Aircraft carriers in battle

fullmetaljacket · Post by **fullmetaljacket** » Fri Mar 27, 2015 1:53 am

Here is a question for all you navy buffs. I love the look of carriers an would love to have them in miniature games, but here is the problem most naval battles using carriers. The fleets would of never seen each other. My group games with Seekrieg 5 rules, now its a great set of rules an has a very detailed rules for carrier operations, but when you get down to ship vs ship battles carriers never see the gaming board. Any thoughts or suggestions or rules sets that you all use that could at least get these beautiful looking GHQ carriers on the board? I have GQ3 rules also but haven't got to use them yet.

fullmetaljacket

av8rmongo · Post by **av8rmongo** » Fri Mar 27, 2015 3:40 am

I don't think it is a question of what rules to use I think its a question of the scenario used or what you want to get out of it. Are you gaming WWII or modern? Are you trying to game out carrier force vs.carrier force or some other mix?

If you want carrier force vs. carrier force on one table then one way to do it would be to have essentially three zones on the table. Each carrier force would have its own zone at opposite ends of the table. In these two zones the normal time and distance scales would apply for which ever preferred ruleset you are using. You can play around with how much table these zones should take up to allow for ship and aircraft maneuvering, detection etc. In the central buffer zone between these two zones time and distance scales would be more abstracted. When an outbound aircraft/flight flies into this zone think of it as if they were flying beyond the detection range of their own force. The referee knows the true distance between forces and with the planned airspeed of the aircraft/flight can place them at the other end at their ETA. This would allow you to compress the distance without forfeiting any action of interest in a game.

Extra Crispy · Post by **Extra Crispy** » Fri Mar 27, 2015 4:13 am

ODGW has a room at the big east coast cons and run lots of games. When they do carrier operations they have multiple tables in different parts of the room!

Donald M. Scheef · Post by **Donald M. Scheef** » Fri Mar 27, 2015 5:13 am

Another possibility is aircraft carriers on one side and surface ships on the other. Either of two historical battles may provide a starting point: the Battle off Samar on 25 October, 1944 and HMS Glorious versus German battlecruisers on 08 June, 1940. In one case, the carriers won; in the other the surface ships. Other hypotheticals are possible.

Don S.

piersyf · Post by **piersyf** » Sat Mar 28, 2015 11:59 am

I'm looking at abstracting the board as well, with 2 time signatures. My main concern isn't aircraft carriers but the surface scales given in rules. If you set a scale like 1" is a 1000 yards then it become physically impossible to space your ships according to squadron practice, and that makes it impossible to group your fire on selected targets (cruiser squadrons suffer this a bit, as do desrons). A figure to ground ratio of around 4:1 (1mm = 10000m) makes spacing tight but possible, however that leads to a gun range for BB's of up to 3m (10 feet for the metrically challenged). I need to find a way that allows groups to maneuver, close, keep accurate spacing, and not need a basketball court, and not end up looking like a fancy game of Battleship. Abstracted distances is an option, but I haven't figured how to deal with what happens when a division moves independently of the main fleet (destroyer charge, for example).

av8rmongo · Post by **av8rmongo** » Sat Mar 28, 2015 11:13 pm

piersyf wrote:I'm looking at abstracting the board as well, with 2 time signatures. My main concern isn't aircraft carriers but the surface scales given in rules. If you set a scale like 1" is a 1000 yards then it become physically impossible to space your ships according to squadron practice, and that makes it impossible to group your fire on selected targets (cruiser squadrons suffer this a bit, as do desrons). A figure to ground ratio of around 4:1 (1mm = 10000m) makes spacing tight but possible, however that leads to a gun range for BB's of up to 3m (10 feet for the metrically challenged). I need to find a way that allows groups to maneuver, close, keep accurate spacing, and not need a basketball court, and not end up looking like a fancy game of Battleship. Abstracted distances is an option, but I haven't figured how to deal with what happens when a division moves independently of the main fleet (destroyer charge, for example).

Umm... are you missing a comma or a decimal point somewhere? Maybe my public school math training is letting me down here but if the scale is 1mm = 10,000m doesn't 3m = 3,000mm which would be = 30,000,000m in scale.

Just out of curiosity what is the spacing for ships you are using?

TAMMY · Post by **TAMMY** » Sun Mar 29, 2015 1:34 am

I think that pyersyf simply forgot and "m". It should be 1 mm = 10000mm or 1cm = 100m. Thsi makes about 4:1 dcsle withj 1/2400 models. Or more or less 4 times the scale of 1/36000 ot 12=1000 yards.

Anyway I don't see the problem. The two carier force will never meet on table so you may use two separate tables for the deployment nad a map to keep trace of the relative positons of the two fleet.

In case one of the two carrier force is involved in a surface acion it owuld develop as a normal naval battle.

CG2 · Post by **CG2** » Sun Mar 29, 2015 1:43 am

As a wildcard, what about WW1? Shorter range aircraft and smaller speed differential.

John Secker · Post by **John Secker** » Sun Mar 29, 2015 2:42 am

Yes, definitely a few decimal places out there. 1mm = 10000m is a scale of 1:10,000,000 - at that scale the Atlantic Ocean would be a couple of feet across, and you could fit the Pacific onto a modestly sized wargames table.

However, even discounting typos, there is a genuine problem - in order to fit a battle onto a table, the "ground" scale needs to be pretty large. At 1:10,000 a range of 20,000 yards is about 6 feet on the table, so if you want your battleships to start out of range, and you don't own a ballroom, you'll need to use that or an even bigger scale. Which means your ships are going to be way out of proportion, giving you problems with spacing, calculating collisions and torpedo hits and so on. It just looks wrong - like a Flames of War battle, everything is just too close.

GHQ ships are very nice models, but for fighting battles I use the smallest ships I can get - the 1:6000 models produced by Hallmark (I think they may have been bought by someone else, my purchases were a long time ago).

piersyf · Post by **piersyf** » Sun Mar 29, 2015 4:16 am

Yes you're all correct, I left an M off. I was particularly numerically challenged yesterday. It is as TAMMY posted. As to distances it depends on the particular battle conditions, but escorts need to ensure they have good coverage for both ASW and AAA to be effective. No point having them 10 miles away, they leave too many gaps. Convoys typically had spacings between merchants of 600 to 800m, and some of them closed up even more at night! I defy you to place any GHQ merchant nose to tail, with a bridge to bridge distance of 6/10ths of an inch. At 1mm = 10m the ships' bases touch nose to tail to meet that scale.