Air Combat Rules

[Propjock]

I've been thinking of running a 1930s aviation heroic game and have some ideas about running air combat (beyond the very generic rules found in Basic Campaigns). However, does anyone know of any existing rules? I don't want a tactical board game level of detail, but would like to have a few more aerial combat specific options.

One of my inspirations has been the aerial combat rules found in the Secrets of the Surface World supplement to Hollow Earth Expedition. That would be my starting point absent any other suggestions.

[vicky_molokh]

IIRC Spaceships 7 has some air rules. Either that, or alternate spaceships.

[The_Ryujin]

Gurps Action 2: Exploits has a fast and simple vehicle chase and combat rules. They mostly deal with ground vehicles but David Pulmer wrote an expansion to those rules that adds dog fights in Pyramid 3/53 Action. The dog fight rules in turn are geared towards modern fighter combat but if you just use the orginal range bands from Exploits they should work fine for pre jet age fighters.

[Michele]

There are 3e-era rules for vehicular combat in GURPS Vehicles for 3e. There are simplified 3e rules in GURPS WWII, too. Abstract mass aerial battles can be run with GURPS Mass Combat, which is up to 4e speed.

[Propjock]

Thanks for the tips.

I checked out the preview for Gurps Action 2 in e23 and it just happened to show the range table. I was actually thinking of doing something very much like this. I also was thinking that 1 second rounds wouldn't hold up since there's very little maneuvering that can be completed in a second.

The abstracted rounds as presented in GURPS Action 2: Exploits make sense, but what happens to RoF for guns? If, for example, you fired 6 machine guns on your aircraft there's potential to be a lot of bullets to be in the air since a "round" might be many seconds. This in itself is extra stuff to track, but even if we ignore that are the modifiers for rapid fire are meant to scale with a multi-second round?

[The_Ryujin]

Originally Posted by Propjock

Thanks for the tips.

I checked out the preview for Gurps Action 2 in e23 and it just happened to show the range table. I was actually thinking of doing something very much like this. I also was thinking that 1 second rounds wouldn't hold up since there's very little maneuvering that can be completed in a second.

A chase scene breaks combat up into minute turns I belive.

The abstracted rounds as presented in GURPS Action 2: Exploits make sense, but what happens to RoF for guns? If, for example, you fired 6 machine guns on your aircraft there's potential to be a lot of bullets to be in the air since a "round" might be many seconds. This in itself is extra stuff to track, but even if we ignore that are the modifiers for rapid fire are meant to scale with a multi-second round?

You still just get one attack action each turn per RAW but if you still want the players to be able to shoot more then once then just multiply the guns ROF by the number of attacks they can make amd just make one roll.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Propjock

The abstracted rounds as presented in GURPS Action 2: Exploits make sense, but what happens to RoF for guns? If, for example, you fired 6 machine guns on your aircraft there's potential to be a lot of bullets to be in the air since a "round" might be many seconds. This in itself is extra stuff to track, but even if we ignore that are the modifiers for rapid fire are meant to scale with a multi-second round?

I don't have any of the Action series, but Spaceships has multi-second (typically multi-minute) turns and does indeed simply multiply RoF by the amount of time involved.

Note this causes issues with the way GURPS RoF works - while it's probably OK (or at least not horrible) for 1 second bursts, abstracting multiple seconds worth of fire into a single roll at high RoF isn't going to work very well. For dogfights, you might need to work out how many bursts (defined as 1-second attacks) you're able to actually line up during your turn, and make an attack roll for each.