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Natural Born Soviet Airwoman - Airplanes vs Aliens

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Character Sheet
  • Informational
    • Kilesso Kristina Vsevolodovna
    (Kilesso is her surname, Kristina is her first name, and her friends call her Tina.)
    Pilot for the VVS

    Hard​
    Calm​
    Keen​
    Daring​
    -2​
    0​
    +3​
    +1​
    Institutional Move

    Positive Heroism: Ongoing while a Soviet pilot operates under 3000 meters, they ignore 1 Injury Penalty and up to 2 G-force penalty. This is for the purposes of rolls only.

    Mastery - Slipstream
    - Tables have Turned: In Dogfight! you can use Keen to turn the tables on your attacker, and Daring to go on the offensive. When you Draw a Bead, you can opt to take G-force equal to Speed factor rather than a Hard Move.

    I-16 Type 13


    Modifications
    - Gun Harmonics (and electric firing triggers)
    - Upgrade to x2 Heavy Machine Guns, x2 Machine Guns
     
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  • Informational
    • [X] Go for one of the fighters.

    Uh, if we have surprise wouldn't going after the fighters make more sense? They're much easier to take down from surprise, whereas bombers require sustained effort to down and don't tend to be very hard to hit without a fighter escort
     
    Wiadi said:
    I feel like from a narrative perspective that's a hell of a lever to pull on only the second mission, but maybe rapid escalation is the name of the game here - if so, I dread to consider what Phase 3 will look like.
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    "I'm from Sevastopol and I say kill 'em all."

    Like, it's a hell of a thing to do early, agreed, but shock and awe make a lot of sense from the perspective of the Alien Invaders.
     
    [X] Go for one of the fighters.

    10ebbor10 said:
    I wonder how a nuclear weapon would behave in their dense atmosphere.
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    I've actually been wondering about how transonic airflow works in their dense atmosphere. Speaking very, very broadly, a denser medium should mean a higher speed of sound, which combined with the additional parasitic drag from the higher density slowing us down means we'll have to worry about mach buffeting and compressibility stalls and so on approximately never on that side of the portal. But I am very much not an aerodynamicist.

    Anyway, regarding nuclear weapons? Best guess, marginally smaller AoE of thermal pulse (more atmospheric absorbtion); larger AoE of shockwave/blast effects. Definitely faster-moving shockwave, which will certainly complicate the whole "getting the bomber out of its own bomb's radius" thing.
     
    If everyone else is being reckless probably good to not do that.
    [X] Hang back and play overwatch for one of the other pilots.
     
    Rolling for overwatch!
    Plausbius threw 3 10-faced dice. Reason: D10's Total: 22
    9 9 5 5 8 8
     
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    2-3: Tina Needs A New Pair of Shoes
  • Threadmarks
    • You decided to ease back on the throttle a bit: somebody needed to play overwatch, and too many pilots piling onto a target was asking for a collision or friendly fire.

    Of course, they wanted the bounty. Like every other job in the Union, the Government would pay extra if you did a good job, and for pilots, that meant putting down the Invader's aircraft would score you a thousand rubles.

    Even under rationing, that was new shoes money.

    You positioned yourself on Lera's wing as the rest of the section broke to chase the other escort, and the two of you closed rapidly. You kept your eyes on the larger plane, and sure enough you saw something moving on the tail. Suddenly, the plane ahead of you broke into a turn.

    "Boss, the big one has a tailgun! They've spotted us!" You reported quickly.

    Lera didn't respond: he was too busy lining up his shot. The invader went to bank left, and you skewed the rudder over to drift in, ready to catch him. The pilot panicked and tried to wing back over, but too late. Sickly yellow-green tracers, including the thick, long spikes from the heavy guns, speared through the rear of the enemy plane, and something broke loose. Lera chased it into the dive, but it was already over as far as you could tell. A fire, tinted an unnatural purple, spouted from the rear of the aircraft as it began to dive away.

