Aircraft Carriers - reload

[captainsmirk]

Yeah it was the big, round, red "aim here" signs painted on the decks which did it...

:lol:


Nick

 

[Fitzwalrus]

There was the de Haviland Mosquito variant FB Mk XVIII or Tsetse, equiped with a 6 pounder. But it had to do a vulnerable approach run, to operate the gun.

There was a B25 variant with a 75mm as well (originally developed for the M24 Chaffee tank, I believe). And various German designs, including a Ju88 with an '88 - although the German versions were primarily anti-tank, not anti-ship.

Wulf

Other way 'round: the gun was developed for the B-25 and then adapted for the Chaffee.

I hadn't thought about the anti-shipping B-25's: massed machine gun fire (up to 14 forward firing .50 cal MGs in some versions), 75mm cannon, and skip-bombing attacks. Oooo, we likes it, precious, we does.... :twisted:

Since I saw this thread yesterday I've been kicking some ideas for reaming aircraft around. One thing that is going to come up is the game time factor: it's going to take a while to launch a strike (or even start with one in the air), fly to the target, attack, fly back, recover, and then rearm and launch again. The whole point may not come up at all unless you're playing a very long scenario. "Carrier Clash" only lasts 10 turns, which is barely enough time to pull it off, and the second strike isn't going to have time to fly very far.

Victory Games used to have a solitare boardgame called Carrier. It was a bear to play because you (as the US carrier admiral) were always getting swamped by swarms of game-generated Japanese airstrikes. It did have a very nice game mechanic for aircraft operations, though, that I've wanted to adapt to a miniatures game for a while.
Basically, recovered flights move through four boxes on the control sheet: "Recovered" (just landed), "Rearming" (in the hangar), "Ready" (armed and fueled in the hangar), and "Launching" (on the deck and taking off.) Planes move from Recover to Launch at so many flights per turn, and if a carrier gets hit with armed planes in the hangar or on deck it's very, very bad.

I thnk this could be adapted to VAS without complicating things too badly. Our gang's next VAS game in a week or so will be the "Carrier Clash" scenario: I'll cobble something together by then, try it out, and see how it goes.

 

[DM]

I've had some thoughts about a more realistic "carrier clash", including keeping the carrier off table (with or without escort) and having searching aircraft atempt to find it. I'll hold off posting anything about it though until you've played it out.

carrier was indeed a lot of "fun" (in a "getting-your-ass-kicked-AGAIN kind of way) - almost as much as "Tokyo Express" :shock:

 

[Wulf Corbett]

Other way 'round: the gun was developed for the B-25 and then adapted for the Chaffee.

I was close...

Victory Games used to have a solitare boardgame called Carrier.
Basically, recovered flights move through four boxes on the control sheet: "Recovered" (just landed), "Rearming" (in the hangar), "Ready" (armed and fueled in the hangar), and "Launching" (on the deck and taking off.) Planes move from Recover to Launch at so many flights per turn, and if a carrier gets hit with armed planes in the hangar or on deck it's very, very bad.

I must have seen it at some time, because I've just suggested this very thing to the playtest group 8) I can't remember seeing it though... I have to say the Pacific war has never been of great interest to me.

Wulf

 

[Fitzwalrus]

I've had some thoughts about a more realistic "carrier clash", including keeping the carrier off table (with or without escort) and having searching aircraft atempt to find it. I'll hold off posting anything about it though until you've played it out.

carrier was indeed a lot of "fun" (in a "getting-your-ass-kicked-AGAIN kind of way) - almost as much as "Tokyo Express" :shock:

Actually, what I like about VAS is that the carriers are on the table, which (even if the distance scale is a little skewed and compressed) gives you a chance to do air and surface operations in a single game. I suppose you could set up the carrier group and escorts in a separate area off the table, or give them a separate Deployment Zone at the outer short edges of the table and say it took a certain number of turns to fly "off" the table and reach the carrier zone to make your attacks. Main thing again there is time : unless you play a really long scenario it'll take quite a few turns to get there (let alone get back and rearm for a second strike) so the way "Carrier Clash" abstracts it may work out best after all.

Carrier and Tokyo Express are two of my favorite solitaire games, though I haven't had time to play either in years. The game mechanics definitely tend to administer a sound walloping to you, but they also do a great job of giving you a real feel for the problems and complexities involved in those kind of naval operations. ( I actually didn't do too badly in Carrier, but Tokyo Express killed me every time.)
Another excellent operational game like this is Avalon Hill's old Flat Top (actually AH's combined redo of Battleline/Yaquinto's Flat Top and CV games). That one is a two-player game in which you run the whole enchilada (land- and sea-based air, surface vessels, submarines, the works) as either the US or Japanese in the SW Pacific. It can take a while to play but isn't as complex as it sounds, and again gives a great idea of what theater operations are really like. Flat Top was the basis of more than one miniatures campaign in my old gaming group: it's a simple matter to use the game for campaign operations but fight out the combat with your chosen miniatures rules instead of FT's good (but necessarily simplified and abstracted) combat system.