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Waters, Michael A (Flight Vehicle Performance AIR 4322) CIV USN NAWCAD (USA)
You left out “Air Supremacy” … unless that was intentional. Michael Waters NAVAIR 4.3.2.2 (AB212) Flight Vehicle Performance Mission Planning Team 48110 Shaw Rd. BLDG 2187 Suite 1320-C4
NAS Patuxent River MD, 20670 301-757-0595 (office)
301-342-8597 (fax) 240-298-5673 (cell)
From: airbattle@groups.io <airbattle@groups.io> On Behalf Of Tony Valle
Sent: Monday, January 23, 2023 12:58 PM
To: airbattle@groups.io
Subject: [URL Verdict: Neutral][Non-DoD Source] Re: [airbattle] [airpower] Other systems On Jan 23 2023, at 10:56 AM, Michael Scott <eagle707@...> wrote: What, no mention of Mig Killers? Dang, I feel left out.😎 SO much history here, and let me give an insider's perspective. I'm going to break the discussion up into two pieces, "tactical" air combat by which I will mean an emphasis on within-visual-range (WVR) air combat maneuvering (ACM) with varying levels of fidelity in representing basic fighter maneuvers (BFM) and energy-maneuverability theory (E-M), and "operational" by which I will mean an emphasis on multiple formations of disparate aircraft, system-level (as opposed to unit level) representation of air defense systems (or integrated air defense systems -- IADS), and balance portrayal of air-to-air and air-to-ground aircraft employment. Richtofen's War (RW), and Air Force / Dauntless (AF/D), were the earliest table-top air combat games I recall seeing in wide circulation (though I think MiG Alley actually preceded them) produced by Avalon Hill and very, very much "games" as opposed to simulations. They often embedded observer quirks into the play formalism (such as the 0-cost right hand turns for rotary engine aircraft in RW and the infamous slip-turn-turn maneuver in AF/D). Other than getting the basic speed/distance/time scales correct for the map, they got almost every other engineering and aerodynamic factor wrong. The I-go-you-go system in RW, coupled with the extreme maneuverability of WW I aircraft and the longish game turn duration made it essentially a game of taking turns at shooting one another until someone went down. AF/D was quite a lot of fun when played "arena" style -- lots of players with one or two aircraft each with an all-against-all rule of engagement -- but suffered from the fact that the maneuvering usually degenerated into a tight furball in the map center after the merge took place. MiG Alley is a set of miniatures rules for handling Korean-era jet combat and it's pretty good at that. The Korean era is a quirky one, combing very underpowered but very fast aircraft, often operating at very high altitude. The latter is both a consequence of the lack of power as getting above your opponent was the only way to secure an energy advantage, and a complicating factor since the lack of power is very exacerbated by operating above the troposphere. Without any air-to-air missiles, the short range of the weapons combined with the high speed and low turn rates of the aircraft make for a fairly boring, often bloodless, fight from neutral start conditions. Never was it more true that the majority of kills went to unseen adversaries than in Korea, but such a situation makes for a really not-so-fun game. I didn't actually see MiG Alley until after Air Superiority came out, so it wasn't really much of an influence for Birds of Prey (but it might have been for J.D.). Foxbat and Phantom from Simulation Publications Inc. (SPI) was the first air combat game that I played and the first historical attempt to build up from "realism" to some degree. Performance ratings for aircraft were the basis for the game ratings, and the game had rules for human factors (through they were primitive), zoom versus sustained climbs (wholly unrealistic of course) a notion of energy (but it played like currency), and unbalanced scenarios (though all the scenarios had fixed starting positions indicated on the map). It also had the bizarre "iron walls" rules that said any aircraft leaving the map was destroyed. In short, it was an air combat game designed by people who researched the subject and tried to capture what they (incompletely) understood. It is to air combat as the SPI game Scrimmage is to American football. Like most of the products coming out Dunnigan's universe, it was very rich and felt well-engineered, even if it was wrong. When SPI turned it's attention to Air War I was very excited. It seemed that they were going to get the engineering right and we would have a game that covered the entire waterfront of tactical air combat. Man was I wrong. The project was headed by David Isby (who actually worked for the same company I did in the 90s -- I met with him in his office in the DC area once), whose strength is International relations and global defense matters, not so much aerodynamics, and it showed. The original rules actually called for an aircraft to effectively halve its speed while turning (not kidding). That was because if you flew straight, you went one hex per MP, but if you were turning, you paid one MP to move and one MP to collect turn points toward a facing in every hex (the latter without moving). Ugh. The anti-aircraft guns were insanely lethal. The game