To Infinity and Beyond….

Starfighters R Us! Registers very highly on the fun factor and with bags of potential!

Yesterday evening at the club saw your truly taking command of a Z95 Headhunter - a single seat ‘snub’ fighter - along with one other and taking on a pair of TIE Fighters in an asteroid field (naturally). The rules in use were Voidfighter published by Osprey and the models, including the asteroids and the star field gaming cloth were from the collection of the esteemed Mr Fox. I should mention that he has a substantial collection of models from the Star Wars based X Wing game and so these provided the mounts we used.

Sadly I did not get any pictures but the game ended with both TIE fighters being vaporised, in part due to some truly outrageous dice rolling by myself rather than any apparent tactical nous. For the record the Z95s scored a TIE each. Despite being a small fight - as much to introduce new players (myself and Mr Huband) as for the scenario itself - it was a lot of fun and I can easily see this becoming a club staple. As an aside I have actually owned the rules for a while now but this was my first run out with them. It will most definitely not be the last though!

Aside from the obvious Star Wars angle the potential for other Sci Fi backgrounds is obvious. Battlestar Galactica being one as well as a whole host of other fictional universes. For my own part I rather like the idea of something pulp based - Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers being prime contenders - or even something VSF related. 

The rules themselves are designed for fighters only with a corvette sized vessel being the largest that could be deployed. It is a very theatrical set, as befits the genre, and play fairly rattles along. I shall enjoy playing around with this so there is yet another distraction when I should be looking at ironclads!

Despite being rocket powered and called Komet the Me163 never made it into space - this was the star field cloth over which the Star Wars game was fought.

The talented Mr Huband brought along the latest addition to his Axis and Allies Angels 20 collection - a resin and metal 15mm scale Me163 Komet. Before anyone asks yes, we have stats for one of these and again, yes - it is pretty fast! Mr Huband did a lovely paint job on this and I will look forward to seeing it in action, assuming the pilot hasn’t melted due to fuel leak….

A Small Piece of the Crusades

A selection of rules for varying levels of medieval mayhem

As far as the ‘middle ages’ are concerned my only interest has ever been the Crusades - and for far longer than I care to remember! Seriously though, aside from a detour via the ‘period’ of Robin Hood my interest in Western Europe during the period has been non-existent. Spain in the period of El CID and the later campaigns of the Reconquista are definitely on the radar, perhaps with the rise of the Ottoman Turks, but for now it is firmly Crusades based. 

As usual, any likelihood of me painting armies for the period is slim to none but that is not to say that I will not dabble in some fashion. I rather like the scale of Lion Rampant and in truth, forces for the Crusades using these rules would be as big a commitment in terms of painting figures as I would like to undertake. However, courtesy of a supplement in an edition of Wargames Illustrated called Assassins and Templars - released around the excellent book of the same name by the eminent Crusades historian Steve Tibble - I now have the opportunity to raise even smaller forces than needed for Lion Rampant. 

Steve Tibble’s excellent study of both the Assassins and the Templars and the Lion Rampant Crusades supplement - really useful!

Assassins and Templers - a Ruckus game - uses forces of up to around a dozen figures a side which is ideal or the reluctant or disinterested figures painter. I am quite happy fighting actions at this level using 28mm figures and so have been thinking about what I would need when along came Pillage, published by Victrix.

Pillage are designed around small scale raids, primarily set during the Viking era but are readily usable beyond this and in other theatres. I am rather taken with these and despite the inevitable glossy hardback book approach the rules themselves look pretty entertaining in an old school kind of way. There is also a useful painting guide and some ideas for making one’s own scenery. I did chuckle at this as there are instructions on making a simple cottage style building using coffee stirrers….

So what does all this mean then? Well, I am not averse to painting up a couple of dozen or so figures for each side so I suspect that acquiring the appropriate figures would be an idea. It is possible to buy individual sprues of most plastic figure ranges so some careful research should point me in the right direction. At first glance I rather like the look of Fireforge - mainly as the figures do not appear to require as much in the way of assembly - but there are plenty of others from Victrix and Gripping Beast. 

We shall see but for now it is back to the ironclads….

A Tale of Books, The Battle of the River Plate and of Coffee Stirrers….

Jane’s Fighting Ships needs little introduction and this is the compilation WW2 volume. Fighting Ships of WW1 and WW2 is a hardback compilation from the old Purnell range of A4 sized 64 page paperbacks - a pocket money standby from my youth! Naval guns is essentially a picture book snapshotting various types of artillery across five centuries. There are some great pictures, accompanied by some useful, albeit brief background to the weapons depicted. Finally, a selection of accounts of the most famous Royal Navy actions, again over the centuries.

As many of you may know, there are a vast number of ‘buying and selling’ groups on Facebook. I belong to a number of specialist types - specialist as in special interest - as well as a few geographically local versions. Very occasionally, among the sofas to be disposed of or sets of golf clubs looking for a new home, something turns up that catches the eye. In this case it was a selection of naval books - 12 in all - that a lady was disposing of, all for £5! After an exchange of messages the deal was struck and so I drove over to her house after hydrotherapy yesterday to complete the transaction.

