100 Hour War Scenario 2 - Zepeda misses out again!

I mentioned in Scenario 1 that one Honduran Corsair had a cannon malfunction and had to abort, inadvertently triggering the dogfight. That was Captain Zapeda. A few hours later he and his comrades were back in action, this time against a pair of Salvadoran Corsairs. And just like on the morning sortie, his guns jammed on testing again............

Major Soto pressed on and in the dogfight that followed claimed two more kills both against Corsairs. At some point a pair of Salvadoran F51s appeared. So this is the setup for Scenario 2. I've messed around a bit with history to get it more playable.

The Salvadoran Corsairs begin about two thirds of the way up the table, with the trio of Hondurans behind them. How far is important given I wanted to give the Salvadorans a chance. The Corsairs used by Honduras don't have Great Dive due to their having quad 20mm cannons and the rule restrictions on only 2 Traits, so to put them just out of engagement range there needs to be at least 22" between them. I left Zepeda in the mix but with no guns - he can still help in what can rapidly turn into a 4v2 even if he cant shoot as the opposition don't know this!  The F51s enter after they pass a raw Pilot Skill test at the end of each turn, adding one die for each turn they fail (or tbh when I thought it was a good idea to get them on to keep the players engaged). They don't use High Cover btw - there is no suggestion of any real coordination going on. Everyone dices for initial Advantage when they start, just as part of the explanation process for new \ first time players)

And that was it. We played three times and it seemed to work.

Corsair on Corsair action. Hondurans in blue, El Salvador in green

I'm going off to polish this one as I think it's a good demo. It's also interesting to see the unusual match up. 

side-note - Zepeda's cannons. After these two actions there was some investigation as to why his cannons failed twice when the others didn't. The result was in some ways emblematic of the war in general. Honduras had bought a batch of 20mm ammunition from the UK, presumably on a discount. Why is this a problem? Well the Corsairs used US M3 20mm cannon, which is in theory a copy of the Hispano 20mm used by the British. Problem is the US version had been "re-engineered" (and wasn't quite as good as the Hispano because of these changes but that's another story) and as a result the UK ammunition was about 1mm thicker than the US version. On older worn out guns this made no difference as the wear and tear coincidentally meant the UK rounds mostly worked. It appears Zepeda's guns were still in reasonable condition so jammed when trying to fire the British ammo. This was apparently resolved by the field expedient of clamping 20mm High Explosive Incendiary \ Armour Piercing into a lathe and grinding them down til they fit. Flying is dangerous but the guys who got that job certainly must have had massive "cojones" :-)