Pop that Balloon
Last Windy Jack and I went balloon busting. Our General ordered to do something about the balloons spying on us on the Verdun front. This particularly obnoxious brown beast was defended by both A and a B firing machine guns.
We were very conscious of the fact that our Nieuports were fragile things with just 10 points of damage in hand. The balloon has a hefty 28 points of damage and each AA machine gun has 5. By my count that is 20 vs 38 points. We did worry that we would not have enough grunt to do the job so we held a third Nieuport in reserve.
To confuse and hopefully distract the Germans we decided to sneak past the defences and make it look like getting the balloon was not our mission. However, the Germans were not wholly deceived and commenced winching down their balloon as soon as we got close enough (1.5 ruler distance). They had an opportunity to winch it down using a 12 sided dice that would decrement once in each 3 card turn.
We stuck to our plan and Windy tried to take out a machine gun as he went past. He ended up being jammed and to add insult to injury he only inflicted 0 damage shots on the gun. As I was trailing him, I ended up in a perfect position to fire my rockets at point blank range into that gas bag. My rockets game him 3 damage points and set him on fire, and an explosion was deemed to cause him half damage points as well.
Meanwhile Windy now unjammed has collected a collision C damage card as has the balloon. Zero damage cards as it turned out.
At this time the balloon was down to 7 winch turns left and although now rocketless I decided to have a go at the other machine gun. I did manage to give that gun 1 point of damage but got jammed in the process. Windy did an Immelmann, and ended in a good position to administer his rockets to the balloon.
Another explosion card and a fire damage card finished the balloon off.
I think we had been very lucky. Those rockets are not very accurate so point blank was good for us although very dangerous. Next to no damage was caused to the planes and there was a lot of zero cards drawn too.
A win for the French.
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