I knew in advance that a couple of titles I already owned but playing forward would be easy enough. The books you see in the picture above are the ones I am keeping, three are destined for a local charity ship whilst the others are for playing forward, so to speak. I was a little embarrassed at the low cost of the haul but the lady was adamant that £5 was sufficient. Interestingly enough, she told me that the books had belonged to a great uncle that had died a few years ago in a nearby care home. He had served during WW2 aboard HMS Ajax and saw action at the Battle of the River Plate. Apparently he had some memorabilia from the ship but when he died no one knew what happened to it - it was in his room at the care home. You never know who or what pieces of history can be found more of less on one’s doorstep!

I use a lot of these but very seldom venture anywhere that you can get them from - Starbucks, Costas, Cafe Nero or even McDonalds! Very useful for the scratch builder.

Laurel and I headed to our local boot sale this morning and once again the pickings for yours truly were pretty thin but I did manage to score a bag of 1,000 wooden coffee stirrers for the princely sum of £1. That should keep the shipyards bust for quite some time to come!

Turrets and Other Bits

The first of five boxes worth of laser cut MDF bits and pieces used in my warship models

As part of my return to scratch building ironclad warships, I decided to carry out a modest reorganisation of my supply of the laser cut MDF pieces I use for the models. This would serve two purposes. Firstly, I would be able to see if there were any pieces that needed restocking and secondly, so that I could tidy up the five boxes full of bits and pieces.

The box you see above now contains all of my turret pieces, as well as the two key components I use for assembling masts.

A selection of masted ships - you can see where the fighting tops are used to help strengthen the masts.

A selection of turreted monitors and the U.S.S. Keokuk (top left).

I have turrets available in four sizes - 1”, 20mm, 15mm and 1/2” - and I am quite sure that it must drive poor Mr Murray at Warbases to distraction as I quite happily mix metric and imperial measurements for the pieces I require!

For the turrets, the central layer with the gun embrasures is 3mm thick. For the layers above and below this I usually use 3mm but have a selection of 2mm thick pieces to use if required. As mentioned previously, using the 2mm thick ‘lid’ means that the gun embrasures appear to be higher from the deck. An illusion to be sure, but a welcome one. 

The mast ‘fighting tops’ are all 3mm thick and whilst circular it would be simple enough to get some rectangular versions cut. From what I have seen of ships over the ironclad period the fighting tops seem to be mostly circular so that is what I have gone with by default. On my models their function is to provide a ‘sleeve’ of sorts to the joins in the masts. They provide an extra surface on which to apply glue, thereby making the join really strong. The full circles with a central hole are used for ships that are running with a cut down sailing rig.

I was pleased to have sorted this particular box out as it gives me a much clearer idea of what I have and what I need going forwards. Once turret designs move away from being circular I will need to order some other shapes but the basic three layer assembly technique will still work for them - I will definitely use the 2mm ‘lid’ though!

The Look of the Thing or Size DOES Matter!

An oldie but a goodie! Taken from the climatic Battle of Static Bay as described in Developing The Portable Ironclads Wargame: The American Civil War. A floating battery, extemporised gunboats, an old navy style sloop and a selection of ironclads. Oh, and plenty of damage markers!

My collection of simple scratch built model warships for the ACW has given me much satisfaction; both from the modelling perspective and from seeing them in action. The whole process of turning a couple of pictures of a chosen ship into a physical approximation is a lot of fun and I have enjoyed it enormously. Although my construction technique has remained largely the same throughout,  I have incorporated a few subtle changes into the overall design process and it is these changes I wanted to write about in this post.

The most significant change I have adopted has been one of size. Although the models are not exact scale replicas in terms of overall dimensions, I am now ensuring that relative size differentials are noticeable. This will be readily apparent with the batch of models I am currently working on for the Royal Navy and the Ottoman Turks. There are no hard and fast rules for this as my models tend to be built ‘by eye’ rather than detailed measurements. My use of a standard hull shape - akin to that of a slab-sided barge - is probably the closest I get to any degree of regularity!

A typical turret. In this case one of the half inch version that were deemed to be too small for the current batch of models. There are three layers of 3mm thick MDF although I am looking at using a 2mm think lid which will bring the gun embrasures closer to the top of the turret.

I have also applied this technique to the construction of turrets. Fortunately, over the period that the Portable Ironclads Wargame covers, turrets tended to be circular and with guns that required muzzle loading so were run into the turret to do so. All of my turrets are built in the same way - three layers of MDF, each of (usually) 3mm thickness - with the middle layer of the ‘sandwich’ having two (usually,  although I have do have some singles available) cut out indentations to represent the gun embrasures. All of my turrets do not have any gun barrels exposed, thereby avoiding having to add them! Once I move onto the later periods I will not be able to get away with this but luckily, the technique I designed would work enough by simply seating the gun barrels in the indentations before ‘putting the lid on’, so to speak.