scale was very tight in both space and time, and the missile and sensor rules were byzantine. It wasn't unplayable -- it was playable in the sense of "War in the East" or "Tobruk". It just required a great deal of table space and patience, and a few surgical operations on Isby's rules to make it more sane. I do recall in college setting up and running a large strike in Air War with 8 v 12 and anti-aircraft on acetate hex maps with terrain drawn in for an attack on a naval complex in a fjord in Norway. It took most of the night Friday to set up and all day Saturday to play with six people. We got through 11 game turns (5 seconds each). Flight Leader is a true oddball. It's tactical, sort of, but at too large a scale for effective ACM representation. It has missile mechanics that look like Pk diagrams, but all IR missiles are the same (as are all radar missiles) since there is basically a fixed template for them in the playaids. It seems to want to handle the large scale action over the Fulda Gap as a venue, but all the essential off-board support you would need to include gets short shrift. It's not really a bad game, or even an incorrect one, it's just purposeless. Air Superiority was the game changer. It was playable, fun, engaging, and seemed to showcase the performance of aircraft in a way that matched intuition, which shouldn't be surprising since the game was basically designed around intuition rather than engineering. It also brought out J.D.'s experience as an aviator, translating NAVAIR tactical doctrine into turn rates and vertical maneuvering. The game scale was a compromise designed to allow pre-merge missile exchanges to flow seamlessly into close-in ACM. It covered Western and Eastern aircraft equally well, included reasonable guesswork on emerging aircraft (like the F-117), and had a simplified, playable system for electronic warfare (EW), sensors and systems, visual sighting, initiative, and even damage control. Lest the assessment to follow be misread, let me state this unequivocally here -- I loved playing Air Superiority and Air Strike. The game and its associated tournaments gave me dozens of friends, hundreds of stories, and even a career change that was hugely beneficial and that I still work on today. But Air Superiority, Air Strike, and later The Speed of Heat (cumulatively AS/TSoH) had some issues that I felt the need to resolve. I contributed quite a bit to the system over the years including the Likelihood system, the mechanism for handling radar range and stealth, adjustments in the climb/dive costs to better represent the physics, and the "fan based" missile attack rules which grew out of my obscene ability to dodge missiles unrealistically using hex grain and the displacement roll mechanics. The scale compromise meant that BFM got squeezed too tightly and didn't break out aircraft differences very well. Maneuvering in three dimensions was really a mix of almost-independent horizontal and vertical maneuvers, and the HFP/VFP split mechanism led to more anomalies, especially when aircraft were maneuvering close to one another. Acceleration and Deceleration didn't match the physics, and the scales for thrust and gravity were also not compatible. The long game turn length of 12 seconds made for real issues in modern aircraft with high turn rates as a game could devolve into 120-180 degree turns that would preclude taking valid shots even with initiative. In short, the more I learned about air combat tactics in the real world, and the more I studied aerodynamics, the more I realized that AS/TSoH need to be adjusted to get the engineering right. Mark "TopWop" Bovankovich and I left the Air Superiority tournament in Fort Worth, TX, in 1997 with an idea to produce a "TSoH Improved Flight Engine" (TIFE) that would drop into the whole AS/TSoH system, keeping all the sensor, missile, gun, and initiative rules and just changing the way that aircraft maneuvered, accelerated, and determined range. J.D. rejected the idea, saying "go off and build your own air combat game". That is what led to what was called "Air Superiority 2000" and finally led to Birds of Prey (BoP) in 2007. At roughly the same time, J.D. took off down the long track of WWII games in the Fighting Wing (FW) series. It's fair to say that if you stand on AS/TSoH and say "I want MOAR engineering" you get BoP. And if you say "I want MOAR intuition" you get FW. The FW games "suffer" from even more distortions in 3D maneuver, more problems with energy and acceleration mechanics, and more "Hollywood" type game feel in rolling mechanics, combat effectiveness, damage resolution, and such. Real WWII actions are far more boring, far more bloodless, and far less "uphill" than FW games, though the "let maneuvering in a prop plane" is lots of fun and scratches the WWII game itch. BoP is based on "get the physics and geometry right and the rest will follow" as a philosophy. As such, I went through many iterations of how to play the complicated equations arising from aerodynamics and physics in game play. There were lookup tables based on logarithms, there were "tax forms" that required a calculator to complete, there were attempts to divide 3D space into 20-degree slices and to divide the hexgrid into multiple scales to solve the