Tony and I were mulling things around one day and trying to come up with some strategic direction as to what we should do next to improve AIR POWER. In the beginning, we had grand designs, such as including articles on many air combat games, club information, opponent wanted ads, and other things more akin to a "fanzine" for air combat gamers, rather than a more serious journal. Instead it seems we've evolved into a sort of bimonthly supplier of errata, new rules, variants, and data cards, along with supporting articles and scenarios. All of the material is almost exclusively for Air Superiority. General services for the gamer seem to have been lost along the way, and we are only very timidly addressing "other" air combat games. While this is great for Air Sup grognards, perhaps we are neglecting a much wider potential audience. I'd guess we could double our subscriber base if we diversified in the sense of covering more aviation-related games and providing more services for the gaming enthusiast whose interests lay in all modern-era games and not exclusively jet air combat. Therefore, Tony and I are contemplating expanding out coverage to include related topics like air/naval games or land games with major aircraft interfaces (Victory Games' "Fleet" and "Strike" games come to mind). We also want to revive interest in a club and convention news section as well as want ads. But wait, there's more! We're also working up ideas for a standard, international tournament system where AIR POWER representatives would sponsor local, regional, and national tournaments at various conventions. Players would gain points for participating and winning places in these contests. Accumulated points would translate into tide awards and kills. Tournament announcements and results would be published here. More on this later. Before we do any of this, we thought we'd toss these ideas out to you for feedback. What do you think? And before you grognards panic, I might mention that the reason we feel we can expand and diversify, is that we're adding more pages and thus have more space. We don't intend to cut down on all the fun stuff we do for Air Superiority. After all, AIR POWER is still intended to be the major source of new material for the Air Superiority game system. Well, to sum up, Tony and I believe AIR POWER has been very successful in its present, somewhat narrow, field of coverage. We also think the journal may be handicapped from growing due to this narrow approach. Our gut feeling is that we can "run faster, leap higher, and fly farther with a little daring! Should we go for it? It's your money and your journal - fill us in! Back to Table of Contents -- Air Power # 9 Back to Air Power List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1990 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