CDF airborne gunship
Gunship squadrons, like their more specific tankbuster and attack helicopter counterparts in Sober Thought's Air Service, provide air support for the Land Service. However, unlike these two other types of units, by their nature they are aimed against somewhat generalised (and once they have flown sorties, non-existent) targets.
They belong to one ordinal number sequence, e.g., 2nd Gunship Squadron, 16th Gunship Squadron, 23rd Gunship Squadron. Three letter squadron codes common to all Air Service aircraft and squadron types are also used, a separate fourth letter indicating the specific aircraft in the squadron. The Community Defence Forces raise three squadrons of gunships for every one hundred million citizens.
Command and air crew
Like most squadrons, the commanding officer of a gunship squadron is always a Chief Lieutenant, the executive officer a Lieutenant and the Squadron Sergeant a full Warrant Officer. However, compared with other aircraft like fighters or even bombers, there are more crew actually in the air whether calculated by raw numbers or percentage of the unit.
Each of the nine gunships has ten air crew, and three aircraft form a Flight under the command of a Lieutenant. The squadron command staff can exercise its prerogatives and take over the functions of regular flight crew. There are also another spare seven crew of appropriate training and experience, forming a complete extra crew to cover combat casualties, sickness, transient abscences or command prerogatives. That makes for an even 100 air crew, which would comprise the entire squadron if it were permanently attached to a wing that takes over ground functions and troops.
Ground crew
There are 150 ground crew, of which 90 are organised into the Air Maintenance Flight commanded by a Lieutenant. This officer and three subordinate Vice Lieutenants direct the maintenance engineers who keep the gunships in running order, aviation fuel aplenty, the turboprop engines running reliably, the fuselage intact and the ammunition hoppers filled to the top.
The remaining 60 ground crew are organised into the Administration Flight commanded by Squadron XO but practically run by a lone Vice Lieutenant. Whichever officer is actually in charge, it is the non-commissioned cooks, pay clerks, drivers, administrators and medics who see to the physical and creature comforts of the squadron's people rather than planes.
Flying gunships
The Community Defence Forces' TG-40 Tiger gunship is a highly modified turbo-charged propeller-driven T-40 aircraft. Basically, the cargo area is given over to 12 mm machine guns and 20 mm cannon (sometimes with a 60 mm piece of pack artillery tossed in for good measure) and copious amounts of ammunition. They are designed to operate in areas in which total air supremacy has been achieved, and one hopes that is true for the benefit of the crew sitting on all that live ordnance.
The tankbuster is similar in concept and execution to the real world Puff the Magic Dragon, the AC-47 of yesteryear and the AC-130 of today. The ten crew are divided into three flight crew and seven gunnery crew: a pilot (Lieutenant or Vice Lieutenant), co-pilot (Vice Lieutenant), a navigator (Leading Flier), a gunnery chief (Vice Warrant Officer or Leading Flier), a deputy gunnery chief (Master Flier) and five gunnery crew (Fliers). A silhouette and additional technical details will follow as time and obsessiveness permit.
