Balkan Naval Estimates

Admiral Pavlos Kountouriotis (here as Captain)

I have spent some today pondering the naval side of my Balkans project - this will follow on after the land element is in a game able condition i.e. I have two sides finished and ready to use! The main fleets will be the Greeks and the Turks and I am reckoning on there being around 50 models combined for the two. Add to this the representative Great Powers then the list easily heads up towards the 100 models mark. I should point out though that half of this will be torpedo boats of various types. The ships covered will vary from state-of-the-art (for 1900 anyway) pre dreadnoughts through old and new armoured and protected cruisers and central battery ironclads. In short, a real mixture of old and new.

I will spend some time during my forthcoming holiday deciding exactly what I shall be needing to make for the fleets - the historical stuff can readily be sourced but I will need to do some digging into what Eric Knowles used to refer to as 'never was-ers'. These are those ships that were either ordered and never built, built and taken over or merely existed as a set of plans. The situation in this respect is fairly well covered for the year leading up to WW1 but less so the further back you go.

I realise that this all seems a little in advance (I will not get to the models until at least the 4th quarter of the year) but once I have this aspect bolted down I will be able to concentrate fully on the armies as they must, in all honesty, come first. I like to think of ship modelling as being my prize for painting the land forces first!