"Modern Air/Naval Gaming-How?" Topic

So, how does one game a modern air/naval battle when most of the weapons are the 'over the horizon' type?

A really, really big table?

Very distorted scale?

You ignore the wonder weapons and use short range stuff?

Comments gents?

Use Harpoon 4, which is the best set of rules for this, although it is complex with a steep learning curve. The ship models are only used when under attack and that's primarily for the weapon arcs.

Two tables, preferably in separate rooms or divided by a curtain

Use the old Victory Games "Fleet" series. It allowed air, surface and ASW without overly taxing your brain. They could be easily adapted to miniatures.

Is your concern that the ship miniatures are out of scale?

Once missiles start flying, shift time scales. Ships become effectively immobile except for facing changes.

Yep, a very distorted scale, or total disconnect between the two ends of one table, and doing a little math, or hex-based or map-based, missile/aircraft movement tracking during the game.

for air gaming, you distort the groundscale and use a big table. use roughly 1km hexes (or 1"=1km), the earlier AMRAAMs will have a 100-hex range. Later AMRAAMs will have a 160+ hex range. AIM54 Phoenix missiles would have about a 200 hex range.

For air attacks on naval targets, well, the naval targets are just that. They don't move other than to change facing and bring more weapons into arc.

One wicked idea I had for Jutland and not massively compressing the groundscale was to use rolling tables as the base for an entire squadron, and just push the tables around.

Figuring out how to handle this depends a lot on what type of battles you want to play. Not every country has the most advanced weapons systems, so you can set your scenario to encourage closer battles.

But if you are going for the most technically advanced weapons, then I would suggest the following.

For air battles you can use a logarithmic scale (a distorted groundscale, which I think this is what AirWar C21 does) or have a pre-dogfight engagement with the longer range missiles.

For air vs. ships, you pretty much do what you would do for a World War II battle. Sometimes with missiles replacing aircraft.

For ship vs. ship (and maybe some aircraft), you probably won't see the sort of gun battles of earlier naval ages. Depending on the situation, ships probably won't get in visual range, other than small boats attacking other small boats or ships and there are rules that handle those sort of situations (David Manley's Bulldogs Away works well for those games). As others have mentioned, ships essentially become stationary when being attacked by missiles and fast moving aircraft. Because of these two things, I'm actually looking at moving my modern naval games to be at more of an operational scale with a sort of "tactical display" for actually resolving missile and air attacks.

Interesting answers guys, thanks!