Nightfighter - Anyone wanna play?

[Staggerwing]

Just to make sure I understand: My obliques have a 4FP per the plane stats, modified down by -2 due to poor position, so I get a remaining +2 added to my dice roll (2x d6). Thus I can get 4 hits against the bomber's 4 hit points if I roll 2 6's.


OK,

[blockquote]Rolled 2d6 : 5, 6, total 11[/blockquote]

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Damn.  I hate situations like this, especially on the last turn in a mission critical situation.  Sincere apologies.  My fault for not asking if we were using the optional rules or not.  I did say just read up to section 13 and the bit about oblique guns therefore we'll ignore the advanced rules concerning poor firing positions and bomber responses.

Therefore, with a roll of 11 and a firepower of 4, you down the B-17 with a concentrated burst of fire from your oblique guns!

[Staggerwing]

I was just going to ask about the optionals.  :o

I saw them on the graphic for combat results on the first page of the thread. I wasn't sure which way it was going to go.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

I thought you were going to end it right off the bat when you managed to find yourself in the same hex as a B-17 #5 on turn 4 but you missed your tally roll.  The B-17 gunners also failed their rolls.





You were in the same hex with B-17 #5 on turn 5 as well but failed to spot him again.  Since you were at an oblique angle, the B-17 never had a chance to spot you.





Then I thought it was going to be a bust as you were never able to pin down bomber #6 and I was 99% sure bomber #2 was going to get away as well but then you managed to pull it off on the final turn.

Here are the entry chits I drew for the bombers.  Bomber #5 entered on turn 1,  Bomber #6 on turn 5, and Bomber #2 on turn 10.



Turn 1.  Bomber 5 in hex 0602. 
Turn 2.  Bomber 5 in hex 0605. 
Turn 3.  Bomber 5 in hex 0608. 
Turn 4.  Bomber 5 in hex 0611. 
Turn 5.  Bomber 5 in hex 0614.  Bomber 6 in hex 1202.
Turn 6.  Bomber 5 in hex 0617.  Bomber 6 in hex 1205.
Turn 7.  Bomber 5 in hex 0620.  Bomber 6 in hex 1208.
Turn 8.  Bomber 5 in hex 0623.  Bomber 6 in hex 1211.
Turn 9.  Bomber 5 in hex 0626.  Bomber 6 in hex 1214.
Turn 10.  Bomber 5 exits map.   Bomber 6 in hex 1217, Bomber 1 in hex 1102.
Turn 11.  Bomber 6 in hex 1220.  Bomber 2 in hex 1105.
Turn 12.  Bomber 6 in hex 1223.  Bomber 2 in hex 1108.
Turn 13.  Bomber 6 in hex 1226.  Bomber 2 in hex 1111.
Turn 14.  Bomber 6 exits map.     Bomber 2 in hex 1114.
Turn 15.  Bomber 2 in hex 1117.
Turn 16.  Bomber 2 in hex 1120.
Turn 17.  Bomber 2 in hex 1123.
Turn 18.  Bomber 2 in hex 1126.

[Staggerwing]

I'll never be that lucky again...

[Staggerwing]

Thanks for a great game!

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

That is a tough scenario for the night fighter player.  Some of the others involving the Germans vs. the Brits are a bit more intricate and involved.  The one with the Germans vs. 50 Lancasters is good fun!

[Staggerwing]

Sounds exhausting!

My ability to think abstractly has diminished with my advancing age. At the end I was reduced taking the screenshots you posted and, using the current contacts zones, trying to predict the next zone and sketching it out right on the map with annotation tools in the pic viewer, then overlapping only part of that zone with my next search, then doing it again to search the other side of the next predicted zone after that, gradually narrowing it down (example: red=next predicted possible location zone, purple=next desired radar search):

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Damn!  Sorry to put you through all that work.

(wanna try one with 15 Halifax bombers?   :D  )

[Staggerwing]

I'm very tempted... but I'm also afraid my brain might explode. :o

What scenario were you thinking? And what extra chapters are involved?

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

It'll actually be easier to find enemy bombers because the German planes are equipped with radar in addition to the ground based radar available. 

It's scenario 4G: 'Y' Guidance.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND:
The RAF learned a hard lesson in the first months of war when unescorted daylight incursions towards Germany were savaged by fighters. The defensive fire from gun turrets proved to be no deterrent and Messerschmitts carved their way through formations of Wellington bombers. In the absence of long-ranged fighter escorts, the RAF chiefs changed strategy and began to bomb by night. The Luftwaffe, ground down by their daytime raids of the summer of 1940, had a similar epiphany and began to blitz Britain after sunset.

