[pmulcahy11b]

Originally Posted by Targan

In my campaign one of the prominent NPCs in the PCs' group was a USAF pilot who had fired an ASAT missile from an F-15 early in the war. The ASAT phase ended quickly and he ended up in a USAF fighter wing before eventually ending up way behind enemy lines in Poland in 1998 after his Eagle suffered some kind of catastrophic mechanical failure and fell out of the sky. When the PCs found him he was working as a tinker and technician in a reasonably secure and well fortified village. I liked running Lt John Truman Johnson, callsign "Renegade", he was a good guy. Made a nice moral counterbalance to the generally anti-hero (ok, lets be honest, war criminal) PCs.

Here's a little spiel on ASATs from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon

One of my favorite NPCs was also a downed fighter pilot -- USAF Captain Pamela Wagner, the Twilight War's top-scoring ace with 42 kills. She flew an F-16F Scamp (the version that was in reality only an experimental version of the F-16, with the cranked-arrow wings). The players had been told a lot of stories by the locals about her bravery and intelligence, and they they had heard of Captain Wagner -- they expected to meet some sort of Amazon. She turned out to be a short, pixieish (but tough) blond with short hair and barely over 5 feet tall. She almost got word out about the PC's whereabouts to friendlies after the group managed to steal a functioning A-37, but she got blown out of the sky by a ZSU-30-6 -- she didn't get out that time.