Greetings again fellow aviation fanatics! As told in the Current Events column, we had a really good time at Origins this year. Aside from retrieving the Air Superiority Tournament Trophy into the hands of brave American pilots (where it rightfully belongs!), the tournament crowd was the biggest ever. Tony ran the Air Superiority tourney this year and he will be writing that up elsewhere in this issue. His scenarios were quite, good and the participants certainly enjoyed themselves, myself included even though I ended up somewhere in the middle of the pack, thanks to a rather poorly judged attempt to disengage from an AA-10 followed by a rather excruciating disintegration at supersonic speed. Air Power This continues to run behind even though you just received another double issue in our attempts to catch up. I'm writing this before any feedback from issues 13 and 14 has come in so I can't tell you how we're doing in terms of giving you the readers sufficient material to feast on but since we have no complaints we'll continue on as before. This issue, along with the next few will continue to feature 2d edition play-aids and such. Coming up soon will be an issue covering the India-Pakistan air wars. Did you Canucks enjoy your jets in issue 14? On to other matters. It seems our subscription level has peaked out at about 500 and new subscriptions are trickling in at a very slow rate. We again ask everyone out there to snag a friend or spread the word and help us get more subscribers. We can't do much more than maintain the newsletter at this level so please help us out. Gunslingers! Where the hell is it?, I mentioned in the last issues that it had come back to me for a rewrite and a severe weight reduction program. I think the 188 pages of master rules was a bit much to hope for GDW to put in a box, so I've had to cut it back quite a bit. At present it looks the rules will be about 100 pages in total but this includes most of the Air Strike and Desert Falcons rules plus some new ones you've seen tested in Air Power. Unfortunately, a lot of the neat chrome had to be bumped to cut the package down, but we'll see to it that those sections edited out of the GDW second edition rules that were worth having get printed here. We may even do a set of Master Level rules for you hard core guys through Air Power at a later date. I'm supposed to have the redone rules and everything else back into GDW by the end of August for a mid 1992 release date. By the way, I have seen the cover art. Its great! Over The Reich! The cat is officially out of the bag now on the WWII air combat game I've been working on since January. Over half of my seminar time at Origins was spent discussing it. The game covers tactical air combat over Germany from 1943 to 1945 and will feature about 30 types of aircraft including several variants of the ME- 109 and FW- 190 fighters plus the ME- 163 and ME-262 jet fighters. On the allied side you'll see Spitfires, Typhoons, Thunderbolts, Lightnings, and Mustangs, plus the Meteor IV. Formations of heavy bombers (B- 17's and B-24's) will also be addressed The game will have two levels of play; operational and tactical. The operational level is played at a scale of 10 minutes per turn and covers take off, formating, and maneuvering to contact with the enemy. Combat can be resolved quickly using an operational level table or via the tactical scale. Tactical scale play is "mano a mano" ala Air Superiority with a scale of 4 to 8 seconds per game-turn with individual aircraft fighting it out on a tactical map. Post combat, and return to base is covered at the operational level. The tactical system has been in playtest for quite a while and is near completion. Operational level play and rules will begin playtest in Septemberafter Gunslingers is turned over to GDW and I can return to working on OTR. More on this in future issues. By the way, Clash Of Arms is the game company planning to publish the game and they are looking at an early 1992 release. Well that's it for now! Later. Back to Table of Contents -- Air Power # 15 Back to Air Power List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1991 by J.D. Webster This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com