"Any House Rules for Purple Heart Valley Air Rules?" Topic

Have any of you developed house rules for Purple Heart Valley, to add in jets and rocket fighters, or adapting it to the night bombing campaign over Europe?

If so, I'd be interested in sharing notes and ideas, if you're willing to do so.

Dredging up this old subject again, given Bill's question on WWII rules.

So, seems that is a pretty definitive, no.

Here's a review of the rules, if you want to check them out, by another person:

link

Bomber and fighter movements per turn/phase are pretty limited, e.g. bombers generally only move once per turn, most fighters 2 hexes – once in each phase. P-51 and FW-190Ds can move 3 hexes, e.g. once in the first phase, IIRC, and ten twice in the second one.

Thinking of adding in Me-262s and Komets, just for grins. Will go with 2/2 for the jets, and 2/3 hex moves for the rocket fighters, at least when they've still got fuel left.

The movement rules remind me a bit of Blue Max/Canvas Eagles, or Mustangs, in that each turn has so little movement, and is more incremental in nature compared to some others out there.

I think the rules only cover WGr21 rockets, so need to come up with stats for the R4M ones.

May even add in rules for the 50mm cannon for the Me-410s, and Natters as well, and to come up with some stats for B-26s too, just for grins.

Don't recall seeing any rules for bomber crew injuries, or fires generally, other than the plane exploding if you hit a loaded up bomb bay on a lucky percentile die roll.

Probably too much to track for larger games, but might be useful for small ones with one or two bombers trying to struggle home from a raid, pitted against a few fighters.

I think these rules are definitely worth searching out if you're interested in daylight bomber raids over Europe, and like percentile dice to determine where targets are hit.

The rules use D6s for determining hits on a target, in a relatively simplistic manner.

Looked at the rules again, and there are bomber crew casualties (though they're listed generically, like ball turret KO'd, top turret KO'd, etc.). Presumably, that means the person manning those in knocked out of the fight when hits occur there.

Personnel are permitted to move to other positions, to replace those KO'd.

Thinking of adding in a house rule where 1/3 to 1/2 the time the hits to certain gun positions also destroy those weapons too. 50% of the time sounds reasonable to me.

There are also simplistic rules for fires in wing tanks on bombers, e.g. fire doesn't grow, or plane goes down in flames, so I need to come up with a house rule to permit diving a number of levels to try to put the fires out, with a moderate level of success, since that option isn't provided.

Haven't played these rules in a long time, but always enjoyed them. Very impressed by the hit result rules being secret. I played this as an Ongoing campaign with my air cadets – 13 to 18 year old boys and girls and it proved very popular. I switched to Check Your 6 because it had a greater variety of games, not just daylight bombing raids. To answer you original question I increased the movement as you suggest.

Thanks for the reply.

I enjoyed your review of the rules, and postings.

Need to try these out at the local club.

May port the damage rules on to the Duel of Eagles movement system, to go hexless.

Now, to just come up for rules for R4M rockets, and the jets/rocket fighters. Work is progressing well on the latter, but still not sure how to handle the scattergun effect of the rockets, and claims that one hit may knock down a bomber. Need to think on that a bit more.

The dispersion of the rockets is about exactly the size of a heavy bomber, at 1,000m, e.g. 50' x 100', so assuming the shot is on target, looks like multiple hits will vaporize the aircraft. They can use the Revi gunsight, since the drop is identical to that of the Mk 108 30mm cannons.