    You glanced over at the other two pilots just in time to see them score some hits before the enemy plane began to climb. Fuck, it was fast: tracers were chasing it, but it was already pulling away, and pulling your wingmates out of the fight.

    Just you and that observer. The tube on the back of the plane swiveled again to point straight at you.

    ===

    What do you do?​
    ​
    Believe it or not, the cash bounty for Soviet pilots was real. It's purchasing power under the militaristic Stalinist government, which produced only small quantities of consumer goods for those favoured by the party, was less impressive, especially once wartime inflation kicked in.​
    Adhoc vote count started by open_sketch on Jun 18, 2019 at 9:53 PM, finished with 409 posts and 1 votes.
    • [X] Try to shoot the tailgun before the tailgun shoots you.
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  • Threadmarks
    • Well, this is a toughie. I don't really want to go one-on-one with a tailgun, but I think we're already near the limits of our airspeed and altitude. So, I'm not sure we can do much maneuvering.

    It may be the time for crude plans.

    [X] Try to shoot the tailgun before the tailgun shoots you.
     
    open_sketchbook said:
    Of course, they wanted the bounty. Like every other job in the Union, the Government would pay extra if you did a good job, and for pilots, that meant putting down the Invader's aircraft would score you a thousand rubles.
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    This is a pretty decent way to sabotage your own economy. It sets up numerous perverse incentives. Some of which you can see here (kill-stealing) but even industry is affected. Under the Soviet system, production was inconsistent and rushed. When materials became available, production would rump up massively to gain all the various bonusses and all that, and then crash again due to shortage. Rapid production meant low quality, and unstable production meant varying wages for workers.

    Now bonuses are not inherently bad, you just have to ensure that they remain bonuses, rather than becoming required as part of your living wage. Also, that the thing they're awarded for is actually useful.

    open_sketchbook said:
    - Tables have Turned: When you Dogfight! to go from the hunted to the hunter, you can roll +Keen instead.
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    Is this applicable in our current situation?
     
    With no rent and fixed staple food prices subsidized as low as they can go, this soviet union had well compensated for that. you don't *have* to work to live, but money gets you shinies.

    like new shoes
     
    Military pilots are ultimately a pretty small subset of workers. A bonus system for them is unlikely to have massive distorting effects on the economy unless they're being rewarded like Roman chariot racers or something. If it accidentally produced a somewhat broken incentive structure for pilots, then that would be an issue, but only for pilots. It would also be hilariously on-brand for the Soviet Union and quite an interesting generator of plot elements.

    Apropos of nothing, Red Plenty is generally a pretty great read for an overview of the Soviet economy's structural problems and the systemic issues facing any planned economy. Although it focuses more on the Khrushchev era, with Stalin as more the ever-present backdrop. Also, obviously it is not set in an alternate universe where Stalin and most of the Politburo fell down the stairs and aliens from the front of a Popular Mechanics cover are now attacking through storms.
     
    I'm going to speculate that the aliums are using lifters for propulsion. That sort of dense atmosphere is great for lifters.
    Also, I'm not 100% sure about this, but the blue glow from their engines might be sparking between their anodes and cathodes as they transition from a dense atmosphere where the safe gap length between the anode and cathode of their ionic drives is smaller, to our thinner one where it's longer.
    This means that they're losing a shit ton of efficiency on our side of the portal.
     
    It does look a lot like that, yeah. That said, the efficiency on our current iteration of electrohydrodynamic thrusters is pretty terrible even if you were in an atmosphere thick enough to pop you like a grape. If it's anything like an IRL version they shouldn't be able to fly on their side, let alone Earth's.

    Being able to make EHD thrusters work at all for propelling aircraft would mean that they're either using some sort of rather exotic materials or technology, or they have the power of both God and Anime on their side.
     
    Honestly, the whole bonus thing reminds me of a joke I got from Longtom over on SB:
    Aghanistan war is going on and group of spetznas are loaded on cargo plane going to kabul.

