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" :-)      

100 Hour War part 4 - Decals and done

Paint done, now for decals!

At this point I should mention the Blue Falcon Hobbies decal Patreon. Steve Toth sends out decals to members once a month and in sheer coincidence last month he did a sheet of Honduran and Salvadoran markings for the 100 Hour War. These were (obviously) perfect for this project and were one of the reasons I thought it would be possible, though I was wincing at the Honduran wing tip and rudder markings.

It only took and hour - part of the speed I realised was the fact I was only painting pairs or threes, and also (to my shame) I was only concentrating on the the things you would see on the table, so left the undersides plain. 

And here they are - all painted and ready for action!

F51 Cavalier Mustangs 

Salvadoran Corsairs

Honduran Corsairs

 

100 Hour War- rule tweaks and scenario 1

 So what was I going to do with the models?

I do have a tendency to try and shoehorn games to fit "official" scenarios. I blame Andy Chambers. The problem here is the historical dogfights of the 100 Hour War were quite a bit smaller than a normal BRS game, so the scenarios wouldn't work. Nor would the "Boom Chit" mechanism, where the squadron breaks when it has more Boom chits than planes. 

So here is what I came up with. I'm not restricted by table size and as all the planes are Speed 9 I have a full 6x4 table to deal with. So far so good. 

Boom Chits wont work as advertised as this is a participation game and I may well have pilots playing single planes rather than Squadrons, so in this case Boom Chits are going to be accumulated on individual planes, and if the total exceeds the Pilot Skill, that plane must immediately disengage. The second change to normal BRS is to allow TWO trait cards per plane not just one - again in case we have players with a single plane so that they all get a reasonable flavour of how Traits work. 

Scenario 1 is the first dogfight. This occurred when three Honduran Corsairs were on a ground attack mission. Just before engaging they tested their guns, and one had an embarrassing total fail on all four 20mm. He was ordered to disengage, and turned for home alone. Shortly afterwards he was spotted by a pair of Salvadorian F51s who dived in. He managed to survive long enough to summon the other pair of his flight, and in the following dogfight one F51 was downed. Putting this into a BRS game was pretty straightforward - the unarmed Corsair starts half way down the table with the pair of F51s 18 inches behind him. He can't shoot and only has the Robust Trait, but as the opposition don't know he is toothless he can do everything other than shoot - including Outmanoeuvre . At the end of each turn he makes a pilot skill check and if successful his supports arrive. Simple. The F51s are both Pilot Skill 2 - this represents the Salvadorian pilots seeming have lacked faith in their Mustangs which they only recently had taken delivery of, apparently preferring their "old faithful" Corsairs. The Hondurans have a Skill 4 (Major Soto) and two Skill 3s, one of which is the guy with jammed guns. 

We played this twice on the games day. The first game the Hondurans arrived in time to save their flight mate and shot down a F51. Incidentally this is pretty much happened historically. The second time something went wrong and an F51 shot down the Honduran Flight Leader! This was something of a surprise to say the least. 

100 Hour War - Part 3 Much and unexpected progress

So after printing the models I decided to put the base coats on, and immediately ran into a problem. I got base coats on the F51s and the Salvadoran Corsairs, and decided the later looked wrong. As it was quite late I decided to pack in for the night - three more hours done. I "resolved" to start the Corsairs again first thing, spraying them a green from one of the rattle cans - that seemed like a plan.

I woke early and needed to get the models from the painting station in the loft to take them to the yard for the rattle can treatment, which would be dry when I got in from work. Except when I got to the loft and looked at them again, I thought, bugger that. This was a quick project and maybe they were close enough. I sat down and got on with the darker green mottle pattern, and it went on quickly and easily. While that was drying I put the dark blue on the Honduran Corsairs, then got some details on all three sets, canopies, engines etc. This all went remarkably smooth and quickly. By the time I had to go to work they were ready for the panel lines.

After a disheartening day at work (shock) I hit the panel lines, tidied everything up and varnished them ready for decals. Two hours down. 81 hours to go........ this was looking easy. Famous last words :-)

 

  

 

100 Hours War Part 2 - 16 hours down 84 to go

So a quick update.