Night was a shield against detection. An aircraft that was visible at five miles by day might only be detectable 2,000 feet away on a good night. In the polluted air over the Ruhr or London, visible distances were far less than that. In Britain, attempts were made to launch single-seat fighter patrols against the bombers, but in 1940 there was no radar coverage over land and ground observers had to fall back on listening for bomber engines. The tracking of raiders was so poor that a fighter pilot had to be lucky to spot a bomber. It was like finding a needle in a haystack. One veteran of these 'catseye' patrols described them as 'bloody stupid', mainly because of the danger. Lacking night navigation aids, and reliant on instrument flying, accidents with single-seat Spitfires and Hurricanes were common and probably more aircraft were lost to noncombat causes than enemies were shot down.

In Germany efforts were made to integrate fighters and searchlights in 'illuminated zones'--belts of searchlights some 22 km deep, away from the flak guns. Fighters would orbit a radio beacon or upward-pointing searchlight until they saw the searchlight belt 'cone' a target and light it up. Then they would dive from their standby position and shoot the bomber down. The first such illuminated zone, or helle Nachtjagdräume (abbreviated to Henaja) was established near Münster and the first kills using the system were achieved in July 1940.




ILLUSTRATION: Henaja in action. A nightfighter orbits a beacon behind the illuminated zone until sound locators and searchlights acquire a bomber. Then it peels off to fly to a point behind the bomber where it can shoot it down.

Henaja achieved some modest successes. However, once it became clear to the RAF pilots what this flak-free strip of light meant, they simply flew around it. However, Oberst Josef Kammhuber, the energetic commander of Germany's rapidly growing nightfighter organisation, soon had enough searchlights to establish a continuous zone of illumination from Jutland to Liege. The British dubbed this 'The Kammhuber Line'.

The Henaja system was far from perfect. Searchlights were reliant on sound detection and their crews would often become confused between the noise of the bomber and fighter engines. The need to reduce confusion meant that only one fighter could operate in any sector of the line at a time. However, the RAF obligingly trickled bombers through one at a time, with a space of a few minutes between each raider. And the British bombers' poor navigation meant they often spread themselves across the line, rather than concentrating at a single point.

Henaja fighting's other weakness was a reliance on the fighter pilots' own initiative. Kammhuber knew that a more complete solution to the nightfighting problem would require the development of ground control to direct the fighter to the enemy bombers. He devoted his command's energies to the evolution of new techniques involving radar.

Key to perfecting nightfighting tactics was the development of radar. With it, ground-based fighter controllers could direct nightfighters to intercept a raider and shoot it down.

In the late 1930s the British, in desperation, adopted a third-rate radar system and built a world-class fighter control system around it. Chain Home looked out to sea and was accurate enough to place day fighters within a few miles of a raid, where they could pick it up visually. However, Chain Home was a metre-wave radar and its enormous wavelengths, around 10m to 15m, gave it poor performance over land. It also had problems detecting low-level raiders and lacked the precision for night intercept.

The Germans had a superior ground-based radar in Freya. With a shorter wavelength, around 2.4m, it traded off a modest amount of range compared to Chain Home, but had much better discrimination. In 1940 Freya early warning radars were lined from the Danish to the Swiss frontiers, but unlike the British system they did not report to a central command post. Though they had a better radar the Germans lacked an integrated system of warning and control to hook the radars into. It took them a while to comprehend the potential of radar for control of fighters.

The earliest German attempts at fighter control were crude. If a target was picked up by Freya, a nightfighter was ordered to intercept on a bearing. But without constant updates of precise target information, successes were few.



PHOTO: A FuMG 80 Freya radar of the kind that eventually lined the coast from Denmark to the Atlantic. Initially used just for early warning, they were soon adapted with AN circuits to provide close control of fighters for interception.

In November 1939 a Luftwaffe signals detachment began to experiment with trying to control fighters using the Freya radar. Unfortunately Freya did not give the target position to the level of precision needed for a night intercept. These early radars were difficult to use, using primitive cathode ray scopes that gave distance information, but required careful interpretation to determine the bearing in azimuth.

