This was a game between my brother and I. He hadn't played in over a decade and wanted to try out a small game under 1500 points. He wouldn't tell me what I was facing. So I set up this scenario.
It was a quiet day on a quiet Lyran planet near the House Kurita and the Clan occupation zone in the late 3060's. A single ARC-5W Archer and two squads of Nighthawk battle armor lazily stroll through a town south of a spaceport. An incoming freighter dropship has been deemed suspicious but it's probably nothing. Show up, check it out.
Unbeknownst to the Lyran defenders the freighter is carrying a company of Kuritan renegades who send three Wasp Mk I LAMs to destroy the spaceport defenders and allow their dropship to land. These Drac renegades are the Shadow's Fury. Little is known about them. They do follow their own code of honor but seem more like Ronin, masterless warriors roaming the stars seizing the supplies they need to survive from those they deem as enemies of the Draconis Combine. The three Wasp LAMs fly in AeroSpace Fighter mode on the low altitude map toward the spaceport and city (marked with counters) ready to drop bombs on any defenders.
The Lyran defenders are shocked as the spaceport tower controllers warn them of incoming fighters! The two battle armor squads run for buildings. One squad ducks into a nearby research station while the other gets into the power station (dice on top specifies where they hid). The battle armor can literally do nothing against aircraft. Archer pilot says, "Oh crap." There is nowhere for him to go.
All three LAMs drop their bombloads at the same time. They fly in at different elevations on the low altitude map and all target the Archer. The rules don't say anything against this so my Archer looks to the sky as three Wasp LAMs simutanously divebomb him. Two bombloads hit doing 100 points of damage to the Archer. Mercifully, one bombload misses. We assumed the damage was to the front of the Archer because we couldn't find out otherwise. My Archer's left arm was blown off but it survived. One LAM was shot up but it survived. With the bombs dropped my infantry headed for hardened buildings for better protection.
My brother kept the LAMs in
ASF mode and now began air strikes using his lasers and one-shot SRMs. He once again manuevered so all three LAMs fly in at the same time at different elevations and attacked the same target. He wanted to know if he could target the rear armor of my Archer but we couldn't find how that worked for targeting purposes. We know that
LOS and range is drawn from hex 0909 on the ground map but does the facing of the
ASF in low altitude affect what facing it hits on the ground target? Anyhoo, the LAMs attacked a battlearmor squad but did no damage. The Archer was still functioning and the LAMs were getting nervous about that so flew back to their freighter dropship, which was still approaching orbit.
This battle required a lot of flipping through sourcebooks trying to answer many questions. I didn't find air-to-ground and ground-to-air attacks easy to understand. Many of the rules for it are inferred to but not implicitly laid out or the rules seem to be embedded in the examples but not mentioned anywhere else that we could find. No one was killed but I was very happy to play this game because I will be much better prepared for a future air attack now knowing the importance of ranging myself to hex 0909 on the ground map (and, of course, added two to the range for each level of elevation). Wasp Mk I LAMs are deadly just for the 5 ton internal bomb bays!
