Ships in the Night

Coming to an African delta near you soon - S.M.S. Konigsberg, scaled at 1/1800th

Whilst I was rummaging around in the man cave I rediscovered the free promotional sample I received from Topside Minis based in the US. These are full colour and scaled ‘top down’ views of warships and aircraft from Tsushima to WW2. The scales available are 1/1800th, 1/2400th and 1/3000th and you cab buy them with the appropriate bases - obviously when shipping from the US this would add substantially to the cost due to the weight. They are also available in PDF format which would also reduce the cost.

The images are printed on very durable matt self adhesive paper and certainly look very impressive deployed on the tabletop. I finally got around to mounting the free sample I received on the base provided just to see what it looked like ‘up close’.

Assembly consisted of cutting to the black border and sticking on to the plywood base provided - simplicity itself! If I opted to use this system then I would certainly colour the base edges.

If I was to pursue this as an alternative to models then I would look to order the printed sheets and then source the appropriate bases in the UK. It is something I am thinking about as a quick and easy solution to raising the forces I want to use - certainly storage of the assembled fleets would be very easy indeed.

There is one personal issue with this. My warships models have always been based sailing right to left with the name along the bottom and the ensign in the top left corner looking down in the model. As you can see the Topside standard has the ship facing the other way around!

Something to think about and to get used to!