First off let me appologize for our typical abysmal bombing
If there is any squad that level bombs worse the VF-17 and actually tries at it, I'm not aware of it. We actually practiced the day before but I didn't see it say anything about manual cal. in the write up so we practiced MA style Thursday night. I sent Shifty a PM that night, only to find out it was manual, DOOH! So we practice in the TA before hand with manual cal. and I didn't have an issue (oops that reminds me I don't think I set the TA back to normal yet
), everything dropped fine. I get into FSO and start trying to calibrate over the water and I can't get my speed within 120mph of what I'm doing, after repeated tries
So I made a best guess and dropped, I think I hit the ground but that doesn't come up in the buffer
. From the logs, it seems the rest of VF-17 bombed just as well
. To make VF-17's day worse, two of our top kill leaders, I think Pollux was in the high 20's and Branch was in the low 30's for kills without loss in a fighter sortie, were both shot down by Hopper
. Of course this does put me alone at the top of the leader board
. Not sure If this means I should put Hopper on top of my hit list or avoidance list
.
Anyway the real reason I wanted to post this is, despite our poor bombing showing, the teamwork between the 4 squads (VF-17, G3-MF, VMF-222, and Air Raiders), last night was great. It's not often 4 squads will work together that well for timing an attack. Position reports and timing was critical to how it played out. Without G3-MF's last position report, and Air Raiders time to port, we would have ended up going in too early but since they told me exactly where they were we knew to loiter for a bit to get the timing correct. And the timing was very good. Our TBM losses were fairly light for being TBM's against cannon birds, and the cover for egress from G3-MF and VMF-222 was very good
. Special thanks to the Air Raiders for what was essentially a combination diversion/suicide mission, I'm sure your attack held back a lot of enemy birds from following us back to our carrier.
BigRat
