A quick note on the second session of our game. We only managed one mission, completing the training station. That was because we were all having fun dealing with the aftermath of the disastrous second training mission.
The deputy politruk told her illicit lover (a PC) that someone would be punished for the disaster, and the PC would be that someone unless she should stitch up someone else. Meanwhile, the rest of the section had realised the PC in question was a disaster and tried to sabotage her plane. It ended up with a brand new pilot (brought in to replace the two who died in the previous mission) being blamed for everything after she chickened out of an attack run.
Two observations.
1) There’s a lot of GM intervention in the game! The PCs haven’t really discovered their own agenda/goals, so they’re spending a lot of time reacting to events. I can see that continuing, with a lot of play being driven by the GM throwing War events at the squadron and the PCs reacting. (I’ll have to prepare a bunch of PC-NPC-PC triangles and see if that helps the game run itself.)
2) The missions throw a long shadow over the game, but there seems to be little “game” in them directly. There’s very little interaction between fictional positioning and the mechanics, with each mission following near-identical structures. (Perhaps that will change when we get more missions under our belt and people are prepared to fail some missions.)