Reply To: What is your air wargaming set-up?

[zippyfusenet]

Pleased to meet you fathom. I’m glad you revived this thread. It was fun to review the old posts. I was sorry that I killed the thread off back in August. I have more to write about now.

I’ve lately achieved liftoff with the Check Your Six! rules. I bought a copy years ago and tried to run a couple of games for my cronies, but couldn’t quite figure the rules out on my own. Since then several GMs have kindly steered me through a number of CY6! games at conventions. Thanks to their patient coaching I finally comprehended enough to run some games on my own starting this fall. I posted an AAR on one recent game when it was fresh and exciting:

Check Your Six Game: Hankow Jingbao

and posted some models I completed the other week on the Painting Desk thread:

What's on your painting desk/table/corner

I’m proud of them, because most of my models were painted by others, but I paint as much as I can, and I’m gaining traction since I fully retired in 2016.

You can see my CY6! set-up in the two posts. I fly ‘6mm’ models on the proprietary Noble Enterprises CY6! flight stands. I mount planes on stands with rare earth magnets glued to both. I write ‘6mm’ because I’m very loose on scale. I have models as small as 1/350 and as big as 1/260 in my collection, although most are 1/285-300. I play on an old Blue Skies brand hex mat, sky blue with ‘clouds’ printed on, 40mm hexes, about 6 feet by 4 feet. This gives me a playing area 47 hexes long X 37 hexes wide with the straight line of hexes running the length of the mat, more than I need for a standard CY6! scenario map. I have a similar mat in desert tan, but I use that mostly for land gaming. The 40mm hexes fit my NE stands very well and contain single engine and smaller twin-engine aircraft. The bigger multi-engine planes stick out a bit.

I’ve considered the same question you’re facing: How to play CY6! with 1/144 models? My solution is to play CY6! using 6mm models and 40mm hexes, so that a game will fit on a regular table. I use different rules, Mustangs/Air Pirates, with my 1/144 collection and play on 5 inch hexes. M/AP works better with the bigger models, in my opinion, because you don’t need as many hexes for a good game. An 8 foot X 6 foot mat laid out in 5 inch hexes gives me a playing area 18 hexes long X 15 hexes wide, with the straight line of hexes running the length of the mat. I can fit two or three single engine models into a hex, but the bigger multi-engine planes stick out a lot, and like you, I usually go ‘down a scale’ for the bigger planes.

I’ve never played Starfleet Battles, but maybe you have. I’ve heard the M/AP movement system compared to Starfleet Battles. The game is played in 8 game turns, which is usually more than is needed for resolution. Each game turn is divided into 5 movement impulses and an interphase. Models move only one hex per impulse. Models move up to 5 impulses per turn, depending on their speed: a plane at speed 1 moves only one impulse, one at speed 2 moves on two impulses, and so on. 1 point of speed is about 100 mph in the standard version of the rules – there’s an early-war variant to acomodate slower airplanes. We have no problem fitting a game on my mat, as long as I focus the scenario on a bomber formation, so as to keep the fighters from scattering at random.

Of course, there was this one guy who deliberately flew his two fighters in opposite directions, so as to break the game, for his own amusement. I no longer play airwar games with that guy.

Mustangs/Air Pirate is not as detailed a rule set as CY6!, it uses a simpler model of flight physics, but it emphasizes some different points than CY6! and my pals and I have fun playing it. Not telling you how to play with your toys, just bragging about what I do.

Your post makes me think about getting a mat with 3 inch hexes and using it to play CY6! games with single-engine 1/144 models. I can see that multi-engine models just won’t fit the hexes, even if I use 1/200 models.

The principle I follow when I go ‘down a scale’ is that the big bomber still has to be visually larger than the little fighter. A 1/144 model of a WWII single engine fighter has a wingspan of 3 or 4 inches. A 1/144 B-17 has a wingspan of about 8 inches. In 1/200 scale, the B-17’s wingspan is about 6 inches, still visibly bigger than the fighter. A 1/300 model of a B-17 has a 4 inch wingspan – it’s the same size as the fighter model. That doesn’t look right to me.

Playing analog wargames with three dimensional models is an engineering problem. There are no perfect solutions to engineering problems, only compromises. These are the compromises I make.

You'll shoot your eye out, kid!