Requesting clarification

[The Chauffeur]

so a law student, a chemist, an engineer, and a PHD student in bioengineering got together to play VaS, and naturally some questions were raised....

1. silhouetting: is there a hard and fast rule to determine silhouetting? some template perhaps? we were about to pull out a protractor but then decided to just 4+ all the close calls. does anyone know of a more consistent approach to this? would it be some percentage of the ship's total length visible from the midpoint of the firing ship?

1b. if anyone has the rulebook handy, check out the diagrams on pg.6. in figure 1, is the ajax silhouetted? what about Ajax and Leander in Fig. 2?
in figure 4, is the scharnhorst silhouetted for the ajax both before it moves AND after it moves?

1c. and if (for some crazy reason) a ship ends it's move phase at point blank range to another ship, then is the center point still appropriate for measure silhouetting and range or is it dependent on the ships' facing relative to each other?


2. dogfights: more than 1 counter from each side can be involved, yes? if we have a massive pileup of all six fighter flights from the Yorktown and the Shokaku all in one brawl then we just start adding up dogfight bonuses and only a D6 roll is made at the end, right?

2b. dogfights: if the above is correct, can i simply fly wave after wave of dauntless dive bombers into this massive dogfight in order to use them as casualties and keep my fighters (with their high dogfight bonus) alive longer?

3. does aircraft combat happen BEFORE or AFTER ship combat? the rules say a ship can't fire AA into a dogfight, and that AA fire happens at the beginning of the combat phase. does that mean the ship combat phase or all combat? can the combat phase be broken into:
1. AA fire
2. all plane attacks
3. all ship to ship attacks

thx
teh chauff

 

[Wishbone]

EDIT: these are my personal answers, the way I would work it out. They are in no way shape or form based on or even experienced from tournament level play or official answers. just guidelines...

1) I use the fire arc template. if the target ship can fire a broadside against the firing ship, then it is a large target/silouetted.

1b) I would say yes.

1c) centrepoint to centrepoint (or as I use, Forefunnel to Forefunnel) is consistent. keep using that for range whatever the circumstance, IMHO. it shouldn't really matter what the range is when they get in that close anyway!

2) never really come up. i'd separate them out as much as possible into even combats, i.e. four japanese flights to three yank flights, two 2 vs. 1 and one 1 vs. 1 dogfight. makes the aerial fight more interesting that way. as for the multiple combatants, its never really come up for me, we don't tend to have both sides using aircraft!

2b) as it stands, yes. but don't expect this to last OOB

3) from the attacking with aircraft section, p13: "All atacks made by an aircraft, be it by bomb, torpedo or dogfighting (see below) are made at the same time in a turn. A player may nominate all hi s aircraft to attack instead of a ship at any point in the attack phase"

there is only one combat phase, therefore the ships will just have to wait until there is a free target..

 

[juggler69uk]

1. Roughly as per Wish, we place firing template on target ship and if centre to centre line passes into broadside arc then it is considered as side on

2. To quote the supreme being, from buried in the rulemasters forum

Each aircraft may initiate _one_ dogfight in its turn, and may choose which enemy to engage if in contact with more than one.

However, it may take part in more than one dogfight _if_ more than one enemy is in contact and they initiate a dogfight each.
_________________
Matthew Sprange

3. All one sides aircraft are chosen to fight at any point in the attack phase instead of choosing a ship to fire or after all thier ships have fired.

Rulesmeisters please feel free to correct these interpretations