compromise scaling issues that were present in AS/TSoH. I came across nomographs as an ancient art that allowed the problem of complex calculations to be solved by drawing lines on a playaid, and I cracked the code of 3D maneuvering with the PHAD. And this worked well enough (by no means easily) to produce a game that could be played -- often slowly -- and was true to the aerodynamics and energy-maneuver of modern aircraft. Lots of work has gone in BoP over the last 16 years to make it more playable to the point that we are now likely to produce a custom circular slide rule based on the E6-B "whiz wheel" to speed up the play mechanics even further. This is already way too long for me to tackle the operational games, so I'll save that for a later post. There was another, lesser known and often overlooked game that came out in 1979 titled, Rolling Thunder: Airwar over North Vietnam 1965-1972, by Group 3 Games. While the games graphics were adequate, the game itself was rather good and complexity-wise it probably fits somewhere between Air Superiority/TSoH and AH's Flight Leader. The game's designer, Steve Weiss, also designed Avalon Hill's very successful game, Siege of Jerusalem For transparency purposes, I currently own all of the games listed above along with Birds of Prey. I used to own Air War and tried Foxbat & Phantom a few times when it first came out. Anyway, some folks on this thread might want to consider checking out Rolling Thunder as another air-to-air combat game to play. I hope this helps. The game you are thinking maybe was Foxbat and Phantoms by SPI, precursor to Air War which was so difficult to understand let alone play. How do you go from a totally unplayable (except by Physics PHD majors) to something streamlined and fun to play like Air Superiority or Speed of Heat I'll never know... J.D. Webster’s games do not happen without Air War, and Air Force/Dauntless being developed first. (It seems like there was one other game that was inspirational for Air Superiority, but I have forgotten.) Air War and then (especially) Air Superiority are the ancestors of Birds of Prey. BoP’s first name was Air Superiority 2000”, as it started as a derivative of AirSup… Air War was voted at one time as the hardest game ever designed to be played! Flight Leader is a better and easier game. JDWebster games are those that I prefer. Not sure if moderators will allow this to be answered. It seems as if many present in this group are way more knowledgeable about jet flight / combat than the average 'gamer'. So, answers would probably be very well constructed. Any thoughts on the systems used for SPI / TSR Air War, or AH Flight Leader?
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Well, it was just a temp name
You left out “Air Supremacy” … unless that was intentional. Michael Waters NAVAIR 4.3.2.2 (AB212) Flight Vehicle Performance Mission Planning Team 48110 Shaw Rd. BLDG 2187 Suite 1320-C4
NAS Patuxent River MD, 20670 301-757-0595 (office)
301-342-8597 (fax) 240-298-5673 (cell) From: airbattle@groups.io <airbattle@groups.io> On Behalf Of Tony Valle
Sent: Monday, January 23, 2023 12:58 PM
To: airbattle@groups.io
Subject: [URL Verdict: Neutral][Non-DoD Source] Re: [airbattle] [airpower] Other systems On Jan 23 2023, at 10:56 AM, Michael Scott <eagle707@...> wrote: What, no mention of Mig Killers? Dang, I feel left out.😎 SO much history here, and let me give an insider's perspective. I'm going to break the discussion up into two pieces, "tactical" air combat by which I will mean an emphasis on within-visual-range (WVR) air combat maneuvering (ACM) with varying levels of fidelity in representing basic fighter maneuvers (BFM) and energy-maneuverability theory (E-M), and "operational" by which I will mean an emphasis on multiple formations of disparate aircraft, system-level (as opposed to unit level) representation of air defense systems (or integrated air defense systems -- IADS), and balance portrayal of air-to-air and air-to-ground aircraft employment. Richtofen's War (RW), and Air Force / Dauntless (AF/D), were the earliest table-top air combat games I recall seeing in wide circulation (though I think MiG Alley actually preceded them) produced by Avalon Hill and very, very much "games" as opposed to simulations. They often embedded observer quirks into the play formalism (such as the 0-cost right hand turns for rotary engine aircraft in RW and the infamous slip-turn-turn maneuver in AF/D). Other than getting the basic speed/distance/time scales correct for the map, they got almost every other engineering and aerodynamic factor wrong. The I-go-you-go system in RW, coupled with the extreme maneuverability of WW I aircraft and the longish game turn duration made it essentially a game of taking turns at shooting one another until someone went down. AF/D was quite a lot of fun when played "arena" style -- lots of players with one or two aircraft each with an all-against-all rule of engagement -- but suffered from the fact that the maneuvering usually degenerated into a tight furball in the map center after the merge took place. MiG Alley is a set of miniatures rules for handling Korean-era jet combat and it's pretty good at that. The Korean era is a quirky one, combing very underpowered but very fast