The Grand Raid on Field 26
We took of from Field 16 and headed towards the dreaded Gold home base
of field 26. It is located on the southern side of Goldlandia and has
an altitude of 2300ft. This provides the golds with a major energy advantage
in that they don't have to spend time climbing to meet any threats. In
a single strike we were about to take it all away.
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Here we are flying north in our standard formation, "all strung out". Actually given the problems we have with connections and getting everyone together across 4 countries, (5 if you count Western Australia, just kiddin laika), we manage to do reasonably well. Gotcha is flying one of the P51 escorts. |
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In the lower left corner of this picture is the Gold Field 26 ablaze after the first pass by seven B17 bombers of the ANZACs. This was a planned mission and I must say that the lads executed it damn near perfectly. The only problem was having enough fighters to defend the field once it was closed down. While we managed to capture the field initially the pesky little golds grabbed the field back at the last minute. |
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Kilroy and Strela waited on the runway just in case any of the nasty goldies turned up and tried to take F26 back from us |
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Here is the picture taken a little prematurely. The Golds landed on field 26 and grabbed it back from us just before the field re-opened |
The "Low Down Dirty Shame" and the "Ugly Duckling"
The pictures that follow are from two missions that were run on one
day. The first was a low level B25H run attacking Field 12 from Field
24 in the water arena. The B25H's are low level bombers. So we stayed
low-level untill about 2km from Field 12 then popped up and attacked the
field. The B25H's managed to go over 230knots at only 75% throttle while
at only 100ft off the surface of the water. This made turns very tricky
as there is very little margin for error while travelling that low and
fast. This means all the turns had to be gentle wide turns. At one point
I decided to turn Southwest to get closer to F12 and had to keep turning
to the SE so we didn't over shoot the target!
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This is the Squad flying in B25H Mitchell Bombers forming up at field 12 by circling around a couple of times untill everyone got off the ground. THe B25H is a very heavy bomber and usually requires a good haul back on the controls to get into the air. |
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Based on information in a bomber discussion group, I
read that the icons of planes didn't appear if you were flying under 100ft.
I have since found out that flying under 300ft won't show up your icon
to anyone more than d21 away. The icon is the purple lettering above everyone's
plane, (except for mine). While flying at 100ft we kept our throttle at
75% and still managed to travel at about 230 knots. At 100 ft it is damn
near impossible for a fighter to get under a bomber and rake your plane
so we powered along and eventually charged in to field 12.
It is an incredible rush flying that fast and low. At on point I managed to get so low that the altimeter had no space between the needle and zero feet!! |
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Laika took this snapshot after the Ugly Ducking mission. The purpose
of the Ugly Ducking is to draw enemy fighters up to the slow moving "undefended"
bombers while the fighter escorts, (lurking about d30-d40 away), pounce
on them.
At one point Laika was being chased by a P38 and Glars and I were chasing the P38. This is no mean feat in a B25 bomber =) As this picture was taken I had run out of fuel and laika had his engine turned off to save fuel. It's a good thing neither of us got bounced!! |
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Laika also took this picture after he landed. While it looks like I'm doing a powerslide landing, (or even landing across the runway!), it is a small quirk of the warbirds game when two pilots are close to each other in the air, but far away as far as network connections go. The delay between my computer sending a packet of data and laika's recieving the packet meant his computer thought I was still turning to my left when on my computer I was turning back to my right. This delay is referred to as warping and typically happens when the connect to the US is bad from New Zealand. More often it is a hold up on the Telstra network in Sydney that causes the fault for me. |
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