Gunboat Diplomacy

 I had not planned to do any more ship building or any other hobby activities for that matter for the rest of the year. Friday, we leave for our annual and probably last trip up to Chicagoland for Christmas holidays. I have been trying to get a million things done to prepare for the trip. Yesterday, a bunch of mishaps happened to my son, some in part to his ADHD. Long story short, he forgot his art project he's been working on to school and its due tomorrow. So, after getting all his other homework done, he started rebuilding his sculpture from ground zero. To speed up the process, I helped cut out some of the corrugated cardboard pieces while he glued it together with the glue gun. As I was wait to cut more things out, I spotted a small rectangle of scrap styrene board on my workbench that would be perfect for a ship base. *light bulb goes off*

I've been reading over the various David Manley pre-Dreadnought rules. I now own all the various campaigns.  Splendid Little War lists all the various warships for both the Spanish and Americans and were they were based. I noticed there were a whole lot of gunboats on both sides. I counted 14 American and 8 Spanish gunboats. I always envisioned gunboats as these stocky little ships with small caliber guns like the fictional USS San Pablo from the movie The Sand Pebbles (1966).

From: https://www.thesandpebbles.com/

But its seems like they were all over the place in terms of what they looked like and their armament. A lot of American ones were more like micro-cruisers.

So as I awaited carboard cutting jobs and encouraging my son to work carefully and not rush things, I ended up making a very generic one.

It took me all of about three hours to build. Two hours last night, and an hour this morning. I gave him two large guns (5.5" to 6") and two smaller guns (3.5" to 4.5"). The most complicated part was the darn ship's boats. They always look cool to add them, but for some reason, they are a pain. Plus, no cranes to handle them. 

I have not decided which navy to assign it to. I will probably paint it a rather generic color of a mid-gray hull and a white superstructure. 

Update on the Fleets

 I've been chugging away both building ships and expanding the size of the hex board. My plan is to initially use the portable naval rules for battles but I do have a shiny blue plastic tarp that I can use with David Manley's many rules. As I build them, they seem to improve in detail as I incorporate new techniques. As you can see, I got a little more fancy with the masts. This is practice for when I attempt to make sailing masts for some of the more older ironclad ships. 

The Commonwealth of  Avalonia finally got some more battleships:

These are based on the Royal Sovereign class battleships. I unintentionally exaggerated the size of the main guns, but I justify their size because they are 13.5" guns rather than the 12" guns that many battleships of the time had. The one thing I could not cram into the models were cranes for the lifeboats. One of them has its own steam pinnace:

Must be an admiral on board!

Laramidia got another cruiser. This protected cruiser was built off of the casts I made of the hulls. Again, I made the guns, this time the gun shields, way out of proportion to the ship. 

Here is a side-by-side comparison with a sort of sister ship I had made earlier using the same hull.

I have have two more of these hulls left, including the original master hull out of wood.

I completed two out of four small torpedo boats but have not assigned them to a particular navy.

I used Green Stuff epoxy putty to make the turtleback forecastles. I am happy with the way they turned out, but I want to try to make the next two with a bow torpedo tube sticking out. The two silver footballs on the side of the funnel are supposed to be Whitehead torpedoes. From what I can tell, they were not painted and the early torpedo boats launched them by dropping them off the side of the ship. I made my crude versions of them by soaking tissue paper in glue and rolling them between my fingers. Some came out a little fuzzy.

Last but not least is a a little steam pinnace. She was originally intended to be an added piece to a larger ship model, but it fit well in some impromptu dioramas I make on my workbench. So, I made a base for her and painted her up. Like the tugboat I presented in the previous post, she can be part of a harbor scene.