Thoughts at 20,000 ft....

A French Dewoitine D520 sporting a rather natty looking paint job....

I am not actually at 20,000 ft as I type this - more like 2ft and on the sofa - but it helps to visualise what I am trying to do in respect sorting out the dreaded and thrice-cursed special abilities attached to the aircraft cards available within the Axis and Allies Angels 20/Bandits High game. I have typed the whole lot out and have assigned each ability to either of pilot, airframe, tactics or bin (reserved for the more gimmicky abilities on offer!). My current task is to list these abilities by type so that I will have page of pilot abilities, a page of airframe and so on.

It is not difficult to do but I have made it so by typing the whole thing out in Word rather than using Excel - which would have been a whole lot easier to manipulate the data with filters etc.

Hey ho, so you live and learn.

Essentially the end result of all this effort will be that that the flight charts I have designed (each of which feature four aircraft of the same type) will have embedded special abilities where applicable for the airframe. Pilot abilities will be determined by the quality of the flier in question and the tactics to be employed will be determined by the scenario being undertaken. At this stage I am unsure if all of the abilities detailed will be used - there seems to be a degree of overlap with some of them - but I want to try and include as many of them as I can.

Next Wednesday evening at the club will see us taking to the skies again with some of Mr Fox's new aircraft and his new, hand crafted hexed cloth which will give a much larger area to fight over (or, as Mr fox dryly observed, a bigger area to hide in....). The plan is to give the 1940 French air force a run out against the Germans for a change - D.520s and Ms.406s against Bf 109s and a Stuka. This should be an entertaining game and no mistake - Mr Fox's French aircraft are rather lovely to look at, full of Gallic charm and swagger - and it will be interesting to see how the 520s perform.

Meanwhile though, back to the special abilities....