aircraft, often operating at very high altitude. The latter is both a consequence of the lack of power as getting above your opponent was the only way to secure an energy advantage, and a complicating factor since the lack of power is very exacerbated by operating above the troposphere. Without any air-to-air missiles, the short range of the weapons combined with the high speed and low turn rates of the aircraft make for a fairly boring, often bloodless, fight from neutral start conditions. Never was it more true that the majority of kills went to unseen adversaries than in Korea, but such a situation makes for a really not-so-fun game. I didn't actually see MiG Alley until after Air Superiority came out, so it wasn't really much of an influence for Birds of Prey (but it might have been for J.D.). Foxbat and Phantom from Simulation Publications Inc. (SPI) was the first air combat game that I played and the first historical attempt to build up from "realism" to some degree. Performance ratings for aircraft were the basis for the game ratings, and the game had rules for human factors (through they were primitive), zoom versus sustained climbs (wholly unrealistic of course) a notion of energy (but it played like currency), and unbalanced scenarios (though all the scenarios had fixed starting positions indicated on the map). It also had the bizarre "iron walls" rules that said any aircraft leaving the map was destroyed. In short, it was an air combat game designed by people who researched the subject and tried to capture what they (incompletely) understood. It is to air combat as the SPI game Scrimmage is to American football. Like most of the products coming out Dunnigan's universe, it was very rich and felt well-engineered, even if it was wrong. When SPI turned it's attention to Air War I was very excited. It seemed that they were going to get the engineering right and we would have a game that covered the entire waterfront of tactical air combat. Man was I wrong. The project was headed by David Isby (who actually worked for the same company I did in the 90s -- I met with him in his office in the DC area once), whose strength is International relations and global defense matters, not so much aerodynamics, and it showed. The original rules actually called for an aircraft to effectively halve its speed while turning (not kidding). That was because if you flew straight, you went one hex per MP, but if you were turning, you paid one MP to move and one MP to collect turn points toward a facing in every hex (the latter without moving). Ugh. The anti-aircraft guns were insanely lethal. The game scale was very tight in both space and time, and the missile and sensor rules were byzantine. It wasn't unplayable -- it was playable in the sense of "War in the East" or "Tobruk". It just required a great deal of table space and patience, and a few surgical operations on Isby's rules to make it more sane. I do recall in college setting up and running a large strike in Air War with 8 v 12 and anti-aircraft on acetate hex maps with terrain drawn in for an attack on a naval complex in a fjord in Norway. It took most of the night Friday to set up and all day Saturday to play with six people. We got through 11 game turns (5 seconds each). Flight Leader is a true oddball. It's tactical, sort of, but at too large a scale for effective ACM representation. It has missile mechanics that look like Pk diagrams, but all IR missiles are the same (as are all radar missiles) since there is basically a fixed template for them in the playaids. It seems to want to handle the large scale action over the Fulda Gap as a venue, but all the essential off-board support you would need to include gets short shrift. It's not really a bad game, or even an incorrect one, it's just purposeless. Air Superiority was the game changer. It was playable, fun, engaging, and seemed to showcase the performance of aircraft in a way that matched intuition, which shouldn't be surprising since the game was basically designed around intuition rather than engineering. It also brought out J.D.'s experience as an aviator, translating NAVAIR tactical doctrine into turn rates and vertical maneuvering. The game scale was a compromise designed to allow pre-merge missile exchanges to flow seamlessly into close-in ACM. It covered Western and Eastern aircraft equally well, included reasonable guesswork on emerging aircraft (like the F-117), and had a simplified, playable system for electronic warfare (EW), sensors and systems, visual sighting, initiative, and even damage control. Lest the assessment to follow be misread, let me state this unequivocally here -- I loved playing Air Superiority and Air Strike. The game and its associated tournaments gave me dozens of friends, hundreds of stories, and even a career change that was hugely beneficial and that I still work on today. But Air Superiority, Air Strike, and later The Speed of Heat (cumulatively AS/TSoH) had some issues that I felt the need to resolve. I contributed quite a bit to the system over the years including the Likelihood system, the mechanism for handling radar range and stealth, adjustments in the climb/dive costs to better represent the physics, and the "fan based" missile attack rules which grew out of my obscene