Our final mission of the Campaign was an attack on enemy artillery emplacements. The bombers were able to complete their mission before we could stop them, and gave us our first loss of the Campaign. Getting back into the fight in our Lagg-3 and I-16 (the lone survivor of us was still in his biplane), we managed to bring down four of the bombers, being heavily damaged in the process by the combination of tail gunners and a furball with their fighter escort. Within seconds, two of us were down from Ju.88 tail gunners. We throttled back up, spread ourselves out, and raced to the attack. Before we knew it, a large horde of bombers was approaching, with a mass of Falco's as escort. With the clouds forming a ring around us, we throttled down and marveled at the beauty of the sun reaching through the eye and illuminating the town below us. After losing each other a couple of times, we managed to climb above the clouds, and found ourselves in what appeared to be the "eye" of a huge cloud formation. Arriving there, we found our visibility severely hampered by haze and cloud cover. We managed to take off in a sort-of orderly fashion, got into formation, and made the long flight to the staging point. With a warning that our biplanes might be outmatched, we signed up and launched the mission. After reading the list of available missions, my friends latched on to the idea of attacking enemy bombers. With that mission a success, we now had two wins to our name, and we only needed three to win the Campaign. We returned home, but the mission ended itself before we got a chance to land on the runway. The third leg of our patrol found us once more surrounded by hostile Falco biplanes, but with our new experience, we made short work of them, once again only losing one plane. After reaching it, we scouted around, and declared it to be "All Clear". After moving on with our losses, we approached the second patrol area. After a few tense minutes of combat, finding and losing the enemy, trying to land blind bursts for the proper amount of lead and deflection, we managed to take them down, losing only my m62 in the process.
Our first patrol area was crawling with CR.42's, and we were seriously hampered by our decision to fly in cockpit view. We got into formation at 500m, and headed to the patrol area with a minimum of near wing brushes and "omg watch outs". After narrowly avoiding a collision once we were airborne, we agreed that taxiing one at a time was probably a good idea. While he was making that statement, the other one and I were busy taxiing down the runway. The wisest among us stated "ok, let me go first and get airborne", since we were all blind in cockpit view, with our noses still pointed at the sky. I had remembered to change the settings to "take off from the airfield and head to objective". Mission two took us into a Combat Patrol. We completed our mission, and prepared for the next. After exclaiming over the detail of the cockpit, the beautiful sounds of the engine and guns, and the detail of the environment around us, all three of us decided we would play the rest of the campaign only in cockpit view. At this time, one of my friends accidentally switched to cockpit view, and fell in love.
After a frantic furball that ended with each of us scoring one kill apiece, and the bots cleaning up all of the damaged enemies, we headed out of the engagement area. I had forgotten to change the settings to take off from airfield and head to objective, so we started in the air, and were immediately engaged by the enemy. Our first mission was a "Head to Head Combat", with our I-15's and I-153's squaring off against a horde of He 112's. This would work out perfect, because one of my friends was only Rank 1 in Soviet, and a low and slow biplane would give him a good chance to get used to the difficulty settings. Once we got in, I decided we would play the Soviet side of the Kuban mission. It took us a good 10 minutes to get together in the mission room, because they had a hard time finding me. They agreed to it, and I made a room for us to play in. I talked them into flying on Historic difficulty, explaining that the damage model was better, and that they'd get kills faster with the proper aiming. Both of them are low level players, with barely any experience outside of Arcade Battles. I suggested flying a Dynamic Campaign to end the gaming session tonight, and two of my friends were up for it. Here's a little AAR from when I first started DC. Hey all you new players coming from Steam, welcome to War Thunder! If you haven't yet, you should take the time to check out Dynamic Campaign, under the "Missions" on the "Game Mode" tab.