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".
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