ability to dodge missiles unrealistically using hex grain and the displacement roll mechanics. The scale compromise meant that BFM got squeezed too tightly and didn't break out aircraft differences very well. Maneuvering in three dimensions was really a mix of almost-independent horizontal and vertical maneuvers, and the HFP/VFP split mechanism led to more anomalies, especially when aircraft were maneuvering close to one another. Acceleration and Deceleration didn't match the physics, and the scales for thrust and gravity were also not compatible. The long game turn length of 12 seconds made for real issues in modern aircraft with high turn rates as a game could devolve into 120-180 degree turns that would preclude taking valid shots even with initiative. In short, the more I learned about air combat tactics in the real world, and the more I studied aerodynamics, the more I realized that AS/TSoH need to be adjusted to get the engineering right. Mark "TopWop" Bovankovich and I left the Air Superiority tournament in Fort Worth, TX, in 1997 with an idea to produce a "TSoH Improved Flight Engine" (TIFE) that would drop into the whole AS/TSoH system, keeping all the sensor, missile, gun, and initiative rules and just changing the way that aircraft maneuvered, accelerated, and determined range. J.D. rejected the idea, saying "go off and build your own air combat game". That is what led to what was called "Air Superiority 2000" and finally led to Birds of Prey (BoP) in 2007. At roughly the same time, J.D. took off down the long track of WWII games in the Fighting Wing (FW) series. It's fair to say that if you stand on AS/TSoH and say "I want MOAR engineering" you get BoP. And if you say "I want MOAR intuition" you get FW. The FW games "suffer" from even more distortions in 3D maneuver, more problems with energy and acceleration mechanics, and more "Hollywood" type game feel in rolling mechanics, combat effectiveness, damage resolution, and such. Real WWII actions are far more boring, far more bloodless, and far less "uphill" than FW games, though the "let maneuvering in a prop plane" is lots of fun and scratches the WWII game itch. BoP is based on "get the physics and geometry right and the rest will follow" as a philosophy. As such, I went through many iterations of how to play the complicated equations arising from aerodynamics and physics in game play. There were lookup tables based on logarithms, there were "tax forms" that required a calculator to complete, there were attempts to divide 3D space into 20-degree slices and to divide the hexgrid into multiple scales to solve the compromise scaling issues that were present in AS/TSoH. I came across nomographs as an ancient art that allowed the problem of complex calculations to be solved by drawing lines on a playaid, and I cracked the code of 3D maneuvering with the PHAD. And this worked well enough (by no means easily) to produce a game that could be played -- often slowly -- and was true to the aerodynamics and energy-maneuver of modern aircraft. Lots of work has gone in BoP over the last 16 years to make it more playable to the point that we are now likely to produce a custom circular slide rule based on the E6-B "whiz wheel" to speed up the play mechanics even further. This is already way too long for me to tackle the operational games, so I'll save that for a later post. There was another, lesser known and often overlooked game that came out in 1979 titled, Rolling Thunder: Airwar over North Vietnam 1965-1972, by Group 3 Games. While the games graphics were adequate, the game itself was rather good and complexity-wise it probably fits somewhere between Air Superiority/TSoH and AH's Flight Leader. The game's designer, Steve Weiss, also designed Avalon Hill's very successful game, Siege of Jerusalem For transparency purposes, I currently own all of the games listed above along with Birds of Prey. I used to own Air War and tried Foxbat & Phantom a few times when it first came out. Anyway, some folks on this thread might want to consider checking out Rolling Thunder as another air-to-air combat game to play. I hope this helps. The game you are thinking maybe was Foxbat and Phantoms by SPI, precursor to Air War which was so difficult to understand let alone play. How do you go from a totally unplayable (except by Physics PHD majors) to something streamlined and fun to play like Air Superiority or Speed of Heat I'll never know... J.D. Webster’s games do not happen without Air War, and Air Force/Dauntless being developed first. (It seems like there was one other game that was inspirational for Air Superiority, but I have forgotten.) Air War and then (especially) Air Superiority are the ancestors of Birds of Prey. BoP’s first name was Air Superiority 2000”, as it started as a derivative of AirSup… Air War was voted at one time as the hardest game ever designed to be played! Flight Leader is a better and easier game. JDWebster games are those that I prefer. Not sure if moderators will allow this to be answered. It seems as if many present in this group are way more knowledgeable about jet flight / combat than the average 'gamer'. So, answers would probably be very well constructed. Any thoughts on the systems used for SPI / TSR Air War, or AH Flight Leader?
