Damage Point System

Over years of playing B-17 Queen of the Skies, we have flown many memorable missions.  Some have resulted in heroic efforts to keep a crippled plane flying back to England, others have resulted in tragedy as a veteran crew succumbs to a "silver bullet" explosion.  Add to those the number of bizarre mid-flight events and you have a lot of memories. 

Many of you have probably created formulas to rate the success of your missions.  You know...bring the crew and aircraft home safely and have that high percentage of your bomb load on target and you get that great score.  Sure we all have, but that's what HQ wants to know about.  Pilots and crews do not care about those numbers.  All they care about is survival and that countdown of remaining missions.

One of the aspects that the game did not seem to cover was "How much damage did your B-17 absorb on the last mission".  In order to quantify damage, we identified every possible damage result.  We grouped them into categories and then we read all the research materials we had available to us.  In the end we created a Damage Point Table.  Each damage result is assigned a number of Damage Points (DP).  The sum of the aircrafts damage points will tell you how tough the mission was for the crew.

All of you can probably argue why some (maybe all) of these assigned numbers are not accurate, but if you fly as many missions as we have with it you will find that it very accurately quantifies B-17 damage.  These Damage Points do not affect the mission in any way.  You do not need to worry about summing the totals until after the mission.

Some missions you will have very little or no damage -- the Milk Runs.  On others you will be in awe of how much damage one of these big Forts can take and still make it home.  Bruce brought one back with over 600 points of damage.

Enjoy --- Mike Haley & Bruce Peckham