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.