Submarines in the Cold War

[jony663]

I wrote this blog post after thinking of other ways to use submarines in the Cold War. My normal games while fun can get a little monotonous as the Americans have an edge in most of the weapons used under water.

http://lebanon1982.blogspot.com/2015/12/submarine-cold-war-and-falklands.html

Does this interest anyone?

[Elbows]

While it's an interesting topic, I'm not sure how big the Cold War maritime gaming community is.

But your post strikes an interesting chord with me simply because my father is a fellow modeler/gamer but more in the classical sense.  He's a book nut, and has a degree in history and has read...more books than I knew existed on military history.  With his masters and subsequent military career spanning the surface navy, naval aviation, air force aviation and eventually numerous intelligence postings - he's really fun to talk to about Cold War games.

He'll take a game like Sixth Fleet or similar AH titles and convert them to be far more realistic.  He's normally a reserved fellow but when I see him setting up a game and we get into a chat about it, it's fascinating stuff.  A lot of "Well, they've given this statistic to this particular Russian strike aircraft, but the reality was their weapons were sub-par and they never took off with more than X% of fuel because of X, Y or Z...so I've dropped their range value by...", or "We had the materials for this unit, but by the late 70's early 80's it was unlikely it would have been fully serviceable for more than X number of days in combat etc.".

It's amazing what someone who did that stuff for a living can really bring to a game.  And spooky when we'll watch the news and he'll bring up a catastrophically good idea that the bad guys could carry out.

My father was speaking to me once of the poor state of U.S. Naval Aviation during the Carter presidency and he told me that while on cruise, his squadron would have 10-11 F-4's on the ship.  Of these 10, 7 were airworthy at any one time, 5 could shoot missiles, and maybe 3-4 would have consistently working radar/missile capability.  Where a wargames developer might look at the carrier and say "Hmmm, it can carry 35 combat aircraft...we'll give it this value" --- the knowledge of the real capabilities or lack of capabilities by someone who was present during that time frame is hugely different.

So, I think it's a darn good post...and I hope you roll with more stuff like this.