[Sun] 18 Nov 2012 (Flaming Choppers Outta the Sky)

[Ferrard Carson]

A huge thank you to all comrades who attended this little session of insanity! First things first:

A helicopter fell on me.

I don't remember my fireteam, role, or squad for this one, because roughly 4 seconds after deploying a chinook promptly fell onto my head . Such an early death meant only one thing: toast and tea break! So I can't complain, really.

Unfortunately we took fire on landing and I died the moment I was about to put her down.

during take off I hit a tree some of our guys were using as cover

i did get to click the left mouse button once in an attempt to get out of the chopper, so it was interactive, right?

Even if it backfired horribly, it made for a very very memorable experience.

I sincerely apologize to the 1/3rd to 1/2 of the dudes who were pretty much killed upon arrival at the LZ during Wideola. I was anticipating a hairy landing, but not something quite so catastrophic as that, and I know you guys didn't come to a session to sit and watch other people play a mission for half-an-hour. All the blame, in this case, lies with my cockamamie plan that, in retrospect, could have been executed a lot better. See this post for why I chose to go with that plan and what I hoped to accomplish with it, and I'll expound on what could've been improved shortly.

Workshop
Deployed as the Wicked Witch of the West
The workshop started with the standard fire-team fire and movement drills, something that most of us can do in our sleep now, which is very good. We continued the routine for the first half-hour, running through vehicle mounting / dismounting, street crossing, and traveling through alleyways all in rapid succession. Then everyone mounted up for the new concept, kitbashed together by me the night before.

Fire and movement has been a very helpful exercise, but it's becoming rote to us now, so I figured we could use some extrapolation to something bigger, and something that we encounter far more often: Fire and Maneuver at a squad-level. The drill consists of a squad-level assault uphill across 150m of open hillside into a set of fortifications, defended by two nasty OpForians. If the entire squad were to charge, they would be cut down in the course of 20 seconds. The solution is for one fire-team or more to serve as a Base of Fire element, laying down massed amounts of suppressive fire against any likely location for an enemy to appear. This keeps the OpFor heads down with bullets snapping overhead at all times while the Assault element closes to flank the fortifications. At this point, the Assault and Base of Fire elements must coordinate very closely, with whoever is leading the Assault element constantly reporting how deep into the fortifications they are in order to avoid friendly fire. As the Assault element reports progress, the entire Base of Fire element shifts its fire to the uncleared portion of fortifications. It's the same concept as walking artillery, practiced by the British army in World War I - suppress the enemy and don't stop suppressing them until your troops are knocking on their kneecaps with bullets.

Look forward to more thorough runs of this exercise, and possibly some variations in terrain to assault, and thank you as always for attending the workshops that Tiger and I put together.

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Arrival SE
Deployed as Alpha Squad Medic
We started off the session with a huge series of bangs as Takistani locals laid down fire on us the moment our feet hit tarmac. Our CO ordered us southeast, with Bravo assaulting a town while Alpha denied the airfield from Takistani hands. Unfortunately, Bravo was bogged down and out of position when Alpha got taken from behind by Tigershark by a few squads of OpFor. In quick succession, just about every leader in Alpha was cut down, and by the time someone stepped up, we were half the squad we used to be. As Alpha advanced through Jaza on Bravo's southern flank, I followed them, tending to any bumps or scrapes they suffered and cross-checking Bravo every now and then as well.

Then the CO cried out for help. Back at the airfield. I snagged the GPS from my dear dead squad leader to help me navigate and set out on the long trek west, only to be halted some 400 meters away by my new squad leader reporting that the CO wasn't responding to comms, and that I should leave him for dead. I was about to ask permission to go and confirm the CO's condition when I noticed a Takistani standing in the middle of the airfield. Looking at me. "Run away! I'm just a medic! Geneva Convention! Red Cross! AAAAAAAA!" *keys radio* "Yup, he's dead."

Loy Manara was empty, its residents having picked up their guns and come for our blood, and then in the interest of time, I authorized "victory" fire to scare off the locals.