The result of experimentation was the development of Freya-AN. This used a technique known as 'lobe switching' to give much greater precision. The radar's receiving aerial was divided into two parts, left and right, which were switched between at the rate of 75 times a second. The cathode ray scope would show whether the signal was stronger on the left or right side of the radar beam. If the signal was symmetrical it would mean the contact was dead centre in the beam.



ILLUSTRATION: The Freya-AN lobe switching system. The left-most example shows the contact in the right-hand lobe of the radar. As the aircraft moves toward the centre the signal on the left and right of the scope becomes more symmetrical.

Despite problems with height-finding (later solved by pairing the Freya with Würzburg radar) Freya-AN had sufficient precision to permit night interception. The fighter controller operated the radar. He could track both the bomber and the target on his scope and give directions to the nightfighter pilot. It was highly skilled and demanding work, because the controller might only have ten minutes to complete the intercept before the bomber passed out of the radar's view. The first kills were achieved in September 1940. Now nightfighters could intercept without the aid of searchlights and the first 'dark' night fighting zones (or Dunkelnachtjagdgebeite, abbreviated to Dunaja) were established in front of the Freya chain along the North Sea coast.



ILLUSTRATION: This sequence shows the Freya-AN scope registering the fighter and bomber at different angles from the radar (to the left). In the topmost, the fighter is behind and to the port of the bomber. In the second row it is crossing left to right. In the bottom-most example the fighter is crossing but approaching firing range. The blob at the bottom of each scope is the permanent ground echo. A skilled operative could use this information to give course corrections to the fighter.

The British were also experimenting with fighter control using the more accurate 1.5m Chain Home Low radar. In the National Archive I came across plot sheets from 1940 for interception exercises off Foulness on the coast of England. There were also attempts to employ anti-aircraft gun-laying radars to guide fighters, along the lines of Freya-AN. The product of these developments was the deployment of the first Ground Control Intercept (GCI) radar, in January 1941.

GCI had many radar features that we would now recognize as 'modern', with a rotating aerial array and the Plan Position Indicator (PPI), a scope that gave a map-like plan view around the radar, which was positioned at the centre of the screen. Unlike the Battle of Britain fighter control system, where positions had to be calculated from bearings and gradually filtered through to a plotting table, a PPI scope could provide accurately filtered information in real time, permitting the controller to pass timely instructions directly to the fighter.



PHOTO: A graphic showing the features of a PPI scope.

Like Freya-AN, GCI had the disadvantage of only being able to control one fighter at a time (though the addition of a scope for a second controller soon increased capacity). But it was part of an integrated system of night defence that included high-frequency communications, well-trained crews and a vital new technology, Airborne Intercept (AI) radar, which could be carried on aircraft.

Ground control of interception was only part of the solution to effective nightfighting. The Luftwaffe's Dunaja 'dark fighting' system permitted a controller to guide a nightfighter close to a bomber with the aid of radar, but still ground radars gave imprecise information. If the controller was just a few hundred feet astray, the target would be lost in the darkness.

It was clear to all involved in night fighting that fighters had to carry their own radar sets. This way the controller merely needed to get the fighter close enough for its own Airborne Intercept (AI) radar to pick up the target. Then the pilot would complete the final stage of the interception alone.


AI radar was one of the great technical challenges of the first year of the war. A radar needed to be small enough to fit in an aircraft and powerful enough to find targets a few miles away. Transmission and receiving aerials had to be sufficiently small that they did not adversely affect aircraft performance. The system needed to be operated by the pilot or observer. These requirements, particularly for miniaturization and power, did not easily go hand in hand and it took a long time for the technology to emerge.

For the RAF the first practical AI system was the AI Mk IV. After various experiments with wavelength, they settled on 1.5m as having sufficient range and sensitivity. In turn this meant that reception aerial dipoles mounted on the wings could be kept to half a wavelength, or 75cm, without hurting aircraft performance too badly. The system had a range of around 2-3 miles.

Metre-wave radar aerials broadcast a large balloon-shaped lobe of radio pulses in front of the aircraft. This was sufficiently imprecise that a comparison of returns between reception dipoles on the port and starboard wings was necessary to give accuracy in azimuth.

Because of the inefficiency of the aerial dipoles, the radar leaked energy into weaker 'side lobes'. These would pick up signals from the ground and feed it into the radar. This meant that the practical range of the radar was limited to its height above the ground. The lower the aircraft flew, the more the ground return overwhelmed the scope. This was to make metre-wave AI radar useless to the RAF when trying to engage low-flying raiders such as minelayers, and was to drive the Allies towards developing radars with shorter wavelengths.



