KISS: Aerospace Edition

[SovietOnion]

Hi all,

I'm a lover of combined-arms warfare, the rule of cool and playing with toy army men but pretending it is serious business. Aerospace models scratch several itches for me, but needless to say, the rules do not.

My table tolerates my experimentation for now, but we all agree that our focus is on the ground combat, and the less time aerospace takes away from that focus the better. We do not want to run a separate set of maps just for the aircraft. We are 100% 'ground map' only. We want there to be fair interaction between ground & air units without having to jump through several different chapters, rulebooks, errata and FAQs.

I took it upon myself to read through all the rules and chop as much fat as possible to keep the authenticity of the (mostly) TW rules, while cutting out things that were irrelevant to the ground battlefield. No rolls, no special revenuers, no space rules. We also found the rules for minimum movement before turns and all that to be too much, and much preferred the basic flight path system. I added a very small amount of homebrew to it, limiting the oncoming turn's flightpath to be within the safe thrust rating of the unit, or the max thrust rating at a penalty to tests in that turn.

The one complaint so far is that air-to-air feels dull. How can I fix that without bogging things down any more? We had a situation where on turn one the enemy player decided to bring his Lightning in to intercept my Chippewa W7 head-on, and with the modifiers as we saw them my G3 Chippewa was auto-hitting with four large pulse lasers. Short range. +1 for head-on, -2 for pulse. That just didn't feel right to us.

Here is my collected doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pDwv3IigCsB9D2Ezse_zWqzFg49_IEH2e5dupHnSUV8/edit?usp=sharing

Suggestions welcome!

[Daryk]

I recommend holding discussion until this thread is moved to Fan Rules.

[DevianID]

Without using any fan rules, I highly recommend the Radar Map for resolving aerospace operations.  In short, in a dogfight you both roll piloting, and the winners and MOS set the angle and range.  You also use a small abstract ring to keep track of how far out air support is, or if your interceptors can engage the bombers before they get to the map.  For the actual air-v-ground stuff, you just draw a line over the battlefield, which works super clean, at least for me.

[SovietOnion]

I found several problems with the radar map.

There was a dividing line between units able to move one or two zones a turn. I believe it was 10 safe thrust? It then went on to say a unit MUST move one zone. A unit may spend one of its movement points on changing altitude. This to me reads that the vast majority of fighters (slower than 10ST) can never alter their altitude, as they must spend their single movement point on changing zones.

Another point of confusion at my table about the 'must move one zone' is that the rules say you can move from the inner ring to the centre (ground) zone. At the end of the turn, you pop back out into the inner ring. Can you just keep going from inner ring to centre zone?

The biggest issue we've found with the ground-map rules is that air-to-air feels dull. I agree the radar map dogfight rules are much more flavorful.

[Grand_dm]

Without using any fan rules, I highly recommend the Radar Map for resolving aerospace operations.  In short, in a dogfight you both roll piloting, and the winners and MOS set the angle and range.  You also use a small abstract ring to keep track of how far out air support is, or if your interceptors can engage the bombers before they get to the map.  For the actual air-v-ground stuff, you just draw a line over the battlefield, which works super clean, at least for me.

This is what we are using along with BSP support for ground games to represent aerospace assets.