As part of the current build, I ordered some turrets sized at half an inch across. Whilst these are useful, it soon became obvious that they were slightly too small for the planned models. My usual size of 20mm across, of which I have a prodigious quantity, was very slightly too large so a quick rethink and a cheeky order to Martin at Warbases and I now have a number of turret pieces to the same design but measuring 15mm across. They look just right, and that is the main thing. As an aside, when I first started building the ACW collection I ordered turrets that are 1” wide - and this proved to be be too large, hence the use of 20mm as the size of choice.

In terms of the ‘Look of the Thing’ then I can happily say that in terms of anything approaching  scale etc, my ACW collection is all over the place! To be accurate, I should say that the relative size differential between types is probably far greater in the ACW collection than that of the current build as I was less concerned with this initially. Being used solely on a grid it does not really matter too much about this anyway and besides, using a model that has some physical presence on the tabletop is far more visually satisfying in my opinion then using something that is on the small size.

A case in point was the WW1 Lake Tanganyika collection, built to go with the hexed version of David Manley’s excellent Steamer Wars rules. My models of Mimi and Toutou were around 3cm long whilst the Graf Von Goetzen was about 10cm. Strictly speaking the two Royal Navy motor boats should have been smaller than this but when modelled in true scale (I am talking about 1:600th here) they are tiny. On the tabletop though, my ‘out of scale’ models looked just fine and I can live with the abstraction!

I guess the point I am trying to make is that although my models are not to scale and are designed to be very basic looking, I am mindful of the look of the thing, hence my moving towards ensuring that relative size differences are obvious. Although they are primarily gaming pieces - pretty robust ones at that - I would be less than honest if I did not say that I continue to be rather pleased with how they look when in action and also just how much I enjoy building them.

And that is the whole point of the exercise methinks!

The Portable Ironclads Wargame: Definitive Edition

What a winning combination of useful titles with which to base a project around! Methinks these will be rather well-thumbed by the time the models are ready!

For a variety of reasons, my planned book for Pen and Sword is now in a bit of a temporary holding pattern so I have taken the opportunity to look at something else. The Portable Ironclads Wargame: Definitive Edition, is going to be the title that completes the trilogy started with the Portable Ironclads Wargame. Essentially it will compromise the best bits from the two existing volumes with a chunk of new stuff. There will be an updated bibliography, the final version of the rules (no real changes here, just a tidy up), additional ship specifications and not one but three battle reports.

The ACW will feature, along with the War in the Pacific and for the alternative history entry, the Anglo Turkish War of 1883. All the models used will be my own scratch builds and I am toying with the idea of including some building instructions - a ‘how to’ if you like - for making one’s own models.

Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of material than can be used straight off the bat from the two previous volumes but it is worth emphasising that this final version will contain sufficient new material to make it a worthwhile acquisition, this is especially important if you already have the two previous volumes!

The box of Royal Navy and Ottoman Turkish ironclads already under construction

In the short term my main focus will be shipbuilding - at this stage the two dozen or so RN and Turkish Ironclads - and so I will need to scope out the ships for the War in the Pacific. Luckily I have a couple of very handy references for this and guess what? I already have the ensigns!

Ironclads and a Boot Sale

The box shape caught my eye and word games are popular in Maison Crook so I picked this up for £1. There are 100 hexagonal tiles each measuring 25mm across the flat sides and are 5mm thick. The letters are on one side only. The gaming potential of these very useful tiles is obvious - more so as they also fit one side of my double sided blue hexed cloth as that also has hexes that are 25mm across the flat sides. 

Bit of a quick post this one - mainly because my next post will be a a bigger one!

Laurel and I headed out to our usual Sunday boot sale for the first time since before we went on holiday. With her newly diagnosed gallstones issue it was touch and go if we were going to be out and about at all but she felt comfortable enough to try it out (which is not saying a great deal as she is still suffering from the after effects of her gallstone attack of two weeks ago). It was worth it as some fresh air did us both good, along with a couple of bargains to add the cherry on top.

The game above will provide a change from Scrabble (Laurel and I have the scores kept from over 15 years of play - she is winning by around 6 games overall!) and the components will be useful from a wargames perspective. All in all £1 well invested methinks!

The Really Useful Box full of MDF. As you can see, the hulls are coming along nicely - the layers that are painted brick red will be used for the RN lower hulls at waterline level. The white ‘boot topping’ will be added to the main hull before the final assembly. I find it easier painting layers rather than lines!

For a variety of reasons, most of which will feature in the next post, I have moved the Turkish and Royal Navy ironclads back into the production queue - at the head of the list! I need to have a sort out of the bits and pieces you see in the box and also I need to order some new custom turret assemblies from Warbases as the ones I ordered for HMS Devastation and the two Turkish monitors are two small by a couple of mm. Once I have tidied them up and have the new turrets the first rider f business will be to finish the hulls and then it will be mast building. LOTS of mast building!