Fleet Review: Part Two, Krackovia

 Again, I've posted many of these in previous posts, but I decided to put them all together. 

Kracovia is the current rival to Avalonia. Their surprising naval victory over Avalonia has emboldened them to embark on a major ship building campaign.

First type of battleships. I was ambitious in adding secondary turrets. 

Second type of battleships. Secondary guns in casemates.

A coastal defense battleship that I posted awhile back. It is based loosely on the Turkish Mesudiye that was a central battery ironclad that underwent a major reconstruction. I classified it as a coastal defense battleship because it has two rather than four main guns. 

Protected cruiser. I would make a lot more cruisers but making mounted guns in gun shields is a real pain. I have earlier posts showing various experiments in making these. If anyone has any suggestions on how to make them efficiently and look reasonably well, please comment.

A gunboat based on a based on the imperial Russian gunboat Khrabri. Building masts are still a bit of challenge as can be seen in that stern mast. I use UV resin as glue to put together parts of masts, but sometimes, it gets to be a mess. 

Finally, torpedo boats. These were pretty quick to build. I have three more of these hulls and will complete those with an added torpedo tube sticking out of its bow. 

Fleet Review: Part One, Avalonia

Some of these I posted in the past, but I thought I'd present them all together. First up is the Commonwealth of Avalonia. Avalonia is made up of various sized islands. I have been working on a post on the various fictional nations. Some day, I'll get it posted. 

I am in the process of building some protected cruisers and armored cruisers. 

These two are near sisters. Both have 12" main guns. The difference between the two is the secondary armament. The right one has 6" guns in casemates. The one of the left is armed in 8"guns in turrets.

These two are armed with 14" main guns exposed in barbettes. 

I've already posted these two but these are older warships. Both are armed with 10" main guns.

This is an auxiliary cruiser converted from a ocean liner. It is armed with two 6" guns and four 4" guns.

I've also posted these destroyers, but I thought I'd repost them.

Last, here are some generic freighters and a liner. I built another one, but it seems to have disappeared. 

Next up, Avalonia's rival Kracovia.

Great War Salvo! Naval Rules

 I am currently at my home town which is a suburb of Chicago. I'm here to help my sister at least begin to clean up my mother's house to sell it, and to deal with some of her outstanding bank finances that for some unexplained reason, I must do it in present here and cannot be done online.

I was going to bring some of my painting supplies and some minis but it ended up that I brought one game, Great War Salvo! by Minden Games. 

I bought this about a year ago, but only did a quick read through. I read it again before I left for Chicago and thought it might be good contender as a relatively simple set of naval rules, it can be played solo, and you really don't need any miniatures. In fact, it can be played with a pad of paper and pencil, which is what I did just tonight. I do have their more comprehensive naval rules, Battleship Captain, but Great War Salvo! seems to be less complex. 

The book is divided up into basic and advanced rules, with some optional rules added that include submarines. Additionally, you get 12 pages of ship counters covering everyone involved in WWI. Ships include dreadnoughts, pre-dreadnoughts, armored cruisers, protected cruisers, light cruisers, and even armed merchant cruisers. The only thing you don' get are torpedo boats and torpedo boat destroyers. You don't get submarine counters either, but subs are a little more abstract. What allowed it to be a candidate for my potential pre-dreadnought wars is that they have a lot of pre-dread battleships as well as a lot of cruisers that were old enough to count. You probably cannot recreate the Russo-Japanese War as is, but I am somewhat a master of reverse engineering stats, so it would not be a big issue. 

There are a number of different factors, but they the usual types: floatation, turrets, armor, and speed. Hits on these causes loss of effectiveness.  Additionally, there are differences in gun effectiveness depending on whether you are firing broadside versus fore or aft. During each turn, players declare whether they are closing in, turning broadside, or withdrawing. This changes range bands. Weather is important, even in the basic rules. 

Combat is in two parts. First, you have to see if you can hit the target. It is a two D6 roll modified by range, but you do get a bonus if you hit the ship in the previous turn. If you hit, then you see if you damage the the ship by rolling three D6 this time and adding or subtracting modifiers. There are a number of modifiers but once you have run through combat a few times, it is pretty quick to tally scores up. Charts tell you whether or not you hit, if damage is taken, and what sort of damage occurs. Unlike some other rules I've used in the past, it is not a slow attrition of loosing hull points. There is plenty of opportunity for more serious or catastrophic damage to occur even in the basic game. 

The game does have an algorithm where the game is not necessarily a slugfest and combat can break off before a ship is sunk. 

For my first test game, I pitted the HMS New Zealand against the SMS Westfalen. I picked them because they were both on the same page. I played the Westfalen whereas has the AI played the New Zealand.

