Ok, got through the thread and at least got to flip through the rules last night. Aircraft are certainly underpowered it sounds like. I think that was a design decision on Mongoose's part. You can complain about it or not but there it is. I think the real issue is scenario design. If you put carriers in play you are not going to get historical results but you are also not playing a historical situation either. I think the only time a ship's guns got fired at a carrier was at Leyte Gulf, and as I said earlier, those were jeep carriers (Casablanca class I think) fitted for ground support and not Essex class fleet carriers.
For my first game I want to try an aircraft-only attack against ships because I'm curious now how that will go. From what others have said it won't go well for the aircraft so that means the aircraft rules are broken from a historical standpoint. Using the Leyte example again, even there the jeep carriers' aircraft managed to sink three CAs. Although I don't remember how many sorties that took. On the other end of the scale it took almost two dozen bomb hits and over a dozen torpedo hits from over 150 planes (over a five hour period I think) to sink the Musashi. Of course it was combat ineffective long before it sank.
I would be more distressed if BBs in VaS shrug off air attacks mostly unharmed rather than how easy it is for them to actually get sunk. Do BBs at least get beat up by aircraft?
But does VaS' apparent poor aircraft modeling matter? If you want to play lots of carrier battles it does but the intent of VaS was always ship battles. The aircraft are intended to be more of a sideshow. House rules and hopefully some later official updates will change that.
The comments on the spotter planes is distressing. Seems like something that should have been caught.
As for destroyers they have five purposes (when grouped with larger ships): Deploy torpedoes against capital ships, prevent enemy destroyers from deploying torpedoes against friendly ships, anti-aircraft screening, anti-sub duties, recon/pickett (not in scope of VaS). So the only real ship-to-ship actions with them is the second one. I don't believe DDs were successfully attacked by BB's very often. Even at Leyte the Japanese CAs and BBs had a heck of time killing the DDs even with overwhelming force. They are hard to hit and the rounds do indeed go right through them as they did with the jeep carriers.
One final comment on 'realism'. I haven't played Seekrieg in a decade so maybe it's great now but 100% accurate fire and damage tables don't make for a realistic naval simulation. Again, pointing to the DD attack at Leyte the larger Japanese ships had a very tough time taking on the smaller ships. Systems such as Seekrieg would fail miserably at depicting that action because it doesn't account for ships firing AP when they should be firing HE or for ships continually missing a ship because they couldn't tell that they had actually hit it, etc. Nor do they simulate a commander retreating from certain victory because he THINKS he is in danger. I don't say any of this to prove VaS is accurate but one needs to look at the results of play more than the mechanics.
From Wikipedia on the Japanese attack on Taffy 3,
"In the battle, a large force of Japanese battleships, cruisers, and destroyers engaged a force of three U.S. escort aircraft carrier task groups. The U.S. naval forces were taken by surprise because they thought that Kurita's force had retreated the previous day. ... Unprepared to engage in a battle with large-gunned warships, Sprague's escort carriers attempted to escape from the Japanese force while U.S. destroyers, destroyer escorts, and carrier aircraft made repeated attacks on Kurita's ships, with two U.S. destroyers and a destroyer escort as well as one escort carrier being sunk by gunfire from the Japanese ships. Another U.S. escort carrier was hit and sunk by a kamikaze aircraft during the battle. After losing three cruisers sunk to air attack and suffering damage to several other ships, Kurita withdrew from the battle area, ending the threat to Sprague's carrier force."
, but sucked mightily in the east. . .
HMS Glowworm style!
