Air War revisited

 There was a certain degree of chatter on the WhatsApp group about SPIs 'Air War'. I did play it a few times at the University wargames club in the early 1980s, but have little memory of it now. We agreed to set up a remote session to play through a few moves and remind ourselves of the joys (?!) of the game. At the time it was reputedly one of the most complex wargames ever designed, and long pre-dated decent computer flight simulators. 

As usual you can find the entire thing on https://www.spigames.net/ if you want to recreate that mid 1970s experience! You just need a few plain hex maps, a few aircraft counters and a printout of the aircraft control sheet and data sheets.

Half a dozen of us turned up (me, Nigel, Ian, Tim, Russell, John B) and we were also very fortunate to have the games original designer, David Isby, on the call. Along with working for SPI, David has written many books on military history and worked as a national security adviser on Afghanistan among other things. Amusingly he said he designed Air War when he was at Law School and before he actually learned to fly a plane.  

The others all set up their copies of the game, I just got out the aircraft data sheets and control sheets with the rules up on another monitor. The control sheets looked quite, familiar, this was coming back to me now. The idea was that we'd play through the introductory scenario side-by side as a play along (2 x Mig 15 vs 2 x F-86 in Korea). John B was lead pilot for the US and Ian D lead pilot for the North Koreans.

The fundamental premise of the game is that it tries to model the physics of flight through the application of forces in various dimensions, coupled with the flight characteristics of individual aircraft. The turns are short (2.5 seconds) so you can actually model the process of each manouvre eg you cant go into a steep climb without going into a shallow climb first, you bank before a turn, the degree of bank may result in loss of airspeed etc.

Along with the obvious things to track (altitude, speed, ammo etc) the critical track is the 'aircraft attitude' track, which is essentially a 2D representation of the different positions of the plane in three dimensions (climb,dive and bank) as well as some specific things to track the energy gained during a dive and degrees of turn accumulated. To turn one hex vertex requires you to accumulate 30 degrees of turn, and as these are jets doing 500mph through 500 foot hexes, it takes several hexes of movement to accumulate enough 'turn' to physically re-point the counter without tearing the wings off the plane.

So to pull any sort of manouvre, even just a 90 degree turn let alone an Immelman, requires a degree of forethought as it will take several (very short) moves.

The scenario starts with both flights of planes parallel (US blue, NK red), the MiGs are 1000 feet higher) and a few thousand feet apart. The MiGs have cannon, the F86s .50 cals, so the  MiGs have to get in close but hit hard, while the F86 have a much longer range, tons more ammo but dont land such heavy blows. The MiGs are more manouverable at lower altitude and the F86 superior higher up, but both planes turn much better than 1970s era jets. Neither of them is powerful enough to pull off a vertical climb though.

The aircraft data sheets list the energy costs and altitude and direction etc changes for various types of manouvre, and where appropriate, the differences any different altitiudes.  

Apologies for the blurry picture. Each plane resolves its move individually and fire is resolved at the end of all movement. There is an initiative system and a system for determining 'advantage' which allows a plane to go later in the turn. So ideally you want to have the advantage, wait for the enemy to move, and then skilfully fly your plane to within one hex of their tail and blow them out of the sky.

If only it was so easy! The US banked right and climbed gently (type I climb) to gain altitude, which cost them some speed. The NK banked left and dived to come down towards the US planes. The first turn took us about 30 minutes while we figured out how the various control settings actually moved the plane. After the first turn, things speeded up a lot as we just flicked through the rules or delved our memories as to how things worked.

We ended up with both sides at the same altitude and facing each other! Ian had obviously played this more recently than the others and showed a certain degree of competence in manouvering the MiGs, however as so often happens in this game, he slightly misjudged where the planes would end up and it was the US who got off the first shot! At medium range and maximum deflection (he'd at least planned that) they missed hopelessly though. Ideally you need to be within 2 hexes and on the targets tail and that clearly wasn't going to happen in any sensible length of time so we called it a day having exercised the major mechanisms over 90 minutes or so.

That was a lot of fun and nice to trawl through the depths of my brain for this stuff. It did remind me of the main issue I had with the game at the time, while it models the mechanics of flying very well within the limitations of carboard counters, is very hard indeed to actually fly the planes to get them where you want them to go without lots of practice in energy management and how the various numbers interact. Flying the same thing in a computer flight sim is a lot more intuitive once you understand the basic principles of powered flight. You can still mess up manouvres, overshoot, stall etc but it all happens much faster. Anyway there was a certain amount of enthusiasm to repeat the experience, but this time using planes armed with missiles, and it was great having David participate, even if he said he felt like a dinosaur talking to a load of paleontologists at times.