My work for Enfilade got a little side-tracked by some real work projects and a few other around the house. I have been making progress, but slower than last month.
I showed off the
Soviet and
US ships in my previous posts, but I wanted include non-US ships in the NATO force, so I pulled out some Royal Navy ships. These were originally done for a Falklands game, but, with a little cleaning up, will fit well with the late 80's scenario.
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| The Royal Navy task group centered around and Invincible class carrier |
The Royal Navy Task Group will include an Invincible class carrier, A Type 42 (Sheffield) class destroyer for air defense, a couple Type 22 (Broadsword) class frigates for close defense, and a Type 21 (Amazon) class frigate for ASW. The Royal Navy will also contribute another Type 21 to an optional NATO ASW group.
In addition to the ships, the game will feature a lot of aircraft. The Harpoon Captain's Edition game used counters for air units, with aircraft being put into groups of four for tracking. I wanted to use a similar system, but didn't want to spend a lot of time and effort on painting up small aircraft. I came up with the idea of using square wooden blocks with different values, so player could just rotate the blocks as planes are shot down.
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| Aircraft blocks |
While not as visually appealing as miniatures, they should be much more functional and easier to identify. Tactical aircraft (fighters and bombers) are on 3/4" blocks, while patrol aircraft are on 1" blocks. That will help players more easily distinguish between the mission types.
That takes care of most of the ships and planes I'll need. Next up was the task group markers for the operational map. For those of you not familiar with Harpoon Captain's Edition, all the movement and detection takes place on the operation map (in this case covering the
GIUK Gap and Norwegian Sea) using task group markers and patrol plane markers. The ships in the task groups and tactical aircraft are kept off the map and only get used for combat actions. The task group markers need to be somewhat generic, but show an ID, speed, and radar status for the group. Here is what I came up with.
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| Task Group markers and a patrol plane marker on the map |
The task groups are 50mm x 60mm bases with three generic ships and a holder for a die. The die is used to show the speed (max speed is 3) and color of the die shows the radar status for the group. The group ID will be added to the side of the die holder.
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| Task Group markers with temporary IDs |
My next effort is finishing up the operational map with Iceland, Norway and the upper tip of the UK.