    "Comrades", speaks the lieutenant, " for every snipers head you receive 200 rubl and a week of vacation,"
    Everybody nod approvingly and trip goes on. Soon the plane land and as soon it stops, the spetznas hurry away. lieutenant wonders why, but concludes that probably to take a leak or something. Two hours pass, lieutenant is rather miffed for his elite troops missing, but suddenly they appear - everybody has at least two heads, some have three and few have even 4 heads, dangling from beards and hair.

    Lieutenants eyes fill with horror and he screams: "Stop you fuckwits, This is refuel stop in Tashkent!"
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    Slightly fixed to make it probably more PC. And apologies about the grammar.

    The real question is, what are they after here?
     
    Admiral Skippy said:
    It does look a lot like that, yeah. That said, the efficiency on our current iteration of electrohydrodynamic thrusters is pretty terrible even if you were in an atmosphere thick enough to pop you like a grape. If it's anything like an IRL version they shouldn't be able to fly on their side, let alone Earth's.

    Being able to make EHD thrusters work at all for propelling aircraft would mean that they're either using some sort of rather exotic materials or technology, or they have the power of both God and Anime on their side.
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    Not necessarily. Our understanding of EHD is really poor right now because it was seen as a dead-end tech for the longest time (largely because they were measuring performance in a way that made it seem worse than it actually was) so I wouldn't use the figures achieved by current experimental units as demonstrative of their true potential. Certainly huge gain in efficiency can be made if you can shrink the diameter of the ionizing wire as low as possible.
     
    Crazy Tom said:
    Not necessarily. Our understanding of EHD is really poor right now because it was seen as a dead-end tech for the longest time (largely because they were measuring performance in a way that made it seem worse than it actually was) so I wouldn't use the figures achieved by current experimental units as demonstrative of their true potential. Certainly huge gain in efficiency can be made if you can shrink the diameter of the ionizing wire as low as possible.
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    I'm aware of that, as I used to be quite interested in EHDs, but we're talking about 1940s technology. This is the era when one of the best sources of voltage to even run basic experiments on the Biefield-Brown effect was Van De Graaf generators. Very thin wires running thirty kilovolts at enough current to lift a plan is also quite a substantial engineering challenge; certainly not an impossible one, and I'm interested in the technology as well, but one that remains formidable even today.

    The fact that we in 2019 are now seeing the potential of the technology using more advanced techniques does not mean it's still very impressive for aliens at a roughly equivalent level to WW2 fighter craft to be doing it. As I said, they must be using something rather exotic, by Earth standards.
     
    Admiral Skippy said:
    I'm aware of that, as I used to be quite interested in EHDs, but we're talking about 1940s technology. This is the era when one of the best sources of voltage to even run basic experiments on the Biefield-Brown effect was Van De Graaf generators. Very thin wires running thirty kilovolts at enough current to lift a plan is also quite a substantial engineering challenge; certainly not an impossible one, and I'm interested in the technology as well, but one that remains formidable even today.

    The fact that we in 2019 are now seeing the potential of the technology using more advanced techniques does not mean it's still very impressive for aliens at a roughly equivalent level to WW2 fighter craft to be doing it. As I said, they must be using something rather exotic, by Earth standards.
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    Considering they're using WW2 era technology to TEAR A PORTAL BETWEEN WORLDS that seems eminently probable. :p

    But yes, there's definitely something fishy about their aircraft. Chiefly their use of a dedicated propulsion ring strikes me as a tad odd since one of the main benefits of EHD is that you can nail it all over your aircraft to turn the whole skin into a propulsion system, which also has the advantage of letting you control your aircraft with thrust vectoring. With WW2 level technology it won't be anything really fancy, but you'd still be able to induce yaw moments quite easily.

    Alternatively they could... no, I mea... you don't think they'd slather radioactive isotopes unto the drive ring to ionize the air instead of using wires? I mean, to generate that sort of blue glow... it'd be insane.
     
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