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Waters, Michael A (Flight Vehicle Performance AIR 4322) CIV USN NAWCAD (USA)
Everything is temporary …
Still, it was a functioning game, and was almost a published one. Not many games use multiple logarithmic calculations in their sequence of play; for that alone it deserves mention. And it’s the only iteration of BoP that I never needed to bail out. Or depart, now that I think of it. Although my luck with gunshot damage was about par for the course. Michael Waters NAVAIR 4.3.2.2 (AB212) Flight Vehicle Performance Mission Planning Team 48110 Shaw Rd. BLDG 2187 Suite 1320-C4
NAS Patuxent River MD, 20670 301-757-0595 (office)
301-342-8597 (fax) 240-298-5673 (cell)
From: airbattle@groups.io <airbattle@groups.io> On Behalf Of Tony Valle
Sent: Monday, January 23, 2023 1:30 PM
To: Airbattle <airbattle@groups.io>
Subject: Re: [URL Verdict: Neutral][Non-DoD Source] Re: [airbattle] [airpower] Other systems Well, it was just a temp name
You left out “Air Supremacy” … unless that was intentional. Michael Waters NAVAIR 4.3.2.2 (AB212) Flight Vehicle Performance Mission Planning Team 48110 Shaw Rd. BLDG 2187 Suite 1320-C4
NAS Patuxent River MD, 20670 301-757-0595 (office)
301-342-8597 (fax) 240-298-5673 (cell) From: airbattle@groups.io <airbattle@groups.io> On Behalf Of Tony Valle
Sent: Monday, January 23, 2023 12:58 PM
To: airbattle@groups.io
Subject: [URL Verdict: Neutral][Non-DoD Source] Re: [airbattle] [airpower] Other systems On Jan 23 2023, at 10:56 AM, Michael Scott <eagle707@...> wrote: What, no mention of Mig Killers? Dang, I feel left out.😎 SO much history here, and let me give an insider's perspective. I'm going to break the discussion up into two pieces, "tactical" air combat by which I will mean an emphasis on within-visual-range (WVR) air combat maneuvering (ACM) with varying levels of fidelity in representing basic fighter maneuvers (BFM) and energy-maneuverability theory (E-M), and "operational" by which I will mean an emphasis on multiple formations of disparate aircraft, system-level (as opposed to unit level) representation of air defense systems (or integrated air defense systems -- IADS), and balance portrayal of air-to-air and air-to-ground aircraft employment. Richtofen's War (RW), and Air Force / Dauntless (AF/D), were the earliest table-top air combat games I recall seeing in wide circulation (though I think MiG Alley actually preceded them) produced by Avalon Hill and very, very much "games" as opposed to simulations. They often embedded observer quirks into the play formalism (such as the 0-cost right hand turns for rotary engine aircraft in RW and the infamous slip-turn-turn maneuver in AF/D). Other than getting the basic speed/distance/time scales correct for the map, they got almost every other engineering and aerodynamic factor wrong. The I-go-you-go system in RW, coupled with the extreme maneuverability of WW I aircraft and the longish game turn duration made it essentially a game of taking turns at shooting one another until someone went down. AF/D was quite a lot of fun when played "arena" style -- lots of players with one or two aircraft each with an all-against-all rule of engagement -- but suffered from the fact that the maneuvering usually degenerated into a tight furball in the map center after the merge took place. MiG Alley is a set of miniatures rules for handling Korean-era jet combat and it's pretty good at that. The Korean era is a quirky one, combing very underpowered but very fast aircraft, often operating at very high altitude. The latter is both a consequence of the lack of power as getting above your opponent was the only way to secure an energy advantage, and a complicating factor since the lack of power is very exacerbated by operating above the troposphere. Without any air-to-air missiles, the short range of the weapons combined with the high speed and low turn rates of the aircraft make for a fairly boring, often bloodless, fight from neutral start conditions. Never was it more true that the majority of kills went to unseen adversaries than in Korea, but such a situation makes for a really not-so-fun game. I didn't actually see MiG Alley until after Air Superiority came out, so it wasn't really much of an influence for Birds of Prey (but it might have been for J.D.). Foxbat and Phantom from Simulation Publications Inc. (SPI) was the first air combat game that I played and the first historical attempt to build up from "realism" to some degree. Performance ratings for aircraft were the basis for the game ratings, and the game had rules for human factors (through they were primitive), zoom versus sustained climbs (wholly unrealistic of course) a notion of energy (but it played like currency), and unbalanced scenarios (though all the scenarios had fixed starting positions indicated on the map). It also had the bizarre "iron walls" rules that said any aircraft leaving the map was destroyed. In short, it was an air combat game designed by people who researched the subject and tried to capture what they (incompletely) understood. It is to air combat as the SPI game Scrimmage is to American football. Like most of the products coming out Dunnigan's universe, it was very rich and felt well-engineered, even if it was wrong. When SPI turned it's attention to Air War I was very excited. It seemed that they were going to get the engineering right and we would have a game that covered the entire waterfront of tactical air combat. Man was I wrong. The project was headed by David Isby (who actually worked for the same company I did in the 90s -- I met with him in his office in the DC area once), whose strength is International relations and global defense matters, not so much aerodynamics, and it showed. The original rules actually called for an aircraft to effectively halve its speed while turning (not kidding). That was because if you flew straight, you went one hex per MP, but if you were turning, you paid one MP to move and one MP to collect turn points toward a facing in every hex (the latter without moving). Ugh. The anti-aircraft guns were insanely lethal. The game scale was very tight in both space and time, and the missile and sensor rules were byzantine. It wasn't unplayable -- it was playable in the sense of "War in the East" or "Tobruk". It just required a great deal of table space and patience, and a few surgical operations on Isby's rules to make it more sane. I do recall in college setting up and running a large strike in Air War with 8 v 12 and anti-aircraft on acetate hex maps with terrain drawn in for an attack on a naval complex in a fjord in Norway. It took most of the night Friday to set up and all day Saturday to play with six people. We got through 11 game turns (5 seconds each). Flight Leader is a true oddball. It's tactical, sort of, but at too large a scale for effective ACM representation. It has missile mechanics that look like Pk diagrams, but all IR missiles are the same (as are all radar missiles) since there is basically a fixed template for them in the playaids. It seems to want to handle the large scale action over the Fulda Gap as a venue, but all the essential off-board support you would need to include gets short shrift. It's not really a bad game, or even an incorrect one, it's just purposeless. Air Superiority was the game changer. It was playable, fun, engaging, and seemed to showcase the performance of aircraft in a way that matched intuition, which shouldn't be surprising since the game was basically designed around intuition rather than engineering. It also brought out J.D.'s experience as an aviator, translating NAVAIR tactical doctrine into turn rates and vertical maneuvering. The game scale was a compromise designed to allow pre-merge missile exchanges to flow seamlessly into close-in ACM. It covered Western and Eastern aircraft equally well, included reasonable guesswork on emerging aircraft (like the F-117), and had a simplified, playable system for electronic warfare (EW), sensors and systems, visual sighting, initiative, and even damage control. Lest the assessment to follow be misread, let me state this unequivocally here -- I loved playing Air Superiority and Air Strike. The game and its associated tournaments gave me dozens of friends, hundreds of stories, and even a career change that was hugely beneficial and that I still work on today. But Air Superiority, Air Strike, and later The Speed of Heat (cumulatively AS/TSoH) had some issues that I felt the need to resolve. I contributed quite a bit to the system over the years including the Likelihood system, the mechanism for handling radar range and stealth, adjustments in the climb/dive costs to better represent the physics, and the "fan based" missile attack rules which grew out of my obscene ability to dodge missiles unrealistically using hex grain and the displacement roll mechanics. The scale compromise meant that BFM got squeezed too tightly and didn't break out aircraft differences very well. Maneuvering in three dimensions was really a mix of almost-independent horizontal and vertical maneuvers, and the HFP/VFP split mechanism led to more anomalies, especially when aircraft were maneuvering close to one another. Acceleration and Deceleration didn't match the physics, and the scales for thrust and gravity were also not compatible. The long game turn length of 12 seconds made for real issues in modern aircraft with high turn rates as a game could devolve into 120-180 degree turns that would preclude taking valid shots even with initiative. In short, the more I learned about air combat tactics in the real world, and the more I studied aerodynamics, the more I realized that AS/TSoH need to be adjusted to get the engineering right. Mark "TopWop" Bovankovich and I left the Air Superiority tournament in Fort Worth, TX, in 1997 with an idea to produce a "TSoH Improved Flight Engine" (TIFE) that would drop into the whole AS/TSoH system, keeping all the sensor, missile, gun, and initiative rules and just changing the way that aircraft maneuvered, accelerated, and determined range. J.D. rejected the idea, saying "go off and build your own air combat game". That is what led to what was called "Air Superiority 2000" and finally led to Birds of Prey (BoP) in 2007. At roughly the same time, J.D. took off down the long track of WWII games in the Fighting Wing (FW) series. It's fair to say that if you stand on AS/TSoH and say "I want MOAR engineering" you get BoP. And if you say "I want MOAR intuition" you get FW. The FW games "suffer" from even more distortions in 3D maneuver, more problems with energy and acceleration mechanics, and more "Hollywood" type game feel in rolling mechanics, combat effectiveness, damage resolution, and such. Real WWII actions are far more boring, far more bloodless, and far less "uphill" than FW games, though the "let maneuvering in a prop plane" is lots of fun and scratches the WWII game itch. BoP is based on "get the physics and geometry right and the rest will follow" as a philosophy. As such, I went through many iterations of how to play the complicated equations arising from aerodynamics and physics in game play. There were lookup tables based on logarithms, there were "tax forms" that required a calculator to complete, there were attempts to divide 3D space into 20-degree slices and to divide the hexgrid into multiple scales to solve the compromise scaling issues that were present in AS/TSoH. I came across nomographs as an ancient art that allowed the problem of complex calculations to be solved by drawing lines on a playaid, and I cracked the code of 3D maneuvering with the PHAD. And this worked well enough (by no means easily) to produce a game that could be played -- often slowly -- and was true to the aerodynamics and energy-maneuver of modern aircraft. Lots of work has gone in BoP over the last 16 years to make it more playable to the point that we are now likely to produce a custom circular slide rule based on the E6-B "whiz wheel" to speed up the play mechanics even further. This is already way too long for me to tackle the operational games, so I'll save that for a later post. There was another, lesser known and often overlooked game that came out in 1979 titled, Rolling Thunder: Airwar over North Vietnam 1965-1972, by Group 3 Games. While the games graphics were adequate, the game itself was rather good and complexity-wise it probably fits somewhere between Air Superiority/TSoH and AH's Flight Leader. The game's designer, Steve Weiss, also designed Avalon Hill's very successful game, Siege of Jerusalem For transparency purposes, I currently own all of the games listed above along with Birds of Prey. I used to own Air War and tried Foxbat & Phantom a few times when it first came out. Anyway, some folks on this thread might want to consider checking out Rolling Thunder as another air-to-air combat game to play. I hope this helps. The game you are thinking maybe was Foxbat and Phantoms by SPI, precursor to Air War which was so difficult to understand let alone play. How do you go from a totally unplayable (except by Physics PHD majors) to something streamlined and fun to play like Air Superiority or Speed of Heat I'll never know... J.D. Webster’s games do not happen without Air War, and Air Force/Dauntless being developed first. (It seems like there was one other game that was inspirational for Air Superiority, but I have forgotten.) Air War and then (especially) Air Superiority are the ancestors of Birds of Prey. BoP’s first name was Air Superiority 2000”, as it started as a derivative of AirSup… Air War was voted at one time as the hardest game ever designed to be played! Flight Leader is a better and easier game. JDWebster games are those that I prefer. Not sure if moderators will allow this to be answered. It seems as if many present in this group are way more knowledgeable about jet flight / combat than the average 'gamer'. So, answers would probably be very well constructed. Any thoughts on the systems used for SPI / TSR Air War, or AH Flight Leader?
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