Mirage 5
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Once upon a time, a French boy sat in his nursery school listening to a teacher reading Humpty Dumpty. He wondered what he was doing inside an English nursery, and used the story as the inspiration for the Mirage: affordable, exportable, outdated by 1985, and with a tendency to have a great fall when enemy pilots look at you funny. The Mirage was designed as an attack aircraft but became the multirole aircraft for the French Air Force. Mirages equipped for air-superiority in the Falklands conflict were defeated by Harriers, the equivalent of a policeman in riot gear getting beaten up by an old lady and her purse. Fortunately for the French, Battlefront has skillfully omitted the ignominious historical authenticity and given you a very solid bomber aircraft.
In Team Yankee
It's almost identical to a Tornado but has 3+ courage instead of 3+ morale. Fortunately, The Armée de l'Air Française aren't as cowardly as their cousins in the Armée de Terre, and will stick around a bit longer after sustaining casualties. A relatively cheap way to kill large blobs of enemies if they don't spread out too much.
As with other NATO strike aircraft, use these things for suicide missions to blast out parts of the enemy's army: a good pass will literally kill dozens of points in units, while a mediocre one against spread out units will earn you the points cost of your aircraft, and then some. Compared to the British Harriers, for many the golden standard for CAS aircraft, these babies perform just as well, except that they don't have the Jump Jets that allow their Tommy allies to enter the field on a vaunted 3+. This does mean you get a discount of half a point per plane.
A 30mm autocannon is included if you decide to use these things for shooting helicopters, vehicles or infantry instead of blasting your payload into the enemy. Ideal for sniping key models that MUST die, such as isolated HQs or artillery spotters.
You can take 2-4 Mirages per flight, costing 2 points apiece.
IRL
The Mirage 5 is a supersonic attack aircraft built in the 1960s. It started life as a cheaper version of the Mirage III by replacing the avionics with more fuel storage, making it a popular model on the export market. As these craft lacked any sort of radar, they were pretty much limited to clear weather ground attack missions. Later versions put avionics back in as electronics became smaller and cheaper. Some of them were manufactured in Israel as the IAI Nesher, who had originally requested the Mirage 5 but never got them due to an embargo. The French fixed many of these issues with the Mirage 2000 multirole fighter which had radar systems and was capable of launching nukes.
| French Forces in Team Yankee | |
|---|---|
| Tanks: | AMX-30 |
| Transports: | AMX-10P- VAB |
| Troops: | Section d'infanterie/Chasseurs - Milan Section Antichar |
| Artillery: | AMX Auf1 |
| Anti-Aircraft: | AMX-13 DCA - AMX Roland |
| Tank Hunters: | VAB Mephisto |
| Recon: | AMX-10 RC - AMX-10P VOA |
| Aircraft: | Gazelle HOT - Gazelle 20mm - Mirage 5 |