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Wideola
Deployed as That Crazy Yank Who is Out to Get Us Killed, a.k.a. Platoon Commander
Ah the insanity. A heliborne assault on the Zelenogorsk supermarket to seize all the beans, maps, tents, and matches that we can get our hands on. A CZ-500 would be a nice find too... Oh wait, wrong mod. We mounted up. We took off. We landed. We died. Well, not all of us - in fact, we cleared four potential cache locations and a little under half the squad even made it back to the chopper!

Oh yeah, and killa was shot in the head. By a friendly. Again. Poor killa and his horrible Wideola luck



Where could I have done better though? Well, for starters, there was a field some 100 meters to the west of that parking lot that would have given our chopper pilots more room in which to maneuver. Not all of us are Dslyecxi, after all, and the Chinook is a flying bathtub. A durable flying bathtub, but as Black Mamba put it, all it takes is one bullet to the pilot, and everything goes to shit. Still, Mamba's flying was superb, even whilst dead. Zitron's was pretty stellar too, managing to land in a tight corner and marred only by the vengeance of a tree. I'm not throughly convinced that the field would have been the best LZ either - the very trait that makes it perfect for helicopters makes it death on a plate for infantry, since there's no cover at all.

What I should have done was the following though:

• 1) We take a crew-chief with each chopper and put the pilots and crew-chiefs in a separate channel with the CO.
  2) Black Mamba's Alpha Chopper orbits the LZ and the crew-chief and mounted infantry provide cover with the miniguns and M240.
  3) Zitron's Bravo Chopper hits the LZ, dismounts, then takes off and orbits while the crew-chief provides cover.
  4) Black Mamba's Alpha Chopper spirals in and lands while Bravo and Zitron's Bravo Chopper provide security.
  5) Black Mamba's Alpha Chopper takes off and both choppers orbit the town with their chiefs providing air support.

This sequence would feature high-strength air support at all stages of the landing, would place the highest-strength element on the ground as quickly as possible, and would allow a sequential landing so as not to crowd the LZ with choppers.

All in all, the concept at least was proven to be fairly solid, if high-strung and dependent on good pilots and a small bit of luck. I feel like we should try some variations on this, maybe with Blackhawks, maybe with the different LZ, maybe with dragons. Not M47s. Dragons. Actual, firebreathing dragons.

Khalid Pass
Deployed as Russian Alpha 3 Rifleman (AT)
During this runthrough of my mission, I found out a few things:

• 1) It's still too dark on the Russian side
  2) RPGs are hard to kill people with - it might be okay to give anti-tank riflemen the standard loadout again.
  3) Bullets hurt

Beyond that, this was an interesting round of Khalid Pass, with the eventual win going to OpFor. Danny's plan for the Russian squad was both simple and complex at the same time. The squad was to spread out in fire-team sized packets and take three separate strong-points across the ridge. Our southern troops were buzzed by a helicopter, but held their own. In the north, Alpha 3 opened up on a fire-team's worth of Takistanis at just about the same time as they sent bullets our way. I was switching back to my trusty 107 when a 5.56mm bullet went in one side of my head and out the other.

A few minutes later, I ended up having a beautiful view of a fireteam-plus-medic succumbing to one of the most effective grenade bombardments I've ever seen. The very first explosion took out three dudes and injured a fourth and fifth, who were finished off by the subsequent billion or so little spherical bastards that were lobbed onto the strongpoint. Turns out, not coordinating between fire-teams leads to excessively accurate fire!
On friendlies.

Eventually the only Takistanis left were wriggling around the crash site, pinned by sporadic gunfire coming at them from relatively stationary Ruskies to both their flanks. Finally, a Russian bullet sank home, and the Takistani irregulars broke and ran, living to fight another day.

