Question:
I am engaged in a PBEM game of Narvik, and a point of contention has arisen between my opponent and I. I am attempting to bomb the airbase outside of Trondheim, and he has stacked a pair of CLAs in the little tiny piece of ocean in the hex, and attempting to fire AA at my bombers. Here is his argument: Per rule 14C
“Naval units may only fire against units bombing ships, ports or bases.”
Does this include “airbases” or only the supply “bases”?
Here is my argument:
Per 11B3: When referring to Allied supply bases, the rules consistently refer to Allied supply bases as a “base” or bases”. This consistency extends to rule 12C3c, where it again refers to Allied supply bases as “bases” or a “base”. In most cases, when referring to an airbase, the rules either use the term “airbase” or “airfields”. There are a few references to the airbases as “base” or “bases”, however, the most common reference is “airbases’ within the context of the rules. “Base” references include “return to base”, or damage to the “base”. Rule 14, in it’s example, also refers to an “Allied base”, to me, meaning an Allied supply base.
Answer:
I looked at it from two different ways and both exclude naval units from
firing AA at airbases.
1. Rule 11B3 states
“French, British, and Polish units receive bases from
which they may draw supply.”
Spot checking various other rules shows that the intention reference of “bases” is indeed these bases and not airbases. The occasional use of “base” to mean airbase is in the air rules, where “base” obviously means airbase. (“Return to base” for example is a standard
term used across a number of games and always means return to airbases. I agree in the context of Narvik with its Allied supply bases, it would be clearer if instead of “base” only “supply base” or “airbase” was used. However, rules writing was less strict back then, and I never got a rules questions that questioned the meaning of “base”.)
2. In reading the Antiaircraft Fire rule (14), it is clear to me that the intention is that naval units can fire AA only in the naval “domain”: at sea or at the sea-land interface (ports and supply bases, [supply bases must be placed in ports]). Airbases are typically more inland (sometimes much more so) and are outside the naval “domain.” “Domain” is just a term I am using here to get the concept across and is not used in Narvik.
Not only do I read this as the intent of Rule 14, but as the person who worked on the 1980 edition of Narvik, I know it was the intent of the GDW design team and how we actually played it.
Source:
Posted on Yahoo Europa Mailing List by John Astell on 15.07.2013 07:10
