Sky Fort Skillman
City: Skillman Airport, Ewing, New Jersey
Population: 500
Controls: Fort Skillman and environs, plus the skies above
Government: Strongman
Problem: Monsters
Heroic Opportunity: Technology
City Aspect: Fortified and worried.
It was blind chance that Major Chester Harrigan (USAAF) was able to get all of his current force of Grumman torpedo bombers into the sky before the tsunami hit; and it was a matter of geography that Skillman Airport itself was just barely above the wave that devastated the East Coast. Most of the rest of New Jersey got erased. And what the wave itself didn’t kill, the new monsters tried their best to.
But Skillman Airport had planes, and a relative glut of trained mechanics, and just enough supplies to let the people lucky to be on the site at the time first fort up, then expand out as much as they could. And not everybody in New Jersey died. Of course, a lot of the survivors beyond the perimeter aren’t quite right in the head — but the more violent and unreasonable ones are justifiably afraid of Skillman’s Grummans, because Major Harrigan wasn’t shy about making an object lesson out of the first few raider gangs to come along.
Of course, that was back when Sky Fort Skillman had more gasoline, parts, and bombs. For the last six months or so, Harrigan’s dialed back the air patrols as much as he dares without risking the raiders still out there getting ideas; he’s also been gathering what intel he can on what supplies might still be gettable. The Major’s got a list of likely sites to check; he can be persuaded to hand that list over to a reliable salvage team willing to make a deal. He can offer some extra parts of his own in exchange for the help, plus of course some of the best airplane mechanics on the East Coast. Strike that: some of the only airplane mechanics on the East Coast.
There are any number of groups — not to mention, countries — out there that would perk up their ears at that last bit of news.
Just to be nitpicky, if Harrigan’s a major, he should be USMC. The Army didn’t fly Avengers.
See, this is where I probably needed to listen to some of the old radio plays. Was Hop Harrigan a Marine?
Since I’d never heard of him before now, I had to check Wikipedia and learn that Hop Harrigan and his pals joined the Army Air Corps.
.
In my ignorance of his existence, I was just looking at AAF + TBFs, which for me did not compute, since the Navy and the Marines flew them, not the Army. If a squadron of Avengers is commanded by a major, it would have to be a Marine squadron.
.
Off the top of my head, the closest plane in the AAF inventory to fill the niche the Avengers are filling would probably be the P-47 Thunderbolt.
Ah, but Grummans were the ones being built in the local factories in Ewing during WWII. Which is one of the great things about The Day After Ragnarok: SOMEBODY was making treasure SOMEWHERE in the vicinity of wherever your campaign was in North America.