Okay, first off, two things, very important which I want to put up front before I
go on my rant.
First is, I want to personally thank each and every one of you who attended
tonight's "Hunt For Yamamoto". It was your participation that made it as much
fun as it turned out to be.
Second is, I want to thank the AvA staff for working up the map and
coming up with the "snapshot" for tonight's initial ops.
Now I'm takin' off my happy face and gettin' down to brass tacks.
The 47 Ronin committed itself to this operation fully and I/we posted up
both our intention to fly Japanese and our intention to have a briefing at 9PM
and liftoff shortly prior to that.
At 10 minutes until the hour there were NO, repeat, NO arena admins
acknowledging any text on "200". Thus, I was forced to organize both
sides and lay out the basic orders for each side. I had no real problem with
that, but WAS disappointed that it occured.
At 1 minute PRIOR to the briefing, one of the admins came in and immediately
began screwing around with the map itself and the fuel burn rate, stating he
was going to make it 4.0. With a burn rate of 4.0 the Zekes would have
had 30 minutes of cruising time.
It was only when I stated I'd withdraw my Zekes from the evening's festivities
that it was changed to a more "fun" / reasonable multiplier.
With the tinkering with the map, one of my guys found himself totally
disallowed from even flying a plane from A17 until (2 minutes after we'd launched)
we discovered he had to exit the arena to reset things on his end due to the
last minute futzing around. Bottom line: there's a guy , and a squaddie; who'll never
fly in there again , and I don't blame him a bit.
When we finally did get up, things got a bit fun, UNTIL.... there were TWO, not
just ONE, but TWO American CV groups due north of our field. That was absolutely
ridiculous, and it was only after the fact when both Yamamoto and his Staff G4Ms
had been shot down, and furballing began that our unfortunate Zeke pilots
found themselves swimming in an entire sector of 5-inch puffy ack. No excuse
for those CVs being there given the mission outlines stated initially by the
AvA staffers. Hell, if we'd taken the direct route to "Bougainville", both G4Ms
would have been shredded just by the CV ack.
Basically, it was a major league "cluster%$%$" for ten minutes before
and ten minutes after the stated official launch time. I found myself apologizing
to the guys who attended, and it wasn't even my show.
We ran the Op a second time and were successful in getting Yamamoto and
his Staff landed safely, but I think that was only because most of the
Americans/Knights had logged off.
After that Op, we went into plain furball mode between 24 and 22 and had
some magnificently fun stallfights for about two hours. (A couple of us
swapped sides to balance things out.)
So, bottom line was there was a lot more fun than "uh ohs", but the
"uh ohs" were entirely avoidable and I lay that directly on the last minute
tinkering with the map/settings and the ill-advised placement of the CV groups.
My guess is somebody got "detailed" to oversee things for the 9PM show
and they slept late or didn't read the memo.
Rant off, you may begin flaming now.
Honto!
Oddball
The 47 Ronin