Weather was rolled to be fair and the ships started at Extreme range. 

Turn 1

The New Zealand got to go first and rolled to turn broadside. I chose to close in. This moved the range band from extreme to long. If I had also turned broadside, the range would have stayed extreme. The ship with the largest gun gets to shoot first. Shooting is not simultaneous, neither is damage. The New Zealand fired and hit me, but even with the +4 added to the to damage roll, it bounced off. The Westfalen fired but it missed. The armor factor of 4 on the Westfalen cancelled out New Zealand's broadside rating of +4. I rolled to see if the battle continued and it did. 

Turn 2

Again, the New Zealand got to go first and rolled to close. I decided to close as well. Because we both closed, we skipped the medium-long band and brought us down to medium range. New Zealand fired first but this time missed. I fired and also missed. Again, the battle continued. 

Turn 3 

New Zealand went first and turned to broadside, so I decided to turn broadside as well. The range stayed at medium. The New Zealand hit me and was able to cause damage. I took took 2 floatation points of damage but there were no further consequences in the basic rules. The Westfalen fired back hitting and causing damage in the form of a turret hit. This meant that from then on, the New Zealand gets a -1 when trying to do damage. I rolled and the battle continued.

Turn 4 

Getting initiative, the New Zealand rolled to close in. I decided not to press my luck and ordered a withdraw. The range stayed at medium. We both fired and hit each other but there was no damage taken on either ship. I was hoping to end the game, but the AI said otherwise. 

Turn 5

Pretty much a repeat of turn 4, with the New Zealand continuing pursuit,  but with both ships missing each other. 

Turn 6

Finally I got to go first, but I chose to continue to run. The New Zealand decided to turn broadside (maybe captain AI decided he was tired of missing or his shells bouncing off my ship). What that did however was to increase the range to medium-long. That slight increase in range was enough cause the New Zealand to miss (really low dice rolls didn't help). The Westfalen fired and scored a hit and knocked off a floatation point off of the New Zealand. Again, the AI determined that the show must go on.

Turn 7

Again, the New Zealand stayed at broadside while I continued to run. That furthered the range to long.

Again, the New Zealand failed miserably to hit me. I managed to hit him but no damage this time. Finally, the war gods of the sea looked favorably upon the Westfalen and called the battle over.

The game took under an hour to play. It probably would have been shorter but I had to get used to tabulated the pluses and minuses. I got the hang of things and by turn 4, things sped up. I'm sure there were some things I goofed up on or missed when adding up things. For example, ships are rated with different speeds. It seems that these speed rating are only related to the effects of speed on damage, at least that was is what it seemed in the basic rules. Also, one of the things I had to remember was that even though the game only uses D6 dice, different charts use different numbers of D-sixes. For example, many of the decision charts only use one D6, but as I stated above, the to hit chart uses two and the to damage chart uses three. 

I enjoyed it. Once I got the swing of things, the turns moved pretty quickly. I think the range bands can be converted to either squares or hexes that would really help if I was to play a multi-ship game. It would tough to juggle a game with only paper and pencil. 

Even though I don't have any miniatures with me, I do have paper, thin cardboard, and glue. I can draw up some quick and dirty ships. I should have brought the various gridded naval wargame rule books with me, but I my David Manley rules are all on pdf. I can have a mini solo naval con on the dining room table. 

Newish Ironsides

 I noticed that I have two posts that I have yet to put up on my blog. One was started over a month ago and the other about a week ago. Unfortunately, I have had very little time to do much of anything and they remain unfinished. For the past month or so, I am lucky if I can stay awake long enough to get in a half hour of hobby time at night. So, if push comes to shove, I choose working on stuff than blogging about it. 

My current work in progress is tiny ironclad based very loosely on the US Civil War USS New Ironsides: 

Source: US Library of Congress

From my brief research, the masts for the sails were removed and replaced by two simple pole masts for signaling purposes. It was not very sea worthy and had a lot of mechanical issues. It did participate in the First Battle of Charleston Harbor but most of its action at sea consisted of bombarding forts. 

Here is my take on the New Ironsides:

Just to be clear, it is not done yet. Mine has a flying bridge, the original does not. In fact, I'm not sure how the original New Ironsides was steered. It took me a while just to find its conning tower, which looked no bigger than a garbage can and aft of the funnel. Mine has fewer gun ports and lacks a ram. I will finish it, but I plan to make a New Ironsides II. For some reason, it came out shorter than I would have liked. Measuring in at just under 4 cm, the gunboats that I have made are longer than this thing. Therefore, I want to lengthen it by at least another centimeter. A longer ship will mean I can add more gun ports. I will keep my flying bridge and add a conning tower just to the front of the bridge. I will also add a ram to it. I might or might not add sail masts. 