ILLUSTRATION: A diagram of a 1.5m radar, showing an idealized main lobe and side lobes. If the aircraft flies any lower, the side lobes will begin to register a ground return, which will fill the radar scope at long range. The lower it flies, the more the ground return fills the scope.

The other big problem that these radars faced was that of minimum range. They could not see targets below a certain distance, and this was a product of the Pulse Width, or the length of time the pulse took to be broadcast by the radar. Difficulties with circuit design plagued the efforts of early radar engineers to produce short pulse widths. If the pulse width was too long, then a target at close range would return an echo before the pulse had finished broadcasting, so making the signal disappear from the radar.

Engineers never entirely got over this problem, meaning that minimum range became a tactical hurdle for the nightfighter. The aircraft had to try and pick up a target bomber before it dropped within minimum range. For the AI Mk IV radar the minimum range was 400 feet, and with a maximum visible distance in the region of 2,000 feet, this meant there was a critical narrow band within which the target must be visually detected.

If the problems of ground return and minimum range was not enough of a challenge for the nightfighter, there was the layout of the radar scopes. For AI Mk IV there were two scopes, showing the radar returns in elevation and azimuth. It took some skill to interpret the information, and as a result the natural division of responsibility in nightfighting fell between the observer, who could constantly monitor the scopes and call out information, and the pilot, who could keep his eyes out of the cockpit, scanning the darkness for the silhouettes of the enemy bombers. This saved the pilot from ruining his night vision by staring at a scope, but put great reliance on tight teamwork between himself and the radar operator.


This division of labour meant that the archetypal nightfighter would be a twin-engined aircraft, something with space for two crew, enough power from the engine alternators to run the radar, great endurance, plenty of firepower, and the space to take all the electronic kit. Though there were exceptions to this--the American Navy and Marine Corps would invest in single-seat fighters--this set the pattern for the years ahead. Initial RAF deployment of AI used the Blenheim light bomber as a platform, but this was too slow to take on fast German bombers, so soon the more powerful Beaufighter was adopted as the mainstay British nightfighter.

While AI Mk IV was being perfected in late 1940, the Germans were developing their own system by repurposing a radio altimeter into an AI radar. This was to become the FuG 202 Lichtenstein BC, which would be operationally trialled in mid-1941 and become the standard Luftwaffe AI equipment for the next few years. This operated on a shorter wavelength than the British AI, around 50cm, which meant a fractionally shorter range than AI Mk IV. It had a useful minimum range of 200m (~650 feet). Four nose aerials functioned as transmitters and receivers and the radar operator had no less than three display scopes, one each for range, azimuth and elevation.



PHOTO: The Me110 became the mainstay of the Luftwaffe's nightfighter arm, but lacked the speed to battle the RAF's heavy bombers. Its replacement, the Me210, proved an abject failure, and so the Zerstörer soldiered on long beyond its sell-by date. This Lichtenstein-equipped Me110G-4 was the ultimate version of the type, with nitrous boost for its engines at high altitude.

The Germans would fit Lichtenstein aboard their own two-seat platform, the Me110 Zerstörer. The heavy 'destroyer fighter' concept had been found wanting in the day fighting of the Battle of Britain, but at night it would come into its own. The only problem was that the extra weight and drag of nightfighting equipment, such as radar aerials and flame dampers to hide the exhaust flares, took 10% or more off the aircraft's top speed. The Me110 could get by when chasing older, slower British bombers but would soon find itself outpaced when a new generation of four-engined bombers appeared.

Now that AI radar had been perfected sufficiently to be useful, the next challenge was to incorporate it into a tactical system.

By mid-1942 the Germans already had a number of systems of night fighter control. First was the Henaja system of illuminated fighting using searchlights. This was being enhanced by the use of the new Würzburg radar, which had the precision to direct a searchlight beam onto a bomber. Each searchlight zone had three Würzburgs positioned at the front, middle and back, able to detect bombers as they entered and exited the zone. However, few bombers were shot down as they left because RAF pilots began to dive as they transited the zone, accelerating past the hazard at low altitude.

