Three Moves Ahead 399: Air Combat

Three Moves Ahead

Idle Thumbs

Strategy, Games & Hobbies, War, Strategy Games, Games, War Games, Video Games

4.8 • 532 Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2017

⏱️ 76 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bruce sits down with James Crate, a former naval aviator, and discusses various efforts at designing and playing games about air combat. Crate discusses how a lot of Cold War era wargames reflected US military doctrine, but not necessarily air engagements as pilots would experience them in the field. How did the lessons learned from actual air combat match the expectations reflected in wargames? Also, prepare to learn that air-to-air missiles don't work like you think they do.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Good evening. You're listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Bruce Garrick.
0:03.5	Tonight, we have a very special guest, James Crate, a longtime wargamer, and a pilot,
0:08.3	is going to talk to me all about air combat games. James, welcome to the show.
0:12.0	Thanks for having me.
0:14.3	So, James, tell me a little bit and tell the listeners a little bit about your war game experience, and we'll talk a little
0:22.0	about flying, and then we'll talk a little bit about, well, a lot about, hopefully, the actual
0:26.5	games and how they do, how they incorporate those things. So you started playing war games,
0:30.4	you told me in the 80s, is that correct? Right. So war games, if you remember the very old
0:36.1	book, you know, the illustrated guide to war games, where it breaks down, you know, the eight different versions of war gamers, I'm the specialist.
0:43.0	And even as far back as then, playing war games was just an extension of my interest in airplanes.
0:50.3	So it was, I'm the guy who's totally subject, focused on one subject. Read books
0:56.0	about it, play games about it, you know, grew up and did it for real. So I initial, my both my
1:05.7	grandfathers flew. I spent a lot of time growing up with my grandfather who flew for the Marines.
1:10.5	And so at a very early age, it's, you know, Robert Conrad on TV doing Boba Black Sheep.
1:16.6	They're showing reruns of Battle of Britain.
1:19.0	And, you know, one of the earliest books I can remember at least flipping through and looking at the pictures is Douglas Bader's fight for the sky, which I still have my shoulder
1:28.9	here on the shelf. So the wargaming was an extension of that. Probably one of the earliest
1:35.3	proper hex-en-counter war games I played was probably something from Fossa. I think it was probably
1:41.8	either Ballastar Galactica, which in my mind was just, hey,
1:45.9	that's like aircraft carriers in space. I'm pretty sure I found that at a model shop when I was
1:49.8	shopping for an airplane model. And the interesting thing about that was because if you've ever
1:54.7	seen that game before, the counters are actually hex-shaped counters. So I recall that. Okay. Yeah. So when you punched them out, they weren't square. They were hex-shaped counters. So... I recall that, okay.
	...

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