fuel rules

[spookiedfx]

Does anyone play fuel rules? I would guess if you did there would have to be take offs and landings. As ww1 planes were not efficient machines. How many turns before refueling? How many turns to refuel? Am I right in thinking this may be reserved for larger games? Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

[OldGuy59]

Kermit,
Please see these posts:

Thoughts about Scale
Another Technical Question

Fuel limits are a scenario choice, by the scenario designer, for a specific limitation on victory conditions. As most people indicate in the threads, there is a lot of book-keeping for little "fun" value. With a nominal "ground" scale of 1/900, and a time of 6 seconds per turn, with anywhere from an hour's worth, to five hours worth, of fuel in a given plane, you could take many hours of game time to run out of fuel.

Are you looking at designing a game where pilots would need to land, refuel, and get back into a fight? IMHO, this would likely be over a German airfield for most of the war, barring occasional periods of local air superiority. And it would depend on whether the refueling method was petrol cans, hand-cranked or powered pumps, etc... You could work this out, but is there any "fun" value in this? Could the opponents straff the field while you were trying to land, refuel, and take off? If the enemy pilots are loitering above the field, they could, "unchivalrously", attack while the plane was vulnerablely landing and taking off. That would be something like Billy Bishop's famous Airfield raid, that the RFC called the "Courage of Early Morning".

[flash]

Sounds like a lot more effort than it's worth Kermit - I would use a game turn limit or a time limit to simulate fuel limits eg you have 10 game turns then you must break contact or you have 60 minutes to achieve your objective before you have to break off.

[spookiedfx]

Thanks for the insight guys. It does sound like it could complicate things a bit. I will have to rethink this.

[spookiedfx]

Kermit,
Please see these posts:

Thoughts about Scale
Another Technical Question

Fuel limits are a scenario choice, by the scenario designer, for a specific limitation on victory conditions. As most people indicate in the threads, there is a lot of book-keeping for little "fun" value. With a nominal "ground" scale of 1/900, and a time of 6 seconds per turn, with anywhere from an hour's worth, to five hours worth, of fuel in a given plane, you could take many hours of game time to run out of fuel.

Are you looking at designing a game where pilots would need to land, refuel, and get back into a fight? IMHO, this would likely be over a German airfield for most of the war, barring occasional periods of local air superiority. And it would depend on whether the refueling method was petrol cans, hand-cranked or powered pumps, etc... You could work this out, but is there any "fun" value in this? Could the opponents straff the field while you were trying to land, refuel, and take off? If the enemy pilots are loitering above the field, they could, "unchivalrously", attack while the plane was vulnerablely landing and taking off. That would be something like Billy Bishop's famous Airfield raid, that the RFC called the "Courage of Early Morning".

[spookiedfx]

Thanks for the links.

[Dan-Sam]

Sounds like a lot more effort than it's worth Kermit - I would use a game turn limit or a time limit to simulate fuel limits eg you have 10 game turns then you must break contact or you have 60 minutes to achieve your objective before you have to break off.

I like the idea of 60 real minutes! We must try it sometime, definitely. Thank you for idea

[gully_raker]

In my opinion Fuel Rules are more suited to WW2 games.

[Dan-Sam]

Huh, we are in WGF section

You are right, Barry!

[Tonx]

Admin Staff: Please may this thread be moved to WW2 General Discussions.

I have found myself in the WW1 section twice with WW2 subject matter - I was assured at the time that there is nothing to worry about and that if one is uncertain as to which section they are in to check at the top of the thread. Where it says:

Home -> Forum -> World War I -> General Discussions

This is an excellent thread IMHO as I for one have yet to introduce fuel rules and restrictions to the games I play. These can be applied when playing under Advanced Rules from what I understand.

[Nightbomber]

In my opinion Fuel Rules are more suited to WW2 games.

What Barry said, plus it would add some odd bookkeeping without adding fun, IMHO.