The second system was an evolution of the Freya-AN system for directing individual fighters by radar. This grew into a line of 'dark' night fighting zones, or Dunaja, positioned in front of the coastal radar chain. The Freya radar was not precise enough for effective ground control, but the new 'Giant' Würzburg (Würzburg-Riese) had both accuracy and range enough for the job.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

With the arrival of Würzburg-Riese in the autumn of 1941 Josef Kammhuber was able to overhaul his nightfighting organization. The searchlight belts were widened and now Dunaja zones 36km in depth, combining Freya and Würzburg, were placed directly in front of the Henaja belt. A further piece of the jigsaw was the Seeburg plotting table, derived from ideas developed by the operational units. This was a 1:50,000 map of the interception zone onto which points of light, representing bomber and fighter units, were projected. This information, updated from the radars, gave a controller a picture of the battle that was clear enough for him to direct a nightfighter to its prey.

This system of dark and light fighting zones was to prove tremendously complex and Kammhuber experimented with narrowing and widening the searchlight belt. It wasn't until the spring of 1942 that many of the bugs were worked out and the system began to work effectively.

However, Kammhuber's XII Fliegerkorps was faced with a new setback. The Gauleiters of regions most frequently raided by the RAF petitioned Hitler, claiming that the vast searchlight resources devoted to the 'Kammhuber Line' were a luxury and would be better employed in support of the flak defending their towns and cities. From March to July 1942 the searchlight belt was gradually withdrawn on Hitler's orders.

The decision to withdraw the searchlights shocked and angered the night-flyers, but gave birth to two new systems of control. The 'combined' fighting zone, or Konaja, was a response to the loss of the searchlights and the lack of success at intercepting fast, four-engined bombers as they dived through the illuminated belts. By reasoning that bombers had to maintain a fixed course and height when approaching a target, Kammhuber tried to combine flak, the withdrawn searchlights and fighters over a number of target cities. There were problems with coordinating the fighters with flak (which would tend to shoot at everything and disobey orders to cease fire at the approach of friendly fighters) and Konaja at best enjoyed modest success.

The other system was a further development of Dunaja radar-directed 'dark fighting'. The withdrawal of the searchlight belt left the radars in position. At each station one 'Red Giant' Würzburg-Riese would acquire an enemy, while a second 'Green Giant' tracked a nightfighter. Both positions were transmitted back to a Seeburg plotting table from which a controller would guide the interception. This procedure became known as the Himmelbett ('Four Post Bed') method. Himmelbett was not without its disadvantages. As with Freya-AN only one fighter could be controlled at a time, which meant that each box-like Himmelbett zone, or Raum, could easily be overwhelmed by a mass raid. Though Würzburg-Riese was a more precise radar than Freya, interception was still a matter of luck.


The turning point came with the deployment of Lichtenstein BC AI radar aboard aircraft. Production of sets had delayed deployment and it wasn't until mid-1942 that these radars reached units in significant numbers. After initial suspicion (some guinea-pig pilots at II/NJG 1 regarded the sets as 'new-fangled rubbish') successes meant they were quickly embraced by the nightfighter crews. With airborne radar able to provide terminal guidance to the bombers, the success rate shot up so sharply that pilots soon forgot the loss of the searchlights.

The night bombing campaign differed greatly from the day bombing effort. By day bombers clung together in tight formations, all the better to provide mutual gun protection. But by night, formation flying was near impossible, and dangerous too.

Until 1942 RAF's Bomber Command had been sending bombers over Germany in piecemeal fashion. The desire to limit accidents meant that bombers took off at well-spaced intervals. The crews would often choose their own routes to the target and lacking more than rudimentary navigation tools they would wander across the sky trying (and often failing) to find city-sized targets.

This all suited the Dunaja and Himmelbett systems perfectly. Lines of Freya-AN controlled fighting areas and Himmelbett boxes stretched hundreds of miles across the Western approaches to Germany. Each area contained one nightfighter with a dedicated ground controller using radar plots to direct the pilot (see Part 4). The diffuse Bomber Command raids, spread over time and across airspace, would try to penetrate the line at multiple points. At each Himmelbett Raum there would invariably be a nightfighter lying in wait for a bomber. The fighter often had the leisure to complete an interception--a process that could take ten minutes or so--before the next bomber would appear. As a result RAF losses were running at an unacceptable rate of almost 7%.



ILLUSTRATION: This map shows the German nightfighter defences in early 1942. The coastal chain of dark fighting Freya-AN Dunaja zones is backed by a line of Himmelbett boxes ranging from Denmark into France. Each Freya and Himmelbett station could control only one fighter at a time. By mid-1942 the searchlights had been withdrawn to the cities, creating large illuminated zones (here marked in a lighter green) where Konaja, and later Wilde Sau, fighting could take place.

