Ship Shape and Bristol Fashion

An invaluable resource for background etc. As the gun factors are largely based on Mr Manley’s Dahlgren and Colombiad rules expect to see these ‘hexed’ in due course!

Two more valuable resources. This will be used for planning the models that I shall be building in my usual simple style. I will not be many be many models for this, simply because the number of ships involved was quite modest.

Now that the temperature has dropped to a more civilised level, work can resume in earnest on The Portable Ironclads Wargame: Definitive Edition. This means models, and lots of them!

Aside from the ships of the Royal Navy and of the Ottoman Turks, I will also need to design the components for the ships from the War of the Pacific. This will be my next task as I will definitely need to order some bespoke pieces from Warbases for some of the ships. 

Whilst going through the rules I noticed that there are a couple things that I left out which I will need to include. Ships under sail is something I took the conscious decision to leave out on the basis that most ships in action would steam power whilst saving the sails for longer journeys. It was fine up to a point but the Union navy used pure sailing ships on blockade duty so, in the interest of completeness I will need to formulate a sailing system. The other thing I need to include are fire rafts and this leads me in a roundabout way to the effects of tide and current. 

During testing I used some rules for the effects of current and it certainly made for some entertaining effects. Given the low speeds of most ironclads used on the rivers, steaming against the current could really slow you down to the point that some of the more underpowered types could barely steam against it. Once again though, this would be easy enough to factor into the rules and so will be (re)included.

I think the point I am trying to emphasise here is that while the rules will remain the same, there will be a few extra bits and pieces included.

As for the battles themselves well, one of them will be a historical refight (probably from the War in the Pacific) whilst the other two will be fictional. What will be real treat for me will be fleshing out the back story for the Anglo Turkish War. For reasons that I will not divulge at present, there will be something special with this.

I will say no more....