I mean, we
might.
I'm sure the Commonwealth Air Force still has a handful of transport aircraft and for general utility (such as ferrying VIPs around). And maybe a few propeller planes that were still in use as trainers even during this campaign. That would be normal and realistic.
But they wouldn't do us any good here, and the Victorians could probably shoot them down.
If we had a single very specific high value target, I MIGHT say "go ahead, do a single bombing attack with our two F-16s and lone F-105 flying high speed at low altitude and hoping to get out before the Victorians can scramble jets to intercept them." With so few planes left, the odds that they have a large fraction of their force on standby ready to attack an air raid, when we've just been fighting hard for about two weeks
without launching any planes, seems fairly slim.
But I don't think that's really relevant.
With 20 planes, the VAF have enough potential kamikazes for every naval ship and still have 9 planes.
So let the VAF fly more sorties at Monroe and have NCR sabotage wreck their planes more.
OWE for the BRO will include antiair weapons.
As noted, kamikazes don't have a 100% success rate. Our gunboats have nontrivial air defense capability to shoot back at, or shoot down, incoming planes. I wouldn't bet on them to handle a strike by 50 or 100 planes firing antitank or antiship missiles, obviously, but twenty planes that have to come in for gun runs or kamikaze runs are a different story.
We may lose gunboats, but if in the process the Victorians lose the last of their air force, that's not necessarily a disaster. In the long run... well, as I've been saying, if they
really are content to exchange supersonic jets for coal-fired river gunboats, that trade will probably favor us in the long run. We've been lucky enough so far to avoid any gunboat losses and I'm happy with that, but I agreed to the Buffalo Raid fully expecting to lose a few ships, so as far as I'm concerned we're ahead of the game in terms of naval losses.
Just curious did the NCR only sabotage the missile shipments or are the jets themselves broken in a dozen ways?
They broke everything they deniably could.
From the sound of it, the NCR has probably most significantly sabotaged the
engines to wear out quickly. This would be fairly deniable (worst case you admit 'oops our quality control slipped'), and there are a lot of ways in which to do so. It's rather easier to sabotage engines to wear out quickly than it is to, say, sabotage the airframe to just randomly fall apart in midair. Because the sabotaged engines can just be
less carefully made. A tremendous amount of very precise, delicately balanced work goes into making a jet engine that can run for hundreds or thousands of hours, so it doesn't take much "oops" to make the engine only run for, say, tens of hours.
This would result in occasional crashes of F-16s whose engines fail in midflight; it's a single-engine plane. If the engine tears itself apart or terminally overheats, suddenly you're in control of a rather unstable and poorly optimized glider that
only might make it back to friendly-held territory.
But much more often, you'd get a plane that starts making very frightening noises or something and the mechanics back at base look at it and go "fuuuuu-." And it's downchecked for maintenance.
Anti-air is what the Victorian Air Force trains for. They have radar, and we have 2 jets which are on the same performance level to their 20. (Our other 2 functional jets are older and have worse performance.) Putting any of our planes in the air outside of Detroit airspace would be asking for them to be shot down.
I mean, if they're sabotaged
that hard I wouldn't put it out of the question for our three jets (the F-105 can carry air to air missiles and isn't
hopelessly behind an F-16V in my opinion)...
Well. If the Victorians actually did get all twenty planes into the air, what I'd expect to happen is for our jets to reap an alarming toll on the Victorians with missiles, then be mobbed and dogfought to death by the Viks when they closed to gun range.
And since our
entire Air Force already had its glorious last stand, well, I don't think we need to have
yet another one for the survivors.
As for plans, I'd be kinda inclined to wait to blow the bridge until the Viks arrive, to mess with their plans just that little bit more.
At this point, their plans start getting really fucky as soon as the bridge blows anyway.
[Note that Victorians
know about pontoon bridges, and in the novel they're described as using them as an alternative to regular bridges destroyed by airstrikes. However, that was back in the early days of the wars, when the Victorians probably had access to more men trained as engineers in the old Army. Those men are now decrepit oldsters and their expertise has likely
NOT been fully transferred to their successors.]
Our fixed AA umbrella is back in Detroit.
The mobile one with the troops is already thinly spread; having to spread it to cover the navy too would further dilute it.
Our ground troops have benefited from the "Limited AA" bonus against the Victorians when they attempt airstrikes.
In this very update our air defenses are described as shooting down Victorian jets. Moreover, the gunboats themselves have air defense capability. The last time the Victorians successfully launched a large airstrike against us (after Buffalo), we shot down five of their jets in exchange for damage to four of our gunboats.
It is vanishingly unlikely that we would lose all our gunboats to a kamikaze attack by twenty planes. I don't think we'd even lose
most, realistically. A lot of the kamikazes would screw up and miss, or get shot down short of the target.
It's...big. Really big. Nearly 80,000 long tons of cargo capacity big.
WOW. That is some Old World sized freighter. Like, that is literally the maximum size physically used on the Lakes in the present day.
In fact, that is almost certainly
specifically one of these ships.
Honestly I wouldn't blame the Victorians for having written that ship off as, perversely, expendable. She's probably too big to pass through the Welland Canal and go down into Lake Ontario. Which means Buffalo is her only viable home port, and if the Commonwealth wins this war and closes Detroit to Victorian lake traffic, she's almost certainly going to be uneconomical to operate.
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