Portable Air Wargame - One Against Many (Missions One & Two)

One Against Many: the next Portable Air Wargame mission (like all in this present series of refights, taken from a scenario in the Achtung! Spitfire boardgame) involves a single Spitfire (piloted by Pilot Officer Johnny Allen) intercepting a squadron of Ju88A-5s.

The Set-Up:

PO Allen coming in on the port side of the Ju88s.

The Combat:

He moves in and engages the outside Ju88, causing some damage...

Allen makes a rookie mistake and in lining up for a better shot, exposes himself to the fire of several rear gunners and takes so much damage that he has to break off!

Mission Two:

Once again, PO Allen moves in on the port side of the Ju88 squadron...

He takes the same shot as the first time, agains causing some damage...

This time, Allen stays to the Port side and the dorsal gunner misses...

PO Allen closes in on the outside Ju88 again...

Game Notes: This game worked fine but led me to re-visit the way that damage works, specifically whether it should be possible for a fighter to take down a medium-sized bomber in a single turn.  The method for allowing this is follows: any dice which hits can be re-rolled to try and get an extra hit, and this continues until this dice misses.  So in the last mission, if PO Allen, rolled 5,6,1,2, he could re-roll the 5 & 6 and if he rolled 3 and 5, then this would count for 3 hits overall.  Now, the British in the first 9 months or so of the war were notoriously bad at bringing down German bombers and this was attributed to lack of harmonized guns.  So one could make this exploding damage dependent upon having harmonized guns...
The other change I have made is to allow missed dice to be re-rolled if the firer is on the six o'clock line of the target.  This reflects the reality that it was much easier to achieve hits from this position.
Although I am very wary of introducing complexity into the simplicity of the game, these mechanisms don't seem to slow down the game to any noticeable degree but encourage more realistic tactics.