RogerBW's Blog

Another scenario from South Atlantic War, the Black Buck One raid on the airfield at Port Stanley.

There's not a great deal for either side to do in this one. The Argentinians set up their air defences; the British decide on an approach route. In both cases they went close to the historical pattern, with Argentine mobile radars on the hilltops, and the British coming in from north of east.

The Argentine guns and missiles were spread over the near-island where the airport is sited.

The Vulcan was spotted with about six minutes' warning, and released bombs while a few miles off-shore. (Incidentally, stats for the TPS-43 and TPS-44 radars are singularly lacking from South Atlantic War first edition; I don't know whether they were in an old Harpoon data annexe that I don't have. But they're in the second edition PDF from Wargamevault.)

The Tigercat launchers and long-range AAA guns were able to engage, but even with radar guidance their odds weren't good, and they didn't bring the Vulcan down.

The bombs hit, and I started to see why Harpoon has a reputation for being complicated. First of all there was the base chance of hitting the runway at all - a Medium target from Medium altitude with a Ballistic bombsight has a basic 3% chance to hit. You'd think you'd just roll 3% 21 times, but not. Bombs are divided into sticks of six, 21/6 rounds to 4, for +4 = 7% (because they're spaced out in a long line, the odds of getting a single hit go up, and the odds of multiple hits go down). Then we use the Stick Hit Table to determine that there's a 35% chance of one hit, 6% of two, 1% of three, and resolve the whole lot with a single die roll. Well, all right, but it seems like a lot of work to determine that, yes, one bomb hit the runway.

Then there's the question of scatter, for which the only guidance is for "30 or more bombs […] dropped in a single pass". 21 is nearly 30, so I used the rule from that (any target within 250 yards of the line of flight and 1nm along that line from the target is also attacked by a reduced number of bombs), but with a danger space of ⅔nm and 175 yards each way. Still, at least I could readily plot this to see what was in the footprint. I'll admit I'm really quite proud of this image.

This ended up being a 5% chance of hitting each grounded Pucará and a 14% chance of getting the airport buildings. One aircraft was hit, and so were the buildings.

So that's a Decisive British Victory: "Damage runway, ramps and airport buildings, while the Vulcan escapes." Though I can't help feeling that this ends up being a bit of an exercise in dice-rolling, without much opportunity for the players to make interesting decisions.

Thanks (and apologies) to John and Marco for playing this one.