The Fleet Continues to Grow

 I had my spring break. As in the past, I had plans to accomplish many things, but probably a fourth were accomplished. This included building a lot more ships. Like everything else in my hobby endeavors, I jump from one thing to another. I probably have ten ships at various stages of completion. That being said, I think I have enough built to finally have a sea battle. Of course I say that about a bunch of things. My previous post showed the work-in-progress of the protected cruiser and gunboat below.

Protected Cruiser

This ship is loosely based on the Russian protected cruiser Boyarin.

The differences are the greatly reduced ship's boats, and the secondary guns are peeking out of the bulwarks on the superstructure rather than sticking out on small sponsons. 

Gunboat

This is the second gunboat made. This one is based on the imperial Russian gunboat Khrabri. 

There were some rearrangements such as repositioning of the bridge from the forecastle to behind the mast, and the number of secondary guns due to size constraints. 

Latest ships on patrol

Destroyers

Destroyers of the time period are pretty generic looking. This is a plus because, barring color scheme, they can fit in with any navy. I guess since they are technically torpedo boat destroyers, their initial emphasis was on destroying torpedo boats and the carrying of torpedoes was secondary. I wanted one that took its torpedo duties seriously. So, I made one patterned after a British WWI destroyer that had twin torpedo tubes. 

I wasn't in the mood to mess with gun shields, so I just added blobs of thick UV resin on the middle part of them and quickly cured. This represents the wider part of the gun. It doesn't even have a flying bridge....lazy builder!

Older model on the left.

Several things I have noticed as I build these ships. Not surprisingly, old photos are a hit or miss, often a miss. Ship plans are far more useful but you are only getting a top view and a profile view. Sometimes, I cannot really tell what is going on, especially with the superstructure and bridge. In a lot of ways, photographs of models are the most useful, especially when paired with plans. I've had a lot of "oh, so that is what this structure looks like" moments. They really helped a lot and my increasing level of detail on these ship is due to using ship models as a source.

Game Board

I did manage to spend a day expanding my hex board. I needed to make new sections and paint the underside of the sea hexes a green. This way, I can flip over the sections to make land. 

Sea

Land

The sea side is more unified in color than the land side of the sections. I experimented a lot with different colored alcohol markers. I avoided acrylic markers except to highlight the edges of the hexes. The hex tiles are a thin wood and I was afraid that the acrylic paint would potentially warp the tiles. I tried different glues to put together the sections and the best seems to be contact cement. Super glue works but the tiles snap off too easily, and the glue from a hot glue gun dries way too fast. I have been doing my gluing in my garage with the door open. It helps with the fumes, though Gorilla Glue makes it in a tube form, so I cap it as soon as I put the bead of glue on the edge of the hex tile. 

I think I have enough hexes to a least get a 3' x 5' board done. I will use any extras to build islands, some of which will have forts on them. 

Gun Shields

 Gun shields are the most ubiquitous means of defense for small caliber guns. They should not be that complicated to model them, and yet I find that they are. My previous posts show examples of how I've tried to make them. I have yet to be happy with the results.  Materials used for the gun shield is one factor. Wood splits and thin cardboard bends in ways that I don't want to. Consistency is another issue. It is difficult to make them all the same size. Once you make them, I find it very difficult to try to shape them to look like something more than a tiny cube. Additionally, it is difficult to drill tiny holes that run true from one end of the material to the other.  

Styrene rods to make shields

The gun shields for the above light cruiser uses 2mm x 2mm styrene rods. First, I drill a hole and then glue the wire in for the gun, then I cut the whole thing off. The result is the gun and its shield ready to go. I mark off the length of the gun using an acrylic paint pen, but once I make several, I line them up to make sure the lengths are reasonably consistent. I would like to have the front of the shield to slope a little, but I have yet to figure out how while keeping them consistent. I discovered I had a package of 2.5mm x 2.5mm rods that I will use for a larger caliber gun. That 0.5mm increase might be just enough to modify the shields.

Experiments in unusual materials

Many years ago, before the widespread use of blogs, there was a web site of a fellow that focused on modern microarmor gaming. I wish I could remember who it was because I attribute my interest in modern armored warfare (pretty much anything post-WWII) to the after action reports on his website. In addition to the time period itself, he also showed that it was possible to modify microarmor. One of the materials that he used was erasers (!?!). He used it because it was a material that was easier to carve than plastic, and it had no grain to deal with. 

I tried using the white vinyl erasers but those are too soft and tear easily. Next up the pink erasures. They are soft, but firmer than the white ones. It is easy to cut into them but they don't tear up, especially when you poke a hole in them to push in a metal wire for the gun. 

As a test, I grabbed some old pencil erasures that have been sitting around at home from my kids' elementary school days. 

You can see on the picture above where I cut out the gun shields. Below the end result before painting:

The lip of the eraser had was curved and beveled at the edge. This gave the shield a more realistic design. It also didn't tear like the white erasure did when I poked a hole in to put the gun in. It was more difficult to be consistent in dimensions when I cut out the shields. Also, I glued them down with superglue gel. I hope it holds. Maybe contact cement will work better.  

I will show the painted results in a later post.

 

Ironclad Ram

 This is one of the fastest ships I've built so far. Normally, Friday nights are binge in front of the tv, but  because my wife is having to work late evenings for her company's annual "go live," I have free time.  At least this year, she gets to work at home. Last year, she had to go to the office and there were two nights where she was there until about 2 am! 

The ship is based loosely on the French ironclad barbette ship Marceau. 

Source: William Frederick Mitchell (1845–1914) - (1892).
 "France". The Naval Annual. Portsmouth: J. Griffin & Co..

Before:

After painting:

I unintentionally exaggerated the size and length of the ram. It looks like the front of Greek trireme. I made it out of Green Stuff epoxy putty.  The funnel is taller than Marceau, but that was because it originally was very short on my model and was below that of the ship's boat platform. The reason being was that I was worried that the boat platform would be too low and bump into the side guns, so I over compensated and made them higher than need be. The Marceau lacks a crane, but I was not sure how it retrieved its boats. Also, the ship's boats on the Marceau stick way out over the side of the ship, past the port and starboard guns. I didn't want to hide the guns, so I reigned them in. 

I learned my lesson from the previous ships that had guns mounted in barbettes and used a thinner wire. The Marceau was armed with 17 138mm secondary guns! My ship is armed with 12 secondaries. I didn't want it to look like a pin cushion. 

The other major difference between my model and the actual ship is that like most, if not all, French warships of the time, it had a pronounced tumblehome shape. My ship does not. Archduke Piccolo has a good tutorial on how to build tumblehome hulls, but I punted. Maybe the next time, I will give tumblehomes a try. 

Once again, I got carried away with detail. 

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. 

Little Toot's Tiny Brother

 My son loved having the book Little Toot by  Bernhard August "Hardie" Gramatky, Jr.

Running across the beloved book on my son's old bookshelf, I knew I needed a generic tugboat to service the harbors of the various nations. So, I built one:

It pre-dreadnought days, the tugs did not have old tires for bumpers (technically, they are called "fenders"). Instead, they used braided ropes that they draped across front and sides of the boat. 

It did need a little lifeboat to complete the picture, but I couldn't squeeze it in. 

I tend to get sidetracked on projects, so back to building battleships.

Pre-dread Progress

 The various shipyards across the planet Nauticar Prime are ramping up ship building, though in a rather random unplanned way. Its as if it is the whim of some unseen hand that is guiding the construction of various vessels with no strategic plan. 

The old central battery ironclad Turkanesque and her sister-ship Djinn get upgrades. Sadly obsolete compared to other nations' warships, it is a stopgap until the Sultanate of Metamora can receive the battleships it purchased from Krackovia to defend itself from the Zordanian Empire.

The Turkanesque getting rebuilt in
the chaotic shipyards of Krackovia

The Djinn on patrol at sea

Flush with patriotic fervor from its surprising victory over the Commonwealth of Avalonia, Krackovia begins a major expansion of its navy, starting with several battleships. 

An unnamed Krackovian coastal battleship in the lead
of two other unnamed Krackovian battleships. 

Meanwhile, fiery debates rage on in the Avalonian parliament over the loss of two battleships and several freighters to the Krackovians in what is now known as the Hob-Slobia Incident. Some MPs refuse to fund any new naval projects until there is complete accountability for the incident. Others counter that this is an example to expand the fleet and build more modern battleships to counter both Krackovia and Laramidia.

The Cantankerous along with her sister ship the
Curmudgeon represent the aging and increasingly
obsolescent warships of the once mighty Avalonian navy

Secret interference by Avalonia convinced enough members of the small, but scrappy Republic of Cerviche's government to nix any leasing deal with Laramidia for guano mines. So, Cerviche was not able to procure the armored cruiser Arkandelphia. Cerviche settled for several, overpriced seagoing monitors, one of which is shown below.   

The monitor Cebolla steaming behind the light
cruiser Chupacabra. Both built in Laramidia

 Avalonian diplomatic corps scored another diplomatic victory by transfering several obsolete warship to Cerviche's rival, Escalona. In return they get rights to build a naval refueling base on Escalona's southwest coast obstensively for Escalonia's navy. 

Ex-Avalonian monitor Hobnob now Escalonian  Areias de Cascais