I have recently been learning how to fly a Microsoft Excel-based
flight simulator that an air combat gamer by the name of Dean Essig
wrote to facilitate the playing of air-to-air engagements in the
World War I and II eras, with a few extensions to the Korean War. I
was initially excited to hear about such a creature because I thought
it might provide some accessibility in an otherwise grim part of the
gaming world.
After two weeks of evaluation I can report that if one is willing to
invest a little time, and one is at least a moderately good Excel
user, this simulator is completely accessible. The other requirement
is a well-developed sense of spacial relations as you need to
translate heading, pitch and roll expressed in degrees to a
representation of the aircraft's attitude.
The simulation consists of a core flight engine, the worksheet that
does all the calculations for the control inputs you provide and
several files that contain specific flight characteristic and
armament data for over 200 aircraft ranging from the biplane fighters
of WWI to most of the active service fighters and several bombers of
WWII, plus a few early jets. You provide four control inputs, two
for stick position in an x-y plane which in turn translates to roll
and pitch controls, throttle setting and rudder position. You have
limits on where these can be set, based on the aircraft's speed and
the G-loading you have put on the wings and the pilot.
To date, I have flown a duel between a Spitfire and a BF-109, a
bounce of three A6M type 21 Zeros by two Brewster Buffaloes as might
have been part of the morning of June 4, 1942 over Midway Island, a
four-on-four melee of Wildcats vs zeros that took place in the China
Theater in late 1941, an attack by 2 FW-190A4s against a wounded
B17-f escorted by two p-47s and a 2v2 f-86 sabers against 2
MiG--15s. In each case, the simulation correctly showed up the
differences in aircraft performance, firepower and toughness, the 109
couldn't turn with the spit, the zeros can outturn anything in the
early war American arsenal, the thunderbolt is deadly if it gets a
clean shot in, and I have ripped the wings off a saber by pulling an
11-G maneuver.
Now, before one gets excited, the simulation provides good
information about each individual plane's flight path. Using it to
play an actual engagement without using some sort of map board is a
far more difficult exercise that requires the ability to construct a
moderately complex simulation in Excel or some other such tool. I
have cobbled together things that work for me but aren't ready for
prime time yet. My next project is to fly a squadron of 12
lightnings in a free-for-all with 12 FW-190s, and to create for it an
engine to handle the mechanics of actually tracking 24 aircraft,
computing the shot possibilities and giving info about relative pitch
and bearings for one aircraft to another to allow for intelligent
flying. This is no small project, but should end up with a game of
high complexity but manageable data loading that others might be
interested in playing.
If I do it correctly, it should be scalable to combats of an
arbitrary size, though the sheer weight of data will become
overwhelming long before the theoretical limit of several thousand
aircraft would be reached. I don't envision flying more than
squadron vs squadron engagements myself.
Sadly, the files aren't available on the web, or at least the web
site that I was originally directed to didn't have them available. I
am willing to email them to other interested parties who may have
other ideas on how to turn the excellent modeling of aircraft flight
into a usable game engine. Dean flew his aircraft on a hex grid, but
provided the facility to track aircraft in Cartesian coordinates. I
have fixed a few small bugs in these calculations and they now
function correctly.
I have asked Dean, and he enthusiastically gave me his permission to
spread this simulator among my fellow blind gamers. He was extremely
helpful in my learning how to fly the thing. As a pay-it-forward,
and since I may now actually know it better than he does (it's an old
project for him) I will provide support on an as-I-can basis for
anyone who is interested. It is my hope that if I or someone else
develops a useful way of taking the output data of the simulator into
a tracking worksheet, we will be able to play engagements over email,
and possibly even run actual missions with several players each
controlling one or a small group of aircraft. As I said, the
learning curve is fairly steep and a good knowledge of trigonometry
would be a useful asset for any fellow designers, but once the combat
simulation portion is done, I think it would highly reward many
people who would like to take the role of Ken Taylor and George
Welch, or the other four Wildcat pilots who managed to take off on
the morning of December 7, 1941, or that of the German pilots
engaging the massed bomber formations in 1943.
So, who's with me?
Christopher Bartlett
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