Tag Archives: naval

Historicals, Terrain, WW2 Naval

Small Buildings & Tiny Ships

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Progress on my naval project, last seen in November’s A Naval Diversion post. My buildings from Brigade Model’s Small Scale Scenics range and British & German ships from Last Square’s Figurehead 1/1200 Coastal Forces line all showed up before Christmas, but aside from doing some quick and basic cleanup of most of the castings I didn’t do anything with them until after Christmas.

The scenery plan for this project is fairly simple, a set of modular coastal strips. After some experimenting with the Brigade buildings I decided on 4″ wide by 12″ long modules, with roughly 3.5″ of land and half an inch of sea/beach. The base is 1mm (.040″) sheet styrene, which I buy in big 4’x3′ sheets from our local plastics shop, and then half-inch styrofoam insulation for the land on top.

coastal scenery planning
Quick graphic done up in Inkscape to explore options for coastal modules. The left-hand trio were 3″ deep, the right-hand set 4″. Click for slightly larger.

Because I’d never done any scenery this small before, I grabbed a scrap of MDF and did up a quick test piece. A lot of flock and foam foliage is too coarse for 1/1200 scale stuff, where 1mm equals 4 feet, so an average human is under 1.5mm tall! I wound up picking up a couple of extra colours of fine foam flock, and I really like the look I got on my little 3″x3″ test piece.

tiny scenery test
A 3″x3″ scrap of MDF plus various foliage materials and such for a test piece of 1/1200 scale terrain. Click for larger.

So far I’ve done just two modules, but I want to do at least one more full-size module and a headland/corner module of some sort so the coast can end on the table without looking weird. The first module has a looping tidal river and not much else; the second one has a village at a low break in the coastal cliffs and farms outside the village.

village planning
Brigade’s tiny English buildings laid out on one of my coastal modules. Click for larger.


The village has a fair-size church, a small commercial area/High Street, some row houses, and a few other buildings that might be the village school or similar.

village module
The village module, mostly painted. Click for larger.


The river module will be mostly river, mud flats, scrubland, and fields, but there will be a small lifeboat station in the outer edge of the big curve. Just one or two buildings and a short dock.

river module
The river module. There will be a small lifeboat station on the right, where the road comes down to meet the river. Click for larger.

Finally (for now!) here’s a photo of all the Brigade Models buildings I bought. The group of large buildings in the left foreground is SSS-8010 Industrial Buildings, then going clockwise from there we have all of SSS-8037 English Detached Houses, SSS-8007 English Churches (three of those), SSS-8022 English Town Shops in the back corner, and finally SSS-8006 English Village Houses in the right foreground. They’re amazingly detailed little buildings, and should be awesome to paint up.

Brigade Small Scale Scenics group shot
All my current Brigade Models Small Scale Scenics English buildings all together. Click for larger.

More soon as I get into painting buildings and ships!

Historicals, WW2 Naval

A Naval Diversion

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At BottosCon 2019 earlier in November I got the chance to play Warlord Games’ new Cruel Seas coastal naval game, British vs German speedboats in the Second World War. It’s not a bad game, but it’s definitely got some quirks and while the models are lovely, 1/300 (6mm) is too big for naval gaming. The table got very crowded very quickly and it felt more like bumper-boats than anything else.

That said, this sort of coastal gaming with light forces has always been one of the few areas of WW2 I’d consider gaming, so a quick chat with friends and look around the web pointed me to Last Square’s 1/1200 coastal forces, the Figurehead range, and I ordered a few British motor boats, some German boats, a few merchantmen, and a couple of aircraft. I also had a look at Magister Militum’s 1/1200 Hallmark range but decided to stick with Last Square for now.

I was also already aware of Brigade Models’ Small Scenery range, which has intrigued me for several years but which I’ve had no particular use for until now. You can, of course, run a perfectly good and realistic naval game with nothing but ship models and a blue or grey mat, but did anyone really think I was going to start a new genre and scale without doing some sort of scenery?

All of that stuff is enroute to me now and I’ll update when it arrives!

Rules?

Boats, ships, and scenery notwithstanding, what about rules? I’ll be trying out both the brand-new Narrow Seas by David Manley or Coastal Patrol by James Schmidt, published by TooFatLardies in their Summer 2011 Special.

We’ll try out both sets, as well possibly Flaklighter II from PT Dockyard, and see what works for us.

Other Resources

In the course of looking up the North Sea and English Channel battleground, I discovered that the amazing David Rumsey Map Collection has England and Wales, Sheets 1 – 146. Ordnance Survey, Popular Edition One-Inch to the Mile digitally composited at crazy high resolution so you can zoom way in and see what the land side of England and Wales looked like between the Wars. Not much in the way of maritime details like shoals and reefs, but fantastic for getting a feel of what the shoreline might have looked like, especially when you can compare the 1923 map with modern Google Maps/Streetview images.

Also from David Rumsey is a 1922 atlas showing the southern North Sea and English Channel with a bit more maritime detail like shoals, sandbanks, and shipping routes.

If anyone knows of a set of pre-WW2 Admirality charts online that cover England and maybe further, please do point them out. The National Library of Scotland has charts but they only cover Scotland.

The Wildfire III website has a scan of a maritime chart of the Thames Estuary and approaches with Allied & Axis ship losses marked, giving you a startling indicator of the intensity of the fighting, a lot of it shockingly close to shore. Lots of other good stuff there about WW2 on the Thames Estuary, too.

Finally, on a more directly related to the tabletop note, Mel the Terrain Tutor did some terrain for Cruel Seas when it first came out. Obviously the scale will be different from what I’m planning, but sandbanks and such are pretty scale-agnostic anyway… By way of an end to this long and rambