Designing a modern air combat tabletop game

go buy janes usaf or janes fighter anthology
>JANES IAF

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U.S. - early Vietnam war

>Ordnance lists
Type - AA: Air-to-Air missile, ATGW: Air-to-Ground weapon (could be guided missile, or GBU), UBG: un-guided bombs
Aspect - I'm sure you all know what this means
Range - Is the range you can fire it, most missiles have a minimum. Guns are around 8" range for comparison
Tracking Rate - how many degrees a missile can pivot on the spot to track a target aircraft - this is largely abstracted and not based on real performance (although more maneuverable missiles from the 80s + will get tracking rates of 90 or more)
Guidance - this should make sense to you here in /k/. Different guidance methods require different things to track a target. Rear aspect IR can only be fired from behind and doesn't need a radar lock, while SARH requires a radar lock and can be fired from any aspect.
Damage - Bonus to damage rolls against aircraft (usually roll 1 six sided dice for each missile - 1,2 = nothing, 3=damaged, 4=pilot wounded, 5=critical damage, 6=destroyed. So a missile with a +4 to damage is likely going to annihilate anything it hits.
Notes - 'Successful launch' indicates the shoddyness of Vietnam-era missiles. A lot of things can go wrong and essentially you have a 1/3 chance of a missile actually coming off the rail, igniting, and tracking the target. Better pilot training impacts this roll.

One thing to note is the ranges of the missiles don't exactly match the range of the radars - the radar range given is that to detect a small object like a fighter. Medium sized contacts like a larger ground attack aircraft (anything over 10,000kg empty weight) treat radars as 1.5 times their range, while large radar contacts (15,000kg+ empty weight) treat all radars as double range. Its also important that missiles 'feel right' on the tabletop and that aircraft can try to evade them in-flight. Having to be like 6" away to fire missiles wouldn't be as fun, and fun is important.

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>>34898844
U.S. - mid Vietnam war

>>34898786
would this cover radar ranges and things like turn rates? Most of the stats are fairly easy to find, but some things like specific ranges of radars can be harder to find.

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U.S. - late Vietnam War

I should note that players can always take aircraft from a previous period. So a U.S. player in a Late Vietnam war game could still take all the aircraft from Early and Mid Vietnam (like B-52s or E-2s from early war)

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Vietnam People's Air Force (VPAF) - Early Vietnam War

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VPAF mid Vietnam War

The VPAF lists include ground assets as the US is generally the attacker in the air in this conflict, the defender is the one who gets things like AAA, SAM sites, etc.

I don't have any information to provide other than I'm looking forward your game. I have been searching for an aerial combat wargame. Those are not common.
Also, checked.

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I should note that the pilot costs are universal for all sides and don't change throughout the conflicts. This helps with balance and lets players build the kind of list they want - they could focus on a few veterans, or spam average and poor quality pilots.

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>>34898877
There are a few great air combat games out there, Check your Six Jet Age, Table Air Combat, Phantoms, as well as more insane old school ones like GDW's air superiority.

The name of this game is Missile Threat, so you can keep an eye out for it if you like

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Here's the blurb on Vietnam, with the table for failed missile launches. I felt reflecting the poor performance of air-to-air missiles in this era was important, as they were far from guaranteed kill weapons. Interestingly the VPAF almost never describe their Atoll missiles failing, but then they did almost always attack from behind and at close range, and usually without the target knowing what was going on...

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Ok we're on to Arab-Israeli wars. Similar time frame to Vietnam and so a few of the same problems with missiles. Once we get to 1982 most of the problems have been solved though, and AIM-7F and AIM-9L were performing excellently.

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Israeli Air Force - 6-day War

>Them training magisters equipped for ground attack

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Arab Air Forces - 6-Day War

I decided to combined Egypt, Jordan, Syria etc. into one "Arab" force, otherwise there would be a bunch of lists with a lot of overlap. Players generally know what they're doing and will know they should only take Hawker Hunters if they want to do a Jordanian air force for example

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Israeli Air Force - Yom Kippur War

Now with some U.S. aircraft like the A-4 and F-4

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Arab Air Forces - Yom Kippur War

Including lots of nasty low altitude SAMs like the SA-3 and SA-6.
Usually being at low altitude protects aircraft from radar locks completely, but not in this conflict! The Israelis learned the hard way, but the lessons they learned allowed them to perform flawlessly in the 1982 Lebanon War.

This is the last of the stats I've done so far, I'm currently almost finished the research for the 1982 Lebanon War - although it was a rape-age, I felt it was important to include in this game as it was a major air engagement. Tabletop games are often far more balanced (or completely fictional but based on real-life units) allowing players to have fun and not always reach the same conclusion as the real conflict - otherwise no one would ever want to play as the Syrians in the Lebanon war. I still need to playtest that period to see if its actually possible to win (or even score a kill) as the Syrians - the Israelis will be packing F-15s and F-16s as well as full AWACS, so difficult to get in range and attack before being blown to shit by long range AA Missiles from the "Flying SAM sites" (Israeli nickname for F-15)

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A photo from one of our playtests. F-4s fire a dick ton of missiles at a couple of MiG-17 - which just shot down 2 F-105s with their cannons.