The Golden BB

This is Steven Petrick posting.

I do not believe I had ever heard the term "Golden BB" before the Mel Gibson Film "Air America", but in my gaming I had definitely become very, very familiar with the term and did not need it explained after I had heard it.

I have, in gaming, been the victim of "The Golden BB".

Long, long ago I played a lot of a game called "Richtofen's War", a game by Avalon Hill about World War I aerial combat. It was not a very good simulation of aerial combat, I must concede, but we played it quite a bit. We even had a campaign going for a while, with players divided between the two sides.

When I joined up, I volunteered for the Balloon Busting missions. Everyone else thought this was great (no one wanted to do them, and everyone was happy that there was a player who would just accept them as his "mission for the day". (Sometimes we flew multiple missions in a single day, and since most of the games were on weekends and not weekdays outside of vacations, it took a long time to play a lot of games.)

In any case, the thing everyone forgot (and no, I did not plan this) was that under the game system, a downed Observation Balloon still counted as an aerial kill. In a relatively small number of missions, I racked of ten downed observation balloons. In some cases I knocked out more than one on a mission, in some cases I aborted missions before knocking down a single balloon due to damage my fighter had sustained, and in some cases I had to fly a different mission because there were no Balloon busting missions that day, so it was not done in ten missions straight. However, I had become an "ace" (in fact, the "only" ace as no one else made ten kills before he was shot down and "killed"), with all the benefits the game awarded to such an individual, principally a die roll modifier when firing my guns.

The die roll modifier led to my fairly quickly downing ten enemy planes, making me a double ace, i.e., I now got to subtract two from my die rolls when firing my guns.

I hit triple ace in very few missions.

I honestly no longer remember where I was on the road to quadruple ace when disaster struck.

I was out on a counter photo-reconnaissance mission, i.e., shoot down or drive off the German photo-recon plane. I easily slipped past and evaded the German fighter that was escorting the recon plane and riddled it with a burst from guns, damaging it but not fatally (or even enough to make it abandon the mission). As I dove past the photographer got a burst in on my plane, a few "minor hits" . . . except for one.

The one had jammed my controls.

My trust fighter would only fly in a straight line (over and into German controlled territory). I could speed up and slow down (throttle control), but could not turn left or right or climb or dive. While the German Recon plane was a lot slower than my plane, the escort was not. In very short order he was on my tail.

I had a 33% chance on any given turn to free my controls. For six die rolls in row I rolled a three or greater as the German pilot slowly shot my plane to pieces until it fell from the sky.

The "Golden BB" had removed the "Ace of Aces" from the skies over the trenches.