In my endless quest for more information on the naval aspects of the Great War, I came across this website which has a PDF of the rules used by the Royal Navy from 1921 for simulating strategic and tactical naval exercises on tabletop. The file is downloadable if you want to have a copy.
Two things struck me about these rules. First, they are very simplistic from the gunnery point of view. No penetration tables, no determination of where a shell has hit, just a very simple 3 range group rate of hitting, and gradual reduction of firepower based on number of hits. For a navy as gunnery mad as the Royal Navy, that is surprising since they would have had a lot of detailed information, if not the complex formulas, to determine penetration and immunity zones. From what I have read, the U.S. Navy was deeply into that kind of a n a l y s i s by the '30s if not earlier.
Second, there is a lot more detail than I would have expected on the effect of aircraft, and from what I've read they have probably been way too generous for the capabilities of aircraft in the immediate post-war period.
The link to the PDF is here:
http://www.btinternet.com/~david.manley ... s_1921.pdf
Royal Navy 1921 Wargame Rules
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ed*b
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chrisswim
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Interesting rules
As I think about the rules review(I haven't looked at them yet), it would be during a period when calculators did not exist (use slide rule perhaps)nor copiers, that we take advantage of in our games.... It would also be a case where the purpose is to teach strategy, operations, and tactics. To understand the concepts and the command and have the 'practice' of an engagement with out being in one. Then better able to command.
Nice find!!
Nice find!!
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ed*b
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[quote]As I think about the rules review(I haven't looked at them yet), it would be during a period when calculators did not exist (use slide rule perhaps)nor copiers, that we take advantage of in our games.[/quote]
Umm, well sort of. Low volume duplicating machines (like Gestetners, Ditto and Mimeograph) were around from before 1900. In the '70s I printed a lot of SF convention program books on Gestetner, as well as APA's and club newsletters. The Trumpeter Gaming Club in Burnaby used to put out a quarterly magazine (complete with board game!) printed on Gestetner. I edited a few issues.
Speaking from experience, the use of overlay graph paper and slide rules to run naval campaigns works quite well. Our gaming club at the University of BC did at least a dozen large naval campaigns during the '70s and early '80s that way. Each side would trace out ship movements, aircraft search arcs, etc. on large sheets of semi-translucent graph paper, then the referee would take the sheets from each side (we ran some campaigns with 6 sides) and note when contacts occurred. Then the referee would go to each side, given some information on what was spotted, and ask for a decision on how to respond. Slide rules worked perfectly well for figuring out ranges, time to get to certain locations, fuel consumption, etc. When forces in contact decided to fight, we transferred to tabletop using models and our tactical rules.
Going back to the 1921 rules, having read them over, I noted that the ship scale used was 1/2400! I still think the gunfire rules are far more simplistic than necessary. Although they do provide for higher rates of hitting for larger guns, the complete lack of armour penetration is still puzzling. If the intention was to train people in how to write orders, then it would make sense that the "battles" were inconsequential. However the rules themselves state that one of the purposes is to show the effect of concentrated fire and tactical manoeuvers. To do this, you have to take into account fire control apparatus and the wide range of effects a penetrating versus non-penetrating hit can have.
Over the past 35 or so years we've developed a range of naval rules increasing in complexity from single penetration (best of belt or deck) at various ranges with all guns hitting at the same rate to the current rules with 24 different categories of gun to show ballistic properties as well as horizontal and vertical armour penetration at different ranges.
For the WW1 rules the ships have six different armour values (lower and upper belt, turret front and top, deck and conning tower). A damage table based on statistical compilation of actual battle damage provides reasonably detailed possible outcome of hits. This is a far more detailed simulation than the simplistic lose guns/lose speed approach in the 1921 rules, but we can run a good portion of Jutland using 8 to 10 people in 6 hours. All this information would have been available in 1921, so I am still puzzled at the extreme simplification in this area.
The aircraft rules are interesting in that the most an aircraft is allowed to do to a capital ship (including an aircraft carrier) is to knock out secondary guns. This shows the bias towards considering aircraft as only useful only for spotting and reconnaisance. Based on WW2 experience (with far better AA directors compensating for the higher speeds) it actually took about 10 times the number of shells to bring down an aircraft as shown in these tables.
Umm, well sort of. Low volume duplicating machines (like Gestetners, Ditto and Mimeograph) were around from before 1900. In the '70s I printed a lot of SF convention program books on Gestetner, as well as APA's and club newsletters. The Trumpeter Gaming Club in Burnaby used to put out a quarterly magazine (complete with board game!) printed on Gestetner. I edited a few issues.
Speaking from experience, the use of overlay graph paper and slide rules to run naval campaigns works quite well. Our gaming club at the University of BC did at least a dozen large naval campaigns during the '70s and early '80s that way. Each side would trace out ship movements, aircraft search arcs, etc. on large sheets of semi-translucent graph paper, then the referee would take the sheets from each side (we ran some campaigns with 6 sides) and note when contacts occurred. Then the referee would go to each side, given some information on what was spotted, and ask for a decision on how to respond. Slide rules worked perfectly well for figuring out ranges, time to get to certain locations, fuel consumption, etc. When forces in contact decided to fight, we transferred to tabletop using models and our tactical rules.
Going back to the 1921 rules, having read them over, I noted that the ship scale used was 1/2400! I still think the gunfire rules are far more simplistic than necessary. Although they do provide for higher rates of hitting for larger guns, the complete lack of armour penetration is still puzzling. If the intention was to train people in how to write orders, then it would make sense that the "battles" were inconsequential. However the rules themselves state that one of the purposes is to show the effect of concentrated fire and tactical manoeuvers. To do this, you have to take into account fire control apparatus and the wide range of effects a penetrating versus non-penetrating hit can have.
Over the past 35 or so years we've developed a range of naval rules increasing in complexity from single penetration (best of belt or deck) at various ranges with all guns hitting at the same rate to the current rules with 24 different categories of gun to show ballistic properties as well as horizontal and vertical armour penetration at different ranges.
For the WW1 rules the ships have six different armour values (lower and upper belt, turret front and top, deck and conning tower). A damage table based on statistical compilation of actual battle damage provides reasonably detailed possible outcome of hits. This is a far more detailed simulation than the simplistic lose guns/lose speed approach in the 1921 rules, but we can run a good portion of Jutland using 8 to 10 people in 6 hours. All this information would have been available in 1921, so I am still puzzled at the extreme simplification in this area.
The aircraft rules are interesting in that the most an aircraft is allowed to do to a capital ship (including an aircraft carrier) is to knock out secondary guns. This shows the bias towards considering aircraft as only useful only for spotting and reconnaisance. Based on WW2 experience (with far better AA directors compensating for the higher speeds) it actually took about 10 times the number of shells to bring down an aircraft as shown in these tables.