B-17 Queen of the Skies: Miss Punctuality's War Career (Mission 2 Complete)

[BanzaiCat]

[BanzaiCat]

[BanzaiCat]

[BanzaiCat]

[BanzaiCat]

[GJK]

I'm thinking that the radio room ain't such a safe place to be in!

[Con]

you guys are toast...that is some serious cold rolling already!

[mirth]

I bail out!

[Staggerwing]

At least you still have a ma deuce to shoot back with. All's I got now is my 1911.  :(

[mirth]

At least you still have a ma deuce to shoot back with. All's I got now is my 1911.  :(

Give those Nazis bastards Hell!

[BanzaiCat]

Are the JPG pages too wide for viewing without scrolling to the side?

[Barthheart]

Nope, they fit nice on my screen.  O0

[BanzaiCat]

Cool, thanks!

I found a variant on BGG that scores missions and awards promotions/medals according to the scores; I might incorporate that. I need to sit down with that first mission and see how it translates point-wise...I mean, we had a lot of FBOA -2 results on those Jerries, but no kills unfortunately, and the bomb run sucked (though that was due to the autopilot getting knocked out and getting hit by flak...both added up to a -3 modifier to the bomb run die roll!).

[JasonPratt]

At least you still have a ma deuce to shoot back with. All's I got now is my 1911.  :(

AND MY CHAINSAW!  :D

(Been a while since I could use that joke. )

Nope, nope they fit nice on my screen.  O0

Ditto.

[BanzaiCat]

I'm going to backtrack a bit to give a little background, and a little ambiance (thanks to Beery's B-17 Historical Mod for this game, to which you can locate a link back in the Discussion thread). Don't worry, I consider Mission 1 to be in the books and still count.

The 'official' start date for this Campaign is 22 June 1943. This is, I think, when we came over to England and joined our squadron. Incidentally, that will be different from the two patches I posted in this first mission - we're in the 100th Bomb Group, 418th Squadron. This is somewhat unfortunate from a historical perspective - the 100th Bomb Group was less-than-affectionately nicknamed "The Bloody Hundredth." You can read more at this link if you'd like; it's rather fascinating reading.

Our squadron, the 100th, earned its share of that 'bloody' nickname. Here's a bit of an excerpt from its Wiki page:

On 25 June 1943, the 100 BG flew its first Eighth Air Force combat mission in a bombing of the Bremen U-boat yards – the beginning of the "Bloody Hundredth"'s legacy. The group inherited the "Bloody Hundredth" nickname from other bomb groups due to the amount of losses it took. In the early summer of 1943, 100 BG became a "marked outfit" by Luftwaffe fighters after a B-17 pilot first lowered his landing gear to surrender to three Messerschmitt Bf 109s, started to descend after the fighters stopped shooting, then changed his mind and the B-17 gunners shot the three fighter aircraft (one Bf 109 pilot bailed out and presumably reported the event). The group experienced several instances where it lost a dozen or more aircraft on a single mission, and for the next six months, the group focused its bombing attacks against German airfields, industries, and naval facilities in France and Germany. One such raid on 10 October 1943, that the 100th BG made on Münster, ended up with the only surviving 100th BG B-17, the Rosie's Riveters (B-17F 42-30758) commanded by Robert Rosenthal, returning safely to Thorpe Abbots.

Our home airfield is, as mentioned above, Thorpe Abbots.

An interesting interview with a 100th veteran:

And, something to give us all perspective on the B-17 and the 100th Bombardment Group (Heavy):

Now, I'm not going to use ALL of Beery's excellent modifications - I decided that his perspective on the game is beyond the scope of what we're wanting to simulate, here. The 100th suffered tremendous casualties during the war, and this game simulates some rather rough spots (to put it mildly). Maybe I'll use all of his modifications in a future campaign, but not in this one. His additions to make the game more RPG-friendly are cool, though, and I'll roll those in every so often.

That all said, one final major point - I'm going to probably change things up with how I cover everything. The Mission 1 report, above, I think looks great, but it was a giant PITA to put together. For Mission 2, I took a bunch of pictures to illustrate the step-by-step procedure of the game, and will report it like that, to see what y'all like best. I did consider doing a playthrough video too, in which I could have added some SFX and other stuff, but I haven't had a chance to do that yet. I'm leaving that one open as an option; after all, there's 25 or so of these to go through!

I did finish playing through Mission Two. According to Beery's historical mod, crews didn't of course fly every day; there were usually breaks anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks between missions. Using his rules for this, I determined that ten days passed between that first harrowing mission for Miss Punctuality and Mission Two.

I have all the pics edited, I just need to get them organized and uploaded for everyone to see.

Thanks for reading, and if you have any suggestions or other thoughts to share, please don't hesitate to post them.