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Mission Comments
There was some self-inflicted logistical difficulty on the Russian side as Danny had us all hop out of our single Ural and split up into three separate UAZ's (no idea how Danny himself got to the engagement area), but as far as I can tell, most of the Russian forces were on their way relatively quickly. Apparently there was a significant amount of confusion on the Takistani side, to which I have to ask: What can I do, as a mission maker, to make the way out of base more obvious without dropping the premise of persistent bases?

Also, I noticed a lot fewer flares used this time around (maybe because I didn't have a grenade launcher this time). Should I make a note somewhere to remind FTLs of their tools? I might as well make a note that Russian forces have red flares, and Takistani forces have green flares, not that it makes a difference when you're blinded by looking at it.

Moonless SE
Deployed as Bravo Squad Medic
Moonless was a mixed bag of almonds and almond-shaped arsenic pills, ringing just about as true to the last time we played it as before, the primary difference being that this time, the ASR_AI sent one technical on a huuuuge flanking move when its two buddies screamed bloody murder upon being bloodily murdered. On the one hand, it was a rip-roaring success (again) because the only casualties we took were due to friendly fire (again). The Infantry column took forever to reach us (again) and they died in a split second (again).

Here is where things got seriously out of whack. Due to the moderate length of time between mission start and the opening shots, people got antsy. Because I was hosting, people started asking me meta questions, and I ended up having to metagame the mission a little bit because no one would respect command's commands. When the technicals came, the first one caught at least two of our dudes down in the valley against orders, looting the bodies. Then, also against orders, someone fired an RPG at that technical AND MISSED BY AT LEAST 30 METERS, necessitating the initiation of ambush even though the first technical had barely entered the kill-zone and the second wasn't anywhere nearby. It is a testament to the weakness of ASR_AI vision in the nighttime and the paucity of enemy forces that we didn't take any casualties at all.

Even worse, some minutes later when Bravo was moving along the crest of the northern hill, most of Bravo started shooting at targets down the slope to our north while maybe half the squad was on the northern slope despite Bravo Squad Leader's constant commands to get on the southeast side. After one such order, the entire squad continued firing in full view of at least one operational ZU-23 truck 800 meters away (e.g., not within our effective engagement range, but well within its horrible-rape radius). If it had been daylight, or if it had been vanilla AI or players operating against us, half the squad would have been erased right then and there.

Once it came time to clear the town, Alpha and Bravo apparently performed a fire-team exchange program, as elements of Alpha came over to Bravo's assigned Western side of Mulladost, while elements of Bravo wandered over to Alpha's assigned Eastern side of Mulladost. The Alpha element earns my ire, however, for shooting our MMG team in the face as they examined a truck in a secured sector that would have had at least four friendly markers near it if anyone looked at a map.

There's no video. It would not be pretty. Let's not ever repeat that sorry performance, shall we?

========================================

Since that would end my AAR on a fairly sour note, let's instead focus on the unofficial after-session shenanigans, shall we?

We ran through Cholo twice as the player-count dwindled. Both times were drug-filled and crazy, and I loved it all! I even shot both police-dudes in the second runthrough! *foams*

Then Glorious Comrade Fer rejoined us and took us all in a time machine to before we were born, when some smurfs (and a KSK medic) were asked to protect a panicky reporter from dastardly twerps with guns. Everything went really well, with the exception of my Bravo fire-team forgetting to check our sector for a brief moment. Fortunately, Mamba's 240 resolved the issue (a technical) fairly handily.

All was well, with the fire-teams maneuvering smoothly under Fer's orchestration until, like Mamba said, Bravo got tunnel vision to our right flank while crossing undulating terrain. Cue baddies behind a rock 50m to our left who wiped the entire group. The cowering reporter was the last to die, and he shall always be remembered by his two wives and fifteen kids in eight different countries. By differing names, of course, but remembered nonetheless.

~ Ferrard

[thekev506]

Watching the video of Wideola, the whole chopper-to-head event is made 100% worthwhile for just how cinematic it looks. My hat goes off to the two chopper pilots for stepping up to the plate and getting both chinooks down in a really small LZ - I don't think I could've done it. The actual helo crash was just bad luck.