[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Bruno

I don't buy them needing to be at a low altitude to do bombing runs. It's not going to be about precision anyways, unless you're seriously trying to take out commanders or standard bearers or whatever.

Well, that's one way for 30-50 guys to do something that manages to actually affect an army of 30,000.

The 1,000 or so 'heroes' spread around the enemy army are the important ones. They include the spellcasters that will breach the walls and the superhero warriors who will lead their men through quite a lot of TL3+1 mechanical artillery and good archers and even musketeers. Without the heroes, a lot of the slave battalions will refuse to go into action at all and even the better quality units will probably not be able to force a breach defended by the PCs and their professional mercenary reserve.

Originally Posted by Bruno

If your target is a massed army, you're fairly likely to disrupt columns even if your dropped junk goes between two soldiers. People become very concerned about things being dropped on their heads...

Disrupting some columns is fairly trivial, but not likely to make much of a difference to the final result. Killing a thousand men in seconds might cause the enemy to stop and reevaluate, but killing a hundred men all over a whole field with 30,000, over a period of several minutes, is probably not going to stop any attacks.

Disrupting the momentum of assaults as they happen is more promising, but requires at least accuracy within 5 yards of the target or so. The 5,000-8,000 elites who will actually make the assaults of the city will attacking the walls that the defenders are standing at while the most important battle is happening, after all.

Originally Posted by Bruno

That said, you'd do better to drop things more interesting than just rocks.

There's a lot of arrows, crossbow bolts, darts, javelins and scorpion bolts.

Those are a lot more bulky to carry and throw than flour bags and need to be dropped with rather more care for each one. I figure you could carry far less weight of them while flying. I don't think many of the mages could carry more than say 100 such items each for a sortie, most probably fewer (depending on arrangment of quivers and such). That's maybe 25 lbs. each, instead of maybe 50 lbs. for a bag of flour each flying mage. Those flying with dragonwing harnesses might carry 200 lbs. of flour, but added strength doesn't really help them with the bulk issue for sharp things.

Also, to drop arrows so that they fall properly would seem to require actual Dropping skill and decent Flight or Aerobatics skill, while getting a bag of flour up into the air and then causing it to fall somewhere within a fairly large radius might not. So even if 50 mages could fly up and drop a single bag of flour, I'm guessing that only 30-40 of them are capable of dropping arrows with any effect.

So, we could deploy maybe 3,000-8,000 sharp pointy things weighing 0.25-2 lbs. each if we went with that instead of maybe up to two tons of flour.

How many of the sharp things will hit a soldier when dropped in bunches from a height of thousand yards in the dark?

I'm guessing that even when you hit a column, very few of the arrows actually hit an individual soldier. And that many of the mages will not hit even a column of soldiers 12x30 yards in area from a height of 1,000 yards.

Originally Posted by Bruno

I understand the urge to try and get the flour to go ka-WOOOSH, it's pretty hardcore. However, it's a hazard associated with grain silos because those are enclosed spaces. You can get it when transferring grain in a train yard, but it's a lot less common.

I realise that if the flour caught on fire while out in the open we would get a very inefficient 'explosion', as opposed one one in an enclosed space. I am trying to determine if it would be not worth doing, however.

Even if we got a REF of only 0.01 (flour isn't really an explosive, though it burns), one or two tons means it would still be the equivalent of 2-4 lbs. of TNT spread over a fairly large area.

Originally Posted by Bruno

Oil? Animal fat? Alcohol?

Alchemist's Fire and Thayan (Greek) Fire are both available. It's just that the PCs expect to expend their entire supply without stopping the enemy and are looking for ways to make their firebombing more effective.