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| City: | Mahomet, Il.  | | Personal Data: | Male, born: August 15 1948 | | Membership | 22years 343days ago. | | Last Login | 7years 212days ago. | | Last Move | 12years 207days ago. | Phil Hall is currently  | Send a mail to Phil Hall |
| | Message text 3 - If the planes are so well represented... please, answert to the question: "Who was the traitor who lured those dumb englishmen to drop theyr wonderful Tripes for a bunch of garbage like Camels ?" 
Two reasons are given for this. The first is that it required a disproportionate amount of repair work for even minor damage (born out by the large number of aircraft serving in a limited number of squadrons) and the second being that it was more difficult to rig, although this would seem to be bogus given its limited rigging. More likely it was simply to difficult to maintain the squadrons with the small number of Tripes produced.
4 - About the fuel rule... a Lewis ammo drum empty in 5/3 round (or 1 round and 2/3 - one long + one medium burst)... at 500 shots/minute of fire rate, a 100 shots Lewis ammo drum last exactly 1/5 of minute, or 12 seconds... so a Blue Max turn is 12+12+12 seconds (3/5 of a drum lenght). Now, with 36 seconds for a game round... explain me again why the "1 1/2 hour" endurance of the DR1 is just enough to allow him to fly straight ahead at minimum speed for 22,5 rounds (13 minutes) before to drop! (oh, of course if we could take in account the 50 shots Lewis ammo drum, the total combat endurance of a DRI will drop to 7 minutes of fly... I anticipate this and make calculations on the larger ammo drum) ...the fuel rule is wrong! Sorry. 
The fuel rule is a game design decision to force a conclusion to the game without requiring that every aircraft on one side be shot down. The fuel of the aircraft is proportional to other aircraft. Most German aircraft only had an endurance of 1 1/2 hours compared with 2-2 1/2 hours of allied aircraft. Originally it was only the fuel number, and became the fuel/speed number when it became necessary to allow you to shoot at an aircraft in the same hex. Think of it more as an amount of fuel consumed to move a certain distance at maximum speed. Faster aircraft go farther on the same amount of fuel consumption.
As far as game design consideration goes, the game was designed within the following parameters.
1) altitude is 15000 feet.
2) it only represents a dogfight without surprise
on either side.
3) There had to be a limiting factor to allow the
game to be played in a reasonable time. Originally there was no limiting factor and games dragged on for literally hours. That wasn't acceptable to GDW which wanted a shorter game. The idea of limiting through fuel made more sense than a simple arbitrary " o.k. now you all go home" rule. It gave the players some control over when and how the game would end plus added another level of decision making that causes the player to agonize a bit about his choices. We had a play tester who simply randomly picked his maneuver by closing his eyes and spinning his maneuver chart and stopping it with his finger. Whatever his finger stopped on was his next maneuver. He was fairly successful with this since it made him entirely unpredictable. That changed after we added tailing, restricted, and non-repeatable maneuvers, then added the r/l turn restriction of having to go straight before you turn to the opposite side.
4) The player is assumed to have some skill in flying his plane. All other flying games at the time BM was published required the player to spend time on his own learning how to fly the plane. BM would assume a level of competence on the part of the player, hence the maneuver charts. The idea of turn, climb and dive points were rejected as not player friendly. That also meant turns had to be made by hexside instead of hexside and vertices as some airgames had you doing.
5 The aircraft had to perform against other aircraft as they actually did, within the parameters of the game. It was this design requirement that inspired the fuel rule as a limiting factor.
6 It all had to fit into a standard size box, with no more than the standard size rules folder of 8 pages, (which would include the logo, one page of charts, and any designers notes. That's why no designers notes were included with the boxed version)
7 The game would have low learning curve without sacrificing simulation value. This led to considering just what the game would simulate. The final decision was that it wouldn't try to do more than simulate a dogfight of short duration. No trench strafing, no recon flights, no bombing runs, no escort duties. Just a dogfight. Then came the question of what do pilots do in a knife fight type of dogfight, beyond staying alive, and the answer is, turn. As sharply as possible. And that led to another decision. No altitude. These aircraft fell out of the sky as they turned. Admitedly they did it at different rates, but sharp turns always tended downwards. You had to fly fairly straight to climb in these buses. So since most of the game would be spent turning, altitude would be assumed to decrease. For a while I considered that as a limiting factor, but it would have required complicated calculations for each aircraft to detemine how fast they were getting lower and who was higher, and then altitude would make its debut. Eric did this with Canvas Falcons, but it wasn't in the cards for BM. When GDW added the 5 altitude levels in the second edition, most people never used them, prefering to stay at the same altitude.
8 Amount of time for a turn would be kept to no more than 10 minutes.
9 Aircraft would be the well-known ones on the Western Front. No oddities or other front specific aircraft, such as the Bristol M1c
There were a few other constraints imposed by the size of the counters and numbers I could use, but they didn't overly affect the design as these other parameters did.
This has gotten to long, so I'll close. |
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