Limited Fuel

[Oberst Hajj]

Does anyone use limited fuel rules, and if so, could you please share them?

[Bixby]

Agreed. I would be interested as well!!!!

[Charlie3]

Our group has done it a few times and we have rules for it in our League rule book.

Basically we choose a set number of game turns that the attacking planes can fly (since they had to fly there first, and must still get home) and one player is in charge of counting game turns. When the Game Turn limit is reached the game ends based on the idea that the limited fuel planes will simply leave the combat area (climb out, or exit the table)

I had originally intended to have the players actually leave the board by the schedualed Game Turn, but some players felt they would spend half of the game trying to leave. There for we simply have a rule that causes the players to focus on the mission and not just a turkey shoot.

[Oberst Hajj]

That's basically along the lines that I was thinking about. How many turns do you guy normally limit fuel to?

[darkeldar70]

hi any one can say the real amount of fuel of the WW2 aircraft?? i want to use this in my new campaign

[Dom S]

It varies massively - you'll need to search for the specific types you're interested, but fuel and endurance figures are generally available.

[tuladin]

The time a WWI scout could stay aloft on a full tank of fuel ranged from 1.5 to 4 hours.

Aerodromes were placed very close to the front, so it didn't take much time to reach their targets.

What is the time scale of the game? Maybe at most 5 seconds per maneuver - 15 seconds per turn? Then a game that goes 40 turns would represent 10 minutes (and that would be a long game.)

I would think that, for the most part, a plane that wasn't in fuel trouble at the start of a 10 minute combat wouldn't be in fuel trouble at the end of it. You could use an arbitrary fuel based turn limit for a specific scenario (to represent a raid deep into enemy territory), but. IMO, in an average game it shouldn't be a factor.

The most memorable example I can think of of a plane getting shot down when it tried to return home after a long combat was in the Lanoe Hawker vs. Manfred von Richthofen battle. But, as Norman Franks et al. point out in Under the Guns of the Red Baron, Hawker had only been flying for about an hour, and his DH2 had a 3 hour range, so he probably didn't try to leave the scene because of low fuel, but because he was separated from his flight - alone over enemy territory - and decided to leave before more German planes showed up.

[MayorJim]

Well...there's a number of other threads here that talk about limited fuel. You can factor in all sorts of things; amount of ammo, number of guns, bombs, etc. distance to target and all that ad nauseum...for me, it's the KISS principle (keep it simple stupid)...If we're just doing a a quick "pick-up" game, we fight to the death...fuel doesn't matter. For a campaign...we limit the total number moves...15, 20 whatever the scenario calls for. Keep in mind that at this scale, the "airfields" aren't 190 cm away from each other ;-) so if doing a campaign, then fuel should be a consideration.