World War One Air combat rules

In my last post I was waxing nostalgic for the "beer and pretzels" games of yesteryear. I suppose I should come at least partially clean, when it comes to some types of war game, simple rules are all I can manage to write.  I spent a couple of mind melting days attempting to come to grips with formulas to allow me to calculate snap turn rates and sustained turn rates from basic aircraft statistics.  It tuns out that Mrs E's oft made comment "your not as smart as you like to think you are" is more true than I like to accept because I had to give up.  I fell back on the stats one of the other members of Hull University's war gaming society came up with back in 1975.  I will try to see if I can find an easy set of correlations between the real world stats and the game stats from those and extrapolate the results for the airplanes I don't have game stats for.


My favourite WW1 flying ace.  The late great Charles M Scultz's Snoopy from Peanuts.


The rules are pretty much done and I just need to wrote them up.  The original rules Jim Dunnigan wrote for SPI's board game Flying Circus all those years ago didn't really need much adding to them.  I have simply added  energy gain in dives and loss in subsequent turns to allow "Boom and Zoom" combat to be a little more doable.  The game handles "Turn and Burn" pretty well I only needed to penalise sustained moves in tight turns with some altitude loss to make it more accurate.  The dive rules were the biggest issue but as part of the energy gain/loss rule I think I have something that will work.  Lastly I have added structural failure rules both to the combat result tables and the over speed diving rules.

All I need to do now is finish creating the game statistics for the 60 or 70 airplanes my obsessive mind set says I need to have.  Then its on to creating a game map and some height adjustable flight stands.  Then its off for a few games.  Mind you I expect it to end like this!

 

I hope they walked away from this one!