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At our last game day, I ran a game with an objective to save a downed pilot who was shot down in our balloon busting mission at December’s game day. Unfortunately, landing a plane, especially behind enemy lines, was a lot more difficult than I anticipated…
The British had two Camels and a DH 9 to pick up the pilot. The Germans had two Fokker DVIIs, but as it turns out, they wouldn’t need them.
The British planes started much lower than the Germans, so the DH9 made it to the ground in a couple of turns. Problem is that it totally botched the landing. With only a 55% chance of landing successfully, the DH9 nosed dived into the ground and was destroyed. The pilot survived though, so there were now two pilot stranded on the ground.
One of the brave Camel pilots was not willing to let his wingmen be captured, so he dove down and landed successfully (I think he had a 65% chance after all modifiers). The problem is that he wanted to pick up BOTH pilots. One for each wing. Is this possible? There are rules for having one passenger hanging off your wing, but not two. The takeoff rules state there is a -15% chance for an extra passenger, so I ruled that it was cumulative for each additional passenger.
Our brave Camel pilot decided that no one would be left behind though, so he tried to take off with a passenger on each wing, leaving him with only a 30% chance of taking off. Unfortunately, he did not succeed, and he was killed in the resulting crash. Both passengers survived (I guess they saw it coming and jumped off?) but were captured by the Germans.
In retrospect, it appears that the objectives for this mission were not the most realistic. Perhaps I should have had the pilot waiting near a road to be picked up? And perhaps the wind should have magically been blowing along the length of the road?
It sounds from your description that you handled everything properly. The two passengers would be cumulative, as you noted correctly.
The rules are designed to make picking up pilots difficult, so your experience sounds somewhat typical. If it was easy, pilots would be trying it all the time, which might be fun from a gaming standpoint. However, you almost never hear of this happening in the actual war, so the considerable difficulty is meant to discourage it from occurring too often. It does often make for some interesting game situations, though, when it is being attempted!
I do recall reading of a couple of occasions where a pilot’s mission was to fly a two-seater behind enemy lines, land and drop off a spy in a remote area. So that’s a mission that could be played out. We did do that once in a ‘big game’ scenario at the Spring Minicon in Kankakee, if I recall, where a Bristol landed in the midst of the air battle for no apparent reason, much to the surprise of the Germans. After dropping off his passenger, the pilot took off again and rejoined the fight!
I would like to make a case that picking up two should not be cumulative. One passenger on the wing would cause the plane to be unbalanced making take-off a little more difficult from that standpoint. Of course the extra weight does not help so I would think that it could depend on the plane, whether or not it can carry a bomb load (and what type).
All of that being said, getting two people to jump on the wings with people firing at them, then taking off should still be very difficult:ohmy:
We did that in game a few weeks ago. The landing pilot made every roll, but the pilot to be picked up failed his one roll. (He had gone down and she wanted to try a rescue since the opposing side had been routed.
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