Musing over Affairs Afloat....

I touched very briefly on matters naval related in my previous post and so it occurred to me that perhaps now would be as good a time as any to outline exactly what I have on the go of a nautical persuasion. The two biggest things, certainly in respect of painting, are the completion of the ACW ships and then the Minifigs WW1 kit. These will dovetail nicely with the ACW and Balkan phases of the block project and so are next on the to do list.

I still have to complete the Jutlandised naval rules (the Boardgamer disc is still en route) and also the expanded Man of War ironclad era variant designed by Dave Manley. The former is well advanced whilst the latter is less so.

I have a hankering to add to my 1/3000th WW1 Mediterranean collection and both the French and the Austrians look attractive - as does a representative RN squadron. The problem is that this will then overlap with the Minifigs ships I have meaning the perennial naval problem of having the same ships in more than one scale. I will have to think about that one!

I want to revisit WW2 in the North Atlantic at some point and perversely (certainly from a practicality point of view) really want to make use of the recently rereleased Sink the Bismarck! set from Airfix in conjunction with some Revell add ons (KGVs and Scharnhorsts). I expect sanity will prevail though and so the old standby of 1/3000th will probably be the scale of choice for this.

Overshadowing all of this though is MS Paint. I am determined to have a crack at some side elevations for ships to use on blocks or even some stylised aerial views for larger, fleet sized actions, again using labels rather than models. Using the Autorealm freeware mapping tool (as described by Bob Cordery) will be of use to a degree in that it already contains some wooden sailing vessels viewed from above that can be tweaked according to the ship type required. Again, this will be one to experiment with.

To finish up this nautical overview I should also point out that at some stage I should like to tackle galley warfare in the 16th century, perhaps even with a dash of the Armada thrown in for good measure.

I think my printer will be pretty busy over the coming months….;-)