, wound about tightly with lacquered fabric. The controls are fairly simple; it seems that the engineers decided to retain the import planes' control scheme for ease of use.
Sweeping the barrel of the gun around, you see that you can easily shoot anything in front and above of you in a seventy-degree angle. In front and below is impossible: the boat's long nose prevents you from lowering the barrel. It looks like you'll have to shoot over the side if you want to hit a ground target.
The pilots start their engines with several pulls on the starting cables. The planes gain speed on the water, raising brilliantly glittering sheets of glass behind them, then take off. So far, so good - many planes experience problems with take-off, sometimes even overturning.
Gun plane #2 takes the lead, Schwartz acting as navigator. The three machines fly in an arrow formation, the bomber and Gun#1 lagging behind #2 slightly.
Quite soon, the panorama of Hashein's south bay unrolls before your eyes. The whole mouth of the bay is dotted with white plumes where water breaks over the jagged stones - Irontooth Bay, you have heard it called in some overly-patriotic and overly-dramatic publication. From the western side, the bay is protected by a crag that juts far into the sea. On the crag, there's gun battery, the grey coat of paint masking the barrels against the rock. There are several ships in the bay: you can count seven smaller craft with two twin-barreled gun turrets each, and two large battleships, each boasting a formidable arrangement of weaponry.
On the shore, there are several long, low buildings - probably barracks of some sort. Further, there is a hangar, and two Kites are resting on the landing strip, their sharply angled silhouettes jarringly familiar.
No alarm seems to be sounding.
Okay, notes. I roll for every aspect of the plane's performance that is particularly failure-prone; so if anything stupid happens, it's the dice, not me. In this game, I'm only going to show you the results of your rolls, and the enemy's rolls in direct confrontation. Random event rolls like whether somebody's seen you or not are not shown.
On a completely unrelated note, I got second place in the stupid literature conference.
Author
Topic: Into Empty Skies - [1][6][Hilarity ensues] (Read 22319 times)