The Task Ahead

Dunn's book, 'Sea Battle Games', was written for the table-top Naval wargamer. Using the popular 1:1200 scale for Naval engagements demands a very large playing area and for the most part precludes using a table-top in favour of a floor - a large floor!

With 18" gunnery ranges reaching out to 92-inches (2.3-meters) one can understand why the average dining table was not suitable for a game involving major Capital ships.

To use VASSAL it was necessary to replicate a surface area that could accomodate such long ranges and also allow for the ships involved to maneuver. VASSAL maps are generally overlaid with a hex-grid to make movement easier and to measure ranges.

At a scale of 1:1200, one-inch on the table-top equates to 500-yards. Movement and gun ranges in the book are all given in inches and the inch is clearly the most basic of units.

Using this scale I decided to set my VASSAL scale to 1-hex = 500-yards. This way I could replicate the 1:1200 scale but not have to find a floor to play the game on!

It sounds very simple in theory but in practice it is not quite as straightforward as it appears. The problem is that for VASSAL you create a digital playing-area. In fact you create an image of the playing area, over which a hex-grid is superimposed. Put simply, the larger the map-image, the more memory is required to display it. replicating a 6-foot by 6-foot table requires a hex-grid that is 72-hexes by 48-hexes. However, we have already noted that a table-top is not of a suitable size.

So, one of the first problems was to create a suitably sized digital playing area for naval engagements. This was for use at the Tactical level.

More problematic was the second requirement which was to create a World-map for the Strategic aspects of the Campaign I envisaged. This had to represent a huge surface area, encompassing vast distances but still had to be created as a digital-image without demading megabytes of memory to display.

The task ahead then was to create or somehow work out how to display Tactical and Strategic maps that could reflect the relative scales utilised for both.

This was to be the start of a protracted effort...