@SS:
IL didnt you say you know or saw a picture of people war gaming on a banquet room floor or bigger and the guys would make attack and defend shots from many feet away for naval battles ?
This is probably a reference to Fletcher Pratt’s naval wargame, which was popular for a while in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It was played with small scale warships carved out of soft wood (Pratt would hold “whittling parties” in which wood-carving enthusists would turn out entire fleets). They’d be deployed on the floors of rented hotel ballrooms, and operated by teams of players in their socks (to avoid accidentally crushing the ships with misplaced shoe steps). Ships were allowed to fire imaginary shells (and torpedoes) whose range was proportionate to the scaled-down range of the real guns carried by the real ships on which they were modeled (based, I think, on the figures given in Jane’s Fighting Ships). Players would write down their firing orders based on a visual estimate of how far away on the ballroom floor the target ship was; Pratt’s umpires would then measure out the specified range with tape measures and mark the landing spot of the shells by using upside-down golf tees to represent shell splashes. Hits would be translated into damage which was cumulatively deducted from the target ship’s damage-tracking card (whose numbers were based on a complicated formula which took armour and other factors into consideration); when the deductions eventually reduced the ship to zero points, it was considered sunk. The overall system was very realistic in some ways (notably the target-ranging aspect) but hopelessly arbitrary in others because it treated ships as homogeneous lumps of amalgamated fighting attributes whose effectiveness was always degraded in a predictable, linear way from 100% down to 0%. As was spectacularly demonstrated by HMS Hood, which was blown apart after six minutes of combat with the Bismark, naval slugging matches between battleships don’t necessarily progress in predictable, linear ways. Still, the game must have been great fun; it was roughly a ballroom-sized counterpart of A&A Naval Miniatures, though with a completely different combat system.