General Quarters - Aircraft Rules for Thursday

It turns out that the Aircraft rules for GC are possibly more complex than the ship rules!

After 3 reads I have grasped a fair understanding of the Aircraft rules so thought it best to put a summary on the blog to save time on Thursday.


Basically you are dealing with tactical and campaign movement for aircraft.

Planes move on hexes and all have a cruising speed associated with each aircraft type and then a tactical speed in inches. For the time we will be using tactical movement rules...

Together with speeds all aircraft have an endurance factor which is the number of map turns they can fly for, again only relates to campaigns and an AA strength value.



Below are the WW2 French aircraft. You can see that each plane has it's own mission code and also a ceiling rating (we wont be using this yet!)

Missions are:

A - Anti Submarine Patrols
B - Bombing - medium or high level
D  - Dive Bombing
F - Fighter Missions, CAP to defend ships and bases or escort to defend B,T & D missions
FB - Fighter bomber mission
R - Recon mission (including gunnery spotting)
T - Torpedo bombing

Each side needs to use an AMC (Aircraft management chart) to log all their aircraft actions by game turn.

You will write down which aircraft and how many will execute a mission on a specific game turn.

One your planes are airborne (see below) they can circle the carrier (we are using aircraft carriers on Thursday to launch planes from) because a map turn is actually 1 hour and a game turn is 6 minutes and most of the planes have enough endurance to stay airborne for a full game.

Note that the QRS sheet seems to have elaborated the aircraft rules and made them more complex.

For simplicity I am geared towards using the rules as written in the book because there seems to be terminology which although makes sense (the ceiling heights) will over complicated the game at this stage of learning.


Each aircraft model represents 2 real planes so please bear this in mind when working out what to bring with you on Thursday.


Generally a squadron consists of  9 models (18 real planes) but for more specialist aircraft like for instance Swordfish I guess you could use smaller squadrons of say 2 or 3 models representing 4 or 6 real aircraft on table.

4 aircraft can be launched from your carriers every game turn (2 models). Once they are airborne they are free to circle and wait for others to join up formation or they can just go off and perform their missions.

You can choose what to attack as you wish and just move the aircraft as per the rates above.

dogfights will occur when opposing aircraft are within 1" of each other and are of the same mission type (this abstracts that they are both flying the same altitude)

To bomb a ship - your plane must move over that ship

To do a torpedo drop your plane needs to be 6" min from the target.

I am not going to go into the actual rules for resolving attacks, these we can run through Thursday.



Both sides should select a carrier. The Japanese and British aircraft lists will be e mailed out later, please choose any 12 aircraft models (24 real planes on table) to use on the night.

Note that your selections must be marked with an asterix as these are carrier capable.
For dog fighting purposes note that you can group like aircraft together to boost you attack value but you can't mix different types of fighters to use against one type of fighter. Everything is paired off in dogfights.

Not too worried about imbalances at this stage, I just want to see how the rules work out.

Excluding the carriers I am going to go with a 200 point cap on other ships. I will send out the SDS sheets later -Ian and Jon - please can you create  a 200 point fleet to use based on the models you have in your collections?

Each ships point value is its Defence factor plus it's Attack factor (use the one in the far left box)




As mentioned last week we will be switching to inches and increasing the play area to 10 x 10ft.

We will be using wind direction because your aircraft can only take off into the direction of the wind...

May I also bring to your attention that we have been moving the ships wrongly. According to the rules you must organise your ships into divisions of up to 2 - 8 models.

These divisions must be moved in strict formation

Line ahead, Line astern, Line abreast or quarter line.

A division may not exceed the speed of it's slowest ship. Individual ships are allowed to do certain moves when launching or trying to evade a torpedo attack but must re form into formation afterwards.


Please bear this in mind when creating your fleets.....