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| City: | Mahomet, Il.  | | Personal Data: | Male, born: August 15 1948 | | Membership | 21years 357days ago. | | Last Login | 6years 227days ago. | | Last Move | 11years 221days ago. | Phil Hall is currently  | Send a mail to Phil Hall |
| | Message text Your going to have to trust me on this. The a/c speeds are for a/c at 15000. The Brits did extensive testing of their own and captured a/c before and after the war. There used to be a marvelous monthly publication called Aircraft in Profile. For each WW1 a/c they did, they gave the specs for the tests when they knew them. The relative speeds of the a/c are against each other at the altitude of 15000 ft. since that was the most common, other than 1000m.
The a/c in the game are the most popular and the oddities, such as the D-XII that I could find that kind of information on.
Why not more a/c in the game? There are several things to be considered when doing a game. First was the deadline. The game had to be completed in time to publish it before GenCon where it was released. This meant the counters for the a/c, which won the designer an award, had to be done. That meant limiting plane types so multiple a/c could be done with only minor changes to the artwork instead of creating a whole new piece. At the same time he was doing BM Rich Banner was working on two more releases that needed to be ready at the same time. I don't think he slept for 6 months.
Next is cost. You get two five color sheets of a/c in the game. A special die had to be made to cut the oversized pieces and the cost of adding another sheet of a/c would have nearly doubled the cost of the game plus the workload on Rich would have meant not releasing it on time. There would also have been additional maneuver sheets needed. And everything had to fit into the standard $15.00 game box.
Another consideration was finding interesting color schemes for the a/c in the game. Every a/c in the game is a bit of art of a real a/c. Rich told me he really enjoyed doing them, but he felt he spent to much time on researching the ones he put in.
Another consideration isn't a hard, such as cost, space, etc, consideration. What will sell? Will people buy a game that doesn't have all the major combatants in it that they see on the movie or T.V. screen or learned about on their own. BM was aimed at the general wargamer, not just the niche air gamer. If you have seen both of the boxes that the game came in you will see that the first box, while a neat picture, lacks color, and the most prominent a/c on the cover is the Bristol, not exactly everyone's favorite a/c. The second box is a blue one with a much more colorful cover, the Albatros called "Blitz" the prominent one. Also note that the main a/c went from drab British to colorful German. For some reason German's sell games when they are on the cover of the box, be they Imperial German's or Nazi's.
Now the final point. The game is coarse. You can only turn through six points. In one of the previous posts someone pointed this out, and if you look at the maneuver charts you will find that several charts list two or more planes using that chart. They differ in their stats as far as damage goes, but they maneuver the same.
If you want to know how to determine the hits, here's how it was done,
Wings- 1 box for every 10 square feet of wing
Fuselage-1 box for every foot of length
Tail. small-4 boxes (Dr-I, Nieuport
large-6 boxes (Albatros, etc.)
Engine- Rotary-6
Inline-8
Fuel. 12 1/2 boxes per half hour of endurance. This is the limiting factor in dogfights and is a design feature intended to limit the number of turns. It rather handily creates an unknown number of turns in the game, forces you to use more than one speed, and plan a bit. And all without much complication.
Hope this helps. Feel free to ask questions. My email is phililphall@yahoo.com
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