Monday, October 8, 2018

Aircraft Maneuver Ratings

I've been wanting to do this for quite some time, but Jim, over at Jim's Wargames Workbench has spurred me on. I am compiling ratings on all the aircraft that I use for my games. By ratings, I mean the numbers used in various rules for undergoing maneuvers. Then, I am figuring out the ratings for the two rules that I plan on using, Target Locked On, and Wings At War.

To me, maneuvering is the most esoteric of the various abilities that need to be modeled for a particular set of rules. Some rules use Thrust/Weight ratios, some use Wing Area/Weight ratios known as wing loading, and for others, I have no clue. The data is not as easy to come by as one thinks. There is a web site that has T/W for a number of aircraft, but when I do the calculations for some of the planes, they don't agree. So what I have done is to compile the ratings for maneuvering for a number of rules and then see what the consensus is among them. For example, Saab JAS-39 Gripen has a T/W = 0.93, Wingload = 532, and is rated at maximum maneuverability by both AirWar: C21 and Missile Threat. Therefore, I give the Gripen a maneuver rating of 5 for Target Locked On.

Wings At War is a different story as it uses power ratings, but I am trying to figure that one out too.

The really big challenge in this is for aircraft that are not found in any rules. For example, ratings for  the joint Chinese/Pakistan JF-17 Thunder is not found in any of the rule set I have. For these cases, I just have to compare T/W and wingload for those planes that are listed and estimate from these.






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