"Pacific Battle - A6M Zero vs US Carrier" Topic

Played a pacific air battle today, using the game Lacquered Coffins.
Aircraft from Tumbling Dice, Decals from Dom's decals.

The first battle was a kamikaze attack on a US escort carrier. Japanese had 12 A6M Zeros, with pilots ranging from average to poor quality. There was also one good quality pilot.
The US had 6 Grumman Wildcats with average quality pilots and 3 Vought F4U Corsairs, all with good quality pilots. The US also had a carrier deployed just outside their deployment zone.

The table at the start of the game:

Close up of a corsair:

Close up of a flight of Zeroes:

Just before the merge, both side in positive climbs:

A few turns later, the zeroes had given the US fighters the slip, although a few were destroyed. The Japanese pilots elected to completely ignore the US fighters and fly as fast and low as possible, aiming right at the US carrier.
2 Zeroes fly right into the carrier! they inflict moderate damage and weaken the carrier's air defense capability:

Close up of the zeroes impacting. The carrier started with 8 damage points and is now down to 5:

The next turn, 4 more zeroes speed in towards the carrier. The rest of the US fighters frantically try to catch up and stop them!

Its too late! 2 more zeroes line up kamikaze attack runs, one of them impacts, while the good quality pilots fails his pilot check and bounces off the deck, doing no damage…
The Carrier is stricken now, its AA defense destroyed and down to 3 damage points (dice was changed after this photo)

A wildcat lines up the last zero as it careens towards the carrier…

The wildcat fires and the poor quality Japanese pilot doesn't even know what's happening as the fighter falls apart around him, he is killed and his aircraft narrowly misses the carrier

End of the game, the carrier badly damaged – none of these aircraft will be landing on it!
The Japanese failed their objective of destroying the carrier, so the game is not a Japanese victory. The only US aircraft lost was one Wildcat who dived too far and hit the water trying to line up a shot on a Zero.

Nice report! Did the aircraft carrier have any game capability to shoot down aircraft with AA. I thought carriers had a lot of AA guns?

Like the planes too, nice work.

Hi mghFond, the aircraft carrier had very good air defense, although it still failed to inflict any hits on the first 2 zeroes that kamikazi'd. After that its AA defense was significantly weakened, which didn't help it defend against the next wave of zeroes.

In lacquered coffins all ground (and sea) targets have air defense. Lower value targets have lower quality air defense, so you would take less fire from strafing a supply column than you would if you were attacking a large airfield. You would also get less points for inflicting damage on the lower value targets as opposed to higher value ones.

Naval vessels have even more AA defense than regular ground targets. With 2 or 3 times as much due to the concentration of AA guns they would have on proper naval vessels and capital ships. The AA would be effective in stopping regular bombers and ground attack aircraft who are just trying to bomb, strafe or torpedo, but the AA defense is less effective against kamikaze where the pilots just try to fly as fast as possible and are gone as soon as they get into base contact.

Thanks for the answers!

I'm not a naval or air gamer, so nice to know how your game worked.

Nice game.

There should be escorts for the carrier. Several destroyers and a cruiser at the least. By 44 fleet carriers would have lots of escorting combatant ships.

Micman – You're dead right. Next time we try this kind of game we will have some escort vessels that should hopefully protect the Carrier a bit more.

We were also thinking the Japanese should get zeroes at half price in this kind of scenario – usually ground attack aircraft in a tactical bombing / close air support mission are half points, but since the Zeroes are fighters it didn't apply to them. I will add something to the rules to allow Japanese to take kamikaze aircraft at half points, but that always count as destroyed at the end of the game (not enough fuel to get home!)