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| Image by Black Library |
The Dakkajet:
This plane is my personal favourite out of the Ork flyer range and that's because I think it will work the best on the battlefield. This because you can fire all of your weapons all of the time and and you have more chance of hitting something and to top it off it is also the cheapest plane of the three.
Basics:
Unfortunately you can only take 1 plane per fast attack slot so that means you could have 3 planes max. This is ok but I hoped you could take them as squadrons of three leaving you with 2 more fast attack slots. Further more it is a Skimmer and it's Fast and follows those universal rules but there's nothing wrong with that for now but we'll probably see some major changes for flyers when 6th edition hits the shelves.
Special rules:
The dakkajet has a few nifty special rules.
Aerial Assault: When you move at cruising speed(12") you can still fire all of your weapons.
Supersonic: You can boost about on the battlefield moving a whopping 36" to get in or out of action.
Strafing Run: When you target artillery, infantry, monstrous creatures beast, bikes, cavalry or vehicles without the skimmer rule you add +1 to your BS and all your shots have the pinning effect.
Fighta Ace: to complement the Strafing Run you can take this special rule for only 10 points which gives you a BS of 3 against jetbikes and vehicles with the skimmer rule. In my opinion you want to take this because you will be able to shoot at everything regardless of what kind of enemy you are facing.
Waaagh!plane: this is the last special rule and it can be a devastating one because you can now fire all your weapons twice on the turn your Waaagh1 is called. For example, a Dakkajet with 3 TL Supa Shoota's that's 18 TL shots probably at BS3.
Weapons and options:
The Dakkajet comes with 2 TL Supa Shoota's as standard. The Supa Shoota has a range of 30" Strength 6 and AP4 and is an assault 3 weapon.For a mere 10 points you can take 1 extra TL Supa Shoota and I think you'll always have to take that. The Dakkajet is quite fragile so you might only get 1 or 2 rounds of shooting so you want to make sure you do as much damage as possible. You also have some firepower left in case you get a weapon destroyed result against you.
For 5 points you can get the Red paint job that will make it fasta! you can move an extra inch on your movement which could be use full to dodge shots at your plane but I still have to see if it is necessary.
And last you can take the Fighta Ace upgrade which I already mentioned above in the Special rules.
Deployment Tactica:
I think you'll always want your Dakkajet to come from reserves. You don't want your opponent shooting at it if he goes first or steals the initiative and also normally you won't be able to maximise it's firepower first round by calling a Waaagh!. You can still get a Waaagh! first round if you take a weirdboy and use it's psychic powers, hell I'll even go as far as saying we'll be seeing more weirdboys from now on or even Warpheads. ( a warphead is a weirdboy that can re-roll the psychic power result)With weirdboys or warpheads you'd be able to Waaagh! every turn in the game, how cool would that be if you had three Dakkajets flying about...but anyway.
The Dakkajet only has an Armour Value of 10 so there's a lot of guns out there able to glance it or even penetrate it's fragile armour.A plane is very hard to hide so you won't get a cover save and since you don't want your new toy to go down in a raging ball of fire in the first round you keep it in reserve and you'll be able to shoot something with it at least once. Of course you can get a cover save if you have a Big Mek with a Kustom Forcefield nearby but you don't want your plane to circle 6" around you Mek and forfeit it's manoeuvrability. When you come from reserve and move on the table you can move 12"and still fire all your weapons which have a 30" range so you could target enemies that are 42" from your table edge, that's nearly your opponents table edge depending on mission rules.
Attacking Tactica:
Like I already mentioned I think you should max out on firepower and take the exUnfortunately your opponent still gets a cover save(if he's in cover) but that's still pretty good for an Ork. You can also try and take out those pesky bike squadrons, (dark)eldar jetbikes that would normally run circles around your boys. Even light armoured vehicles are a valid target because ST6 is not bad at all and with that amount of shot's you're bound to roll some sixes.
Defensive Tactica:
The Dakkajet is really meant to be used aggressively like most of the Ork units. You better make sure you get some points back for it because it probably won't last until the end of the game but if it does you can make use of the Skimmer rule and contest an objective. The only way to protect it is target saturation. You should have a lot of things on the board and make your opponent choose what he's going to shoot. If you keep moving at least 12" all the time your opponent might have some difficulty hitting you and opt to shoot at something else instead but if he does manage to shoot it at least your mob of greenskins is one turn closer to the enemy and getting closer to assault range. Between 110 and 135 points the Jet is expendable but you want to get at least one round of shooting out of it.tra Supa Shoota. Pick a juicy target and call a Waaagh! when you fire 18 TL ST6 AP4 shots (re-rolling to hit!!!) at BS3 you can do some real damage. Mathhammer says you should hit about 14 shots and probably wound at least half of those. Target tactica:
Ok, so your jet is on the board and it's time to pick a target. What to shoot at and what not? Well the Dakkajet is designed to shoot at other flyers so whilst your other units might have trouble shooting something from the sky the Dakkajet has both the range and firepower to do so. On the other hand if you see a unit of infantry in open ground it might be hard to resist not going for it but if there's no flyer or unit in the open I'd look for some units in the back of your enemy's army that are giving long range fire support like sniper scouts, devastators, lootas etc. Since you know your plane will probably go down you want to take at least one unit with you especially if you're playing kill points.
The verdict:
It will be a fun new unit to use and it broadens the variety of anti infantry and skimmer units in the Orks range but there are already some good unit's like Lootas who can do that. It would be better if at least one of the three planes was a specialised anti tank plane, I guess it wasn't meant to be so keep on struggling with those powerklaws.
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| Image from Deff squadron Black Library |
Cheers,
Seb