"Portable Air Wargame - Galland's First Kills" Topic

Please see link for a quick scenario/AAR for Bob Cordery's Portable Air Wargame. I played it with counters but it may be of interest it miniature gamers.

Awesome to see you back playing, John! And three at the same time??? Slow down, brother!

I don't have time to read them right now, about to step out for some Little League baseball games, but I'll come back to these this evening.

V/R,
Jack

Cheers Jack. But there are more on the rails…I have been playing regularly over the last week or so, but computer problems have been delaying the write ups and the posting. That random "Oops!.." error in MS Photo is really beginning to irritate…

Are these rules available to look at?

Not as far as I know. They were published in Bob Cordery's Developing the Portable Wargame link . They aren't expensive £2.69 GBP / $3.30 USD. I guess if you read through all my posts you could pick up most of the mechanisms.

Good grief, John! Seven???

I don't know where to start! ;)

V/R,
Jack

The good news is that there will be another lull of a few days before the next one…

Pretty cool man!

When Galland and his wingman zoomed in and bounced the Belgian formation, why did the Belgians scatter to the winds like that? You mentioned the Belgians' morale dropping, was that some sort of morale result in the rules?

I'd never heard of Belgian Hurricanes, either, but I'm no expert.

V/R,
Jack

Hi Jack,

There were definitely Belgian Hurricanes (and Battles too IIRC) in the air that day. The hard bit is always working out from the records which unit was engaged by whom at which point because they often partly contradict each other and because pilots were often unable to really tell in fighter-fighter combat what type of aircraft they were fighting, let alone the different markings on aircraft of the same type. I know that the air enthusiasts spend a good deal of time disentangling this stuff, but I haven't seen the evidence either way on this one.

Yes, the scattering was entirely down to the morale rules: when a force has lost a third of its total damage points, it has to break off. I can think of lots of things wrong with this rule – and yet (for fighters anyway) it is actually producing quite realistic results!

John,

Thanks, I really didn't know the Belgians had Hurricanes. I guess I figured they'd gone the French route, with DeWoitines and maybe P-36s. And I understand about the confusion of the engagements, but you left out the pilots' own exaggerations: "I shot down five of them myself, six maybe!"
"Only a pair were present."

Yeah, I like the idea of the morale/scatter, that's pretty cool, and I concur that the results have been quite plausible. My big issue with every set of aerial rules I've ever played is that there are simply so many kills, that breaking off isn't generally forced, and so it's almost always a fight to the death.

V/R,
Jack

Yeah, I like the idea of the morale/scatter, that's pretty cool, and I concur that the results have been quite plausible. My big issue with every set of aerial rules I've ever played is that there are simply so many kills, that breaking off isn't generally forced, and so it's almost always a fight to the death.

Yes, exactly. I notice that even computer air war games suffer from the same issue. Bob's application of morale rules to it was a stroke of subtle genius, possibly because he started with a blank page! I think he is away on a holiday at the moment, but he might share his thoughts on that when he returns.

One neat quirk that I haven't mentioned is that aircraft firing guns use 1 move to do so (presumably to simulate the effects of gun recoil, last minute adjustments and the slight delay in responding to target aspect changes). This enables roughly equivalent aircraft to have a decent chance of escaping (so a 109 will get away from a Hurricane quite easily usually, Spitfires and 109s have a decent chance of escaping each other without too much trouble but Hurricanes have to hope that the 109 wasn't too close when they start heading for home).

I ordered Bob's book based on your post, Whirlwind. Thanks.

Yes, this is fascinating. I love the idea of morale to force a break-off, and that is very interesting about firing eating up a movement point.

I think another aspect of the ‘to the death' fights is the inability of a disadvantaged aircraft to disengage and actually escape. This would seem to potentially remedy this. There's always going to be the concern of being able to shake a pursuer, but in rules that don't penalize the shot, it's pure luck outrun him.

V/R,
Jack