Rich Hamilton passed along a note to me today regarding the lack of Indirect Fire for Japanese coastal batteries for the Japan '45 game. The reason was this: these guns were not going to provide support fire for the Japanese army. They did not have a radio setup to coordinate their fire. Their main job is to protect the coastal waters and deny access to the inlets (river mouths or bays) of Kyushu.
The LOS in the series has been set at 5 hexes maximum so this means that even if a battery has a 23 range it only can fire 5 hexes. One of our customers felt that the guns should be on call for fire.
In order to more correctly portray the guns role in the game I made the following changes today:
1. They all now have a facing - it points out to sea for the most part but there are places where they do cover the beaches.
2. Each is now in a Bunker rather than just a Trench. They all are worth 100 Victory Points if captured.
So now there is more direction given to the purpose of the "CD guns" and while this will not please those that think that they should provide support fire for the IJA it does give the players more of an understanding on why we did things in the game for them.
I would like to see the visibility raised to 10 or even 15 hexes and might be putting out a variant scenario that has increased visibility. For places like Mt. Kirishima where artillery was based this would make that location much more important to take.
One reason why the 5 km range has been set for so long is this:
"The true horizon is horizontal. It surrounds the observer and it is typically assumed to be a circle, drawn on the surface of a perfectly spherical model of the
Earth. Its center is below the observer and below
sea level. Its distance from the observer varies from day to day due to
atmospheric refraction, which is greatly affected by
weather conditions. Also, the higher the observer's eyes are from sea level, the farther away the horizon is from the observer. For instance, in
standard atmospheric conditions, for an observer with eye level above sea level by 1.70 metres (5 ft 7 in), the horizon is at a distance of about 5 kilometres (3.1 mi)."
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HOWEVER, please read on:
"When observed from very high standpoints, such as a [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_station]space station, the horizon is much farther away and it encompasses a much larger area of Earth's surface. In this case, it becomes evident that the horizon more closely resembles an ellipse than a perfect circle, especially when the observer is above the equator, and that the Earth's surface can be better modeled as an
ellipsoid than as a sphere."
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon
Thus the higher you are the further your ability to observe distances. Thus a unit at 100 meters height has LESS of a LOS distance than one that is at 200 meters elevation. Given that there are a lot of heights in the games I see no reason why we should not increase the height in a variant scenario to say 10 or even 20 hexes.
For a future update it would be nice if this kind of thing could be factored in to ALL of JTS' series. Thus if you are at the same level as a target hex with distance of 6 hexes - 6 KMs you cannot spot the target but if you are at the next elevation you can. This would finally bring the series into more historical spotting usage. Observers on high locations could see targets but those on lower elevation who have a clear LOS to the target may not due to the curvature of the earth.
Anyway, the CD gun locations for the Olympic game are in the process of being corrected. Once I finish with this and maybe a few other things we should be putting out an update for Japan '45.
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