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!