The arrival of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris marked a fundamental change in RAF tactics. The RAF radio monitoring service had identified the principles behind German controlled nightfighting and from this information Harris concluded that the answer was to concentrate bombers against a narrow section of the line in the shortest period of time. This would overwhelm the defence and produce tolerable levels of loss.

The first such operations took place in March and April 1942, when the RAF struck Lübeck and Rostock and suffered loss rates under 5%. The German leadership, instead of strengthening the night defences, chose to launch the retaliatory 'Baedecker Raids', and so Himmelbett was again unprepared to meet Harris's unprecedented 'thousand bomber' raid on Köln on the night of 30/31 May 1942. A total of 1,047 bombers were concentrated into a raid of 90 minutes duration. It penetrated the Himmelbett line on a front about 18 miles wide. No more than 8 night fighting zones were touched in the entire raid and just 25 Luftwaffe nightfighters were guided to the enemy. Hundreds of pilots and radio operators sat helpless in cockpits and command posts while the RAF obliterated Köln's city centre at the rate of one bomb load every six seconds. Harris felt the loss rate, just 3.9%, well-justified.

Though Harris would only launch a handful of the thousand bomber raids, the tactics set the pattern for the remainder of the war. Bombers would set off at close intervals and form into a narrow gaggle, a 'bomber stream' some 150-200 miles long, that would swarm into Germany. Navigation was helped by the arrival of new radio aids, and though accidental collisions between bombers were not unknown, they were rare enough for Harris to be unconcerned about them.

Kammhuber responded by extending Himmelbett down to the Swiss border, but he resisted calls from his pilots for 'free' fighting techniques against the streams. Kammhuber feared that a change of tactics would reduce his force's effectiveness and the control facilities needed for such operations were simply not available. In the meantime he demanded a massive expansion of the night fighting force. Göring thought the requests for new men and equipment utopian and flatly refused them. However, this didn't stop Kammhuber inducting personnel from the Nazi Party, SS, SA, Reich Youth Organization and Reich Labour Service as signals auxiliaries, bringing thousands of women into the night fighting force.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

SCENARIO BRIEFING:  (read rules up to 22.0)
Spring, 1943.  The weakness of the Himmelbett system was that it could only control one nightfigher at a time.  This was because there was only a single Wurzburg-Riese radar to track friendly aircraft.  The 'Y' system changed that.  It was a form of radio direction finding that permitted the Luftwaffe to track aircraft by triangulating on their radio broadcasts.  Now Himmelbett zones could control up to three aircraft simultaneously.

Attacking forces:
Elements of No. 77 Sqn, RAF (call letters KN) 
15 Halifax Mk III heavy bombers.  (one bomber enters per turn)





Defending forces:
Elements of II/NJG 2, Luftwaffe.



One Dornier Do217J-2


Two Messerschmitt Me110F-4


The Me-110 F-4s must roll to see if they have been upgraded with Schrage Musik (oblique guns).

Defender setup: Defender sets up anywhere in zones J to R with any facing.  No more than one aircraft may be set up in each zone.

Search Radar:  One Freya, one Wurzburg.

Searchlights:  none

Flak: none

Moon phase:  random

Visibility:  random

Cloud cover: random

Victory conditions:  The defender wings if he shoots down three bombers.  If he shoots down four or more bombers, it's considered a decisive victory.

Special Rules:
Deconfliction is in effect (rule 11.1)

The Do217J-2 starts with altitude advantage (rule 18.0)

'Y' Guidance was a lot less precise at tracking aircraft than Wurzburg-Reise.  This is represented in game as follows:
The player designates one of his aircraft as being tracked by Wurzburg-Reise and the others by 'Y' guidance.  These designations cannot change for the rest of the scenario.

At the beginning of each AI search phase, before any AI fixes are lost or gained, the player rolls one die.  On a roll of 5-6, one of the 'Y' guided fighters is displaced.  The attacking player chooses one such fighter and displaces it one hex left or right of the direction it is facing as it it had corkscrewed (rule 17.4.3).  Only fighters without a tally or an AI fix can be displaced.

[Staggerwing]

Cool, let me read up on the manual sections on airborne radar tonight.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Here's the map prior to setup.

I'll scan the relevant aircraft stats and post later tonight.