Hi all, a dumb question from a noob here: is it technically possible to deploy a 4 ship square formation, so that no collision will occur on a bank maneuver?

I'm talking of a placement in which all 4 ships are perfectly aligned in a 2x2 formation, facing the opponent's edge of the board.

I'm asking because, for maximum precision, I tried in this Vassal and discovered that, with a pixel perfect placement that leaves the front nubs touching R1 and the back ones touching the board edge, a bank formation maneuver can be successful, but just barely.

I know there are workarounds to this, like formations in which ships are slightly offset or face the side of the board, but would you consider a maneuver like this as legal in real life? Or is it reasonably assumed that the initial placement was out of bounds?

See this youtube video about flying in formation

You should try the pinwheel formation then.

http://teamcovenant.com/general/understanding-the-pinwheel-formation

Maybe if you are flying a very loose box formation. That pinwheel will provide a tighter group.

It can theoretically be done but realistically it would be considered a bump as you couldn't maintain the accuracy with movement templates to pull it off.

Given:

Length of base = 1

Length of base after a bank = diagonal base length = 1.414 bases

Width of deployment zone = 2.5 bases

So when you deploy you have 0.5 of a base between your ships vertically and horizontally.

When you bank the ship corners of two opposing ships go into that space leaving you with (1.414-1)/2=0.207 base overlapping from either base into the 0.5 base spacing between the ships.

This leaves you with 0.5-2*0.207=0.086 base of total margin of error to make this work between two bases.

Assuming a 40mm base, dimensionally the total placement error between your front and rear ships can't be more than 3.44mm for this to work in a perfectly aligned situation. Given the template nibs can't overhang the front of the deployment zone or the rear of the map this is probably more like 1.44mm of total placement error between the two ships on initial deployment.

So theoretically you could do this. Realistically you are probably going to bump after moving into a bank just due to accumulated error from deployment and template placement.