"Weapons arcs - lots, few?" Topic

I'm dusting off my Aeronef style rules and looking at them with a fresh eye. At present the ship bases are marked off into 16 arcs. In part because I have nice bases already with these arcs marked on them :-)

I'm wondering if this is too "fiddly" for a game where players handle squadrons of 4-9 ships?

I did this as it allows for some of the "early war" designs to have very limited fire arcs as the guns were enclosed or in sponsons, etc. Ships with turrets can fire almost 360 (just not into your own superstructure!).

Is 16 too many to handle when the base has guidelines so you can easily determine if the gun can hit or not?

The era had a lot of sponson mounts amidships so you could get into more detail using 16 arcs.

You're talking about 16 distinct 22.5 degree arcs? Nah – it should be fine, although templates might make it easier to project the arcs across the table. I'm assuming this is a non-hex game. For a hex based game, 12 30 degree arcs would make more sense to me.

If, on the other hand, you're talking about 16 different (and sometimes overlapping) arc designations (like in Star Fleet Battles – FA, FH, FX, etc.) then, yes – that's too many.

Doug

It would be too many for me. I'd probably keep it to 4.

To me, it depends on the time frame of the turn. The longer the turn time, the fewer the arcs, because the ship could turn in "X" amount of seconds (or minutes…or whatever time measurement you have) to fire guns that were out of arc but came into arc due to the turn.

In addition, it also might depend upon the style of play: "dogfights" (for lack of a better word) that attempt to get into some blind spot where a ship can fire into another with little or no return fire, or, "battlelines" that pound each other on parallel courses. The more arcs, the more it becomes a dogfight style of play.

You could probably get away with two arcs: port and starboard, for a simpler system. Most people are probably comfortable with four: the giant "X" for port, starboard, fore, and aft if it makes a difference. With 16 arcs, it might be too fine a gradation to make much difference, and might take too much time for players to either squint along a sightline or constantly place a protractor-like template on the table 16 times.

However many you end with, I would suggest keeping them distinct ie. this gun can fire into arcs A, B, and C … not this gun can fire into arc B(extended). In other words, what elsyrsyn said.

It might get fiddly with ship placement if the arcs are that small, though. You might keep it at 8 x 45 degree arcs.

The game is non-hexed. It's dog fight style. So your long gun might fire out of arcs 1-4 while your broad side is through 4 through 9 or whatever. In practice you'll have the "Big X" as the ships are fairly small.

The turn is shoot-move-shoot-move-shoot. BUT guns only fire once per turn. Guns also have limited ammo. So I want there to be real thinking about when to shoot. So fire first or maneuver for better shot/range?

I'll leave it as the 16 and see how it goes….

16 arcs sounds like an awful lot for a non-gridded game, unless you've only got a few ships on each side.

We barely manage to keep track of broadsides…

Lots of arcs are fiddly on the tabletop and lead to people breaking out micrometers and protractors to see if a target is in arc. I prefer fewer distinct arc. After all the ships are moving and can wiggle a bit to bring weapons to bear. Fewer, larger arcs are what we used in Fleet Battles by GASLIGHT.

Buck

Each side probably only has a few ships so no issues there.

IMHO the micrometer/protractor crowd do that no matter what. I just invite them to play elsewhere…still, food for thought as not everyone has that luxury.

I'd probably try to 'halve' it; Full Thrust's four/six is not really saturation for me, but that's visible on the horizon. Eight would still be comfortable; using twelve not so much.

Of course, I tend to think of 'Aeronef' as having FT 2.5 arcs, with the broadside ones combined.

Doug