Bomber Crew: missions 19 and 20

Mission 19: Bouncing Bomb Test Run. We’re out of special bonuses, so we decide it’s time for the test mission. There shouldn’t be any enemy fighters over Cornwall, but because we have a protocol in place, the gunners without ammo feeds still got up just after takeoff and grabbed an extra ammo box each. This turned out to be a great move when Forgetful Biggins routed us to some splashed-down fighter pilots in the Channel. We just had to spot them, which wasn’t too hard, since their fancy pants were so shiny and all. Then we took a detour and photographed some recon sites, because we were feeling a bit fancy, ourselves.

The good news I guess is that the experimental bomb works. The bad news is that it means they’re almost certainly gonna make us use it.

Mission 20: Waldau Army Airfield Raid. The crew and I sat down again before this raid and weighed our options. We could take something low-risk, like a sub hunt, or just go for a mission that would get us a bonus so we could tackle the next critical mission and move on to campaign step 4. The crew was somewhat divided on this. fishpockets said he wouldn’t mind getting a little more experience so he could get the “Navigate by the stars” ability, which would let us fly at high altitude at night and still get to our target. The gunners seemed to be more interested in getting out into the thick of things, especially since they had heard another ace was guarding Waldau Airfield and they wanted a shot at him. “We can take the bastard down,” said Juan_Raigada, as MrCoffee nodded silently from his seat in the back. MrCoffee had been notably less talkative since he made it through the mission in which Eric_Majkut died, but he and Juan_Raigada also seemed to have formed a close gunner partnership. And I assume MrCoffee also wanted to try out his new incendiary ammo. Left_Empty seemed to have gotten the hang of bombing subs much faster than he did bombing land targets, and he favored the idea of hunting aquatic prey next. RichVR didn’t seem to care what we did as long as he could keep telling jokes over the plane’s intercom. Miguk was the new guy and didn’t say much. Don’t think he felt like he had the right to.

As usual, they were all kinda just waiting on me to make the call. I said that I figured if we were gonna go bomb a dam, then let’s just get it over with and pick up the armor bonus now. If we were successful, we’d surely have enough XP for fishpockets to get his stargazing skill. I just put it out there, and nobody had a problem with it. Nobody ever did.

After all the talk, the mission was pretty chill until we actually got to the target. We lucked into some light cloud that let fishpockets navigate us across the Continent while I stayed at medium altitude to keep above the flak. Herr Fliegerdork the Ace or whatever his name was came on all aggro, and met Left_Empty’s and Juan_Raigada’s combined Focused tracers right off the bat, directly head on. He took hella damage and scooted off home before MrCoffee could even get a shot in. I think that kind of pissed off MrCoffee. Things stayed quiet after that, and I nonchalantly suggested to Left_Empty that we snap some recon photos from medium altitude since the clouds were so thin, and he quickly agreed. It took us just a few minutes and we had some boss pics of whatever it was that we were supposed to fly over. I guess that’s down to the intel boys to figure out. Then we made a slow descent to low altitude as we came in on the target. We never even got to low, as Left_Empty dropped our exploding bricks directly on the airfield as we descended, then I hit the gas and scooted to high altitude. From there, we had RichVR get in the ventral turret since some planes were bound to come at us from below as we cruised at high altitude. He dashed back to to the engineer console to activate the engine extinguishers a couple times, but it didn’t seem to be a problem. He seemed to enjoy it, actually. We made for medium altitude once to check our bearings, but in general fishpockets just pointed a general direction to England, and I flew us that way until we could see London. Then I dropped us through the cloud layer, we landed with minimal damage, and we were off to report to Biggins.

I used our new cash to upgrade our last engine to Standard Mk 4, and got a newer radar system as well as a more reliable electrical system to power it. There were no more missions available that gave us any bonuses, so in the morning we trudged out to the briefing hut to hear what we already suspected we were gonna have to do.

Next: mission 21
Previously: missions 16-18
Read Bruce Geryk’s Bomber Crew review here.