Madasahatta Meandering and Arabian Activity

A smattering of inspirational reading material for my ‘no so latest’ flight of fancy!

This is not really a new post as such - more like a ‘the story so far’ kind of thing! If you look through the Madasahatta folder you will see a number of ideas I have bounced around over the years - mainly from the naval side and incorporating Madasahatta, East Africa and the Red Sea/Arabian peninsula. Originally I worked on the basis that the German East Asia squadron - centred on the armoured cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau - headed west rather than east, to be based on Madasahatta. In fact I have acquired the models for this in 1:2400th from Tumbling Dice. 

Fast forward to today and with the Lake Tanganyika project in full flow - serious painting starts today - I am now looking to revisit the earlier idea, albeit on a smaller scale. 

Previously I had included the Goeben and Breslau, a brace of ‘I’ class Royal Navy battlecruisers, HMS Triumph and Swiftsure and a random selection of assorted obsolete cruisers etc. Looking at this from the perspective of building the models myself the project itself now will be at a lower level. There will be a degree of fudging in terms of the ships involved but being as this is designed firmly with Steamer Wars or similar in mind, that will be no bad thing. As it stands the largest ship that will appear will probably be the odd predreadnought battleship so no battlecruisers. 

As it stands the list of models to build is surprisingly small but overall there will be more work involved in the construction of them. As far as possible I will use what bits and pieces I have from stock but there will certainly need to be some bespoke pieces ordered from Warbases, mainly hull pieces.

This will be naval war of older and extemporised warships, gunboats and second line types with the odd more modern vessel - mainly of the light cruiser variety. 

As yet I have given no thought to the land side - either in Africa or Arabia - but in either theatre the rules of choice will probably be the Portable Colonial Wargame or maybe even When Empires Clash. The block armies will be used for this.

As far as naval rules are concerned I will need to think about this as Steamer Wars is fine for the gunboat level stuff but would rolling out light cruisers be a step too far? In any event I do not have to worry about that for now as the first batch of building will feature nothing larger than a gunboat or possibly an armed merchant cruiser (AMC). I will need to think about merchantmen though, primarily as targets methinks!