Im an x wing and now runewars player and a friend came by to do an armada demo. after playing we started talking about the games similarities to ww2 battles and how the games core mechanics can easily be re-skinned to make this a historical miniatures game.we were playing around with ideas for upgrades and release packs here are some rule changes /ideas:

based on carriers of course

once you "launched" your fighters they could only have so many rounds of fuel before they need to return to the carrier, if they do not make it, they ditch their planes in the sea and the opposing player gets the points

plane types including: torpeedo, dive bombers ,sea planes and fighters(so many different historic munitions to use here as upgrade cards as well as extra fuel tanks)

squadrons that use munitions will need a firing arc to aim or some other way to aim bombs and torpeedoes, i like the system warmachine/hordes uses for magic deviation

submarines that "decloak" like ships in x wing or some other clever way to hide where they begin their movement

commands and movement would go unchanged that was the main inspiration for all this

defense tokens represent where in the ships you send your crews to help out, and spending the red token would be like sending your men to sacrifice themselves for the ship

islands (larger pieces of cardboard punch like asteroids and runewars terrain)

mats of actual maps/satellite images of the ocean

i sent fantasy flight a much more brief email about this, they said thank you for your inquiry we appreciate your feedback, thanks for letting us know how you feel,

what do all of you think of it? please submit feedback and any ideas the community have, and also would you play this game?

It is a good idea and it makes sense to me to use an existing well developed mechanic with modification.
I think it definitely could work with some fairly intensive play testing.
I would definitely enjoy playing a historical naval miniature game from WWI and WWII.

Risks I would personally see:
1-It is a crowded market place already. Between 40K, AoS, X Wing, Mantic, and tons more, you're adding yet another full game system.
This is part of the problem that many good miniature games suffer from.
What will make a gamer drop his money on this versus something with an established base like X Wing or 40K, etc that he or she can go out and find a game without difficulty?

2- Tying into number 1, I'm not sure how popular a historical WWII naval game would be.
I would not be surprised if the Flames of War folks did some similar analysis as a naval game would tie into their historical aspect.

Just some initial thoughts/musings on my part.

Would definitely enjoy playing it though...

How are you going to handle shield? They're not exactly a random mechanic tacked on to the core game that you can just ignore. Shields are a fairly significant element in adjusting the durability of ships, one of the defense tokens is all about redirecting damage to other shields and if you lose that you throw off the balance of the fence tokens, ship repair is balanced around moving shields and repairing shields and repairing hull damage, so you can't throw out two thirds of the repair mechanic.

Check out Firestorm Armada/Dystopian Wars by Spartan Games. Fighters/Interceptors and Bombers work almost like that save you don't get any victory points from them.

Shields could be treated as a headcount of live officers in that section of the ship to coordinate the captains actions

Shields wouldn't translate well at all, but you could use armor. Maybe it's just a flat reduction in how much damage that section takes per attack, or something along those lines. That needs some tweaking, and maybe a way to shatter armor if upgrades are used or enough damage is dealt. It would definitely make MSU lists less effective since if they're trying to use three dice per attack to kill something that ignores two points of damage per attack, they aren't likely to win. Maybe torpedoes ignore armor?

I like the idea of fuel limitations on planes. I wouldn't want to see it in Armada but in a WWII context it would be an interesting mechanic.

Curse you, sludrick. Now I really want this game and it doesn't even exist.

It's called "War at Sea" : https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/25794/axis-allies-naval-miniatures-war-sea