Before playing my first game of Missile Threat I designed some 3D templates instead of using the card ones in the rules or a protractor. A lot of tabletop air games use templates for turning and weapon/radar arcs, so its good to have some decent ones which help enhance the gaming experience. This is less of an issue for hex based games but I prefer hexless games (mostly because I don’t have a hex mat).

Missile threat has 2 main templates, a radar and weapons arc template and a turn template. I started with the Radar template and designed it in Tinkercad, which is great for basic 3D models. It’s designed to match my 50mm square aircraft bases and later on I made the numbers thicker so they are in line with the turn template.

For the Turn template I tried a few variations before I got it right. In Missile threat there is different turn rates depending on the aircraft and so a template needs a mix of 30, 45 and 60 degree markers. My first design looked like this but I removed the 315 degrees part as no aircraft can make that many turns, and you would tend to perform a Split-S or Immelmann instead.

But during my first game I realised there was a major flaw and I had designed the template for only right hand turns and I had no flat section to line up against the base! And this messed up all the numbering.

So I redesigned it with the numbering in 30/45/60 increments which work from either turn direction and I tweaked it so an aircraft can turn either direction.

Since printing this I made one last tweak and I rotated the numbers so they face inwards. I probably won’t print a new template as they one i have is perfectly usable.

Now they work great and I have uploaded them to Thingverse here if anyone wants to 3D print their own. There is 2 different sized turn templates, one for 50mm base and one for 40mm (used by the rules for 1/600th).