Having decided to commit to trying to complete the whole thing in 100 hours I've made a start. I've spent two hours on some basic research (!) to get the idea what was needed, followed up with another two hours nailing the scenario plans down. I was greatly assisted by Rob Hymer who when I mentioned it, loaned me his copy of THE book on the conflict, which is now OOP. Cheers Rob!

Next step was to get the models printed. I was OK with the Corsairs - Planeprinter has several versions and although none are spot on, there's two that will do. The vanilla P51Ds are again quite easy, Planeprinter has them. The fly in the ointment is the Mustang IIs. For the uninitiated these are P51s that were modernised and configured for Counter Insurgency (COIN) operations. For this they have a slightly higher tail, bigger canopy and wingtip fuel tanks, plus some hardpoints. I reached out to Roger Gerrish who is a Gent and good at the technical stuff and after some discussion he rushed off and added some droptanks to the wings of the P51 stl - its not perfect, and I know he's the sort of bloke who would rather do the job properly, but with the wing tanks they look fine and only rivet counters will know the difference. I suspect he will finish a "proper" model in the near future.

In theory all ten models I will need (6 F4U and 2 each of P51 and F51) will print on one run. Sadly the first attempt failed and I've had to mess around running it again. That's another ten hours gone.

    

100 Hour Challenge

I'm doing a BRS Participation \ Demo game next Saturday 20th July at Pendraken Miniatures in Middlesbrough.

That's the theory anyway. I had intended to do a "Bog Standard" demo with the Midway starter set, but as I was surfing youtube I was struck by a series of coincidences that made me change my mind and try something different. 

To some nations football is important. As an Englishman I'm quite embarrassed that England (men) have won the square root of Bugger All in my lifetime. OK not quite, I was six months old in 1966 but you get the idea. The English supporters anthem "Three Lions on your Shirt" included the line "30 years of hurt, never stopped me dreaming" and that was released in 1996 for the European Championships where we almost made it. They usually release the bloody song every championship but have to change the line. Its probably "58 years of hurt" now. As England are playing in the European Finals tomorrow, football is on my mind.

July 20th 1969 marked the end of the "100 Hour War" between El Salvador and Honduras. It's also known as the "Football War" or "Soccer War" as it started after a series of rather hostile World Cup qualifying matches between the two Nations. Neither side are happy with the football associated name for the conflict as it was about rather more than a footie match and prefer the 100 Hour War - so I'm going with that.

The other interesting fact was that the war involved the last dogfights between piston engine fighters. It really marked the end of the prop fighter era.

So that's the plan - do a BRS Demo \ Participation game based on the 100 Hour War, and to make it spicy, try and do the whole project in under 100 hours. 

Sharp Practice Naval Landing Party - Safe in the Harbour at Last (almost)

Almost done now so I thought I would update on this project. This was one of those side projects that has taken quite a while to complete. I say complete but in truth there are still a couple of elements missing - more later.

So anyway let's introduce the crew of His Majesty's Frigate Venus

First up the senior officers. Most of these are unnamed as of yet, but that will come. Left to Right our Gallant Commander (who I now realise probably needs an epaulette but there are loads of them spare in the plastic kits), unnamed Bosun and Midshipman Poopdekker, Sally to his friends

Next the other leaders, a hatless Midshipman (who may actually just be a sailor originally but he looked so damned "Sharp" that I thought he needs promoting), and a Marine Officer

Speaking of the Marines, here they are. Two groups in close order, and one skirmishing.

Next up the Jolly Jack Tars - Two groups of skirmishers and two large groups of sailors with mixed weapons.

Lastly the gunners. Although there are two guns here the plan is to only use one (if any) and swap out the gun to represent different sizes of cannon.

And the group shot

So putting these together and getting some pics has highlighted some shortfalls. Firstly I probably need an option of junior leader for the Marine skirmishers. That's a bit of a pain as there are no really suitable figures except some of the firing line types which have extra braid on their shoulders. I'll see what can be done with one of them. I'll also need a Deployment Point - I'm thinking of a Rum Cask and a Marine guard but while I think it sounds good I don't think it makes much narrative sense. Will have a think.

The Venus's are an interesting force. Theyre going to lack any sort of staying power but I think they will be ok as a raiding unit, which I think seems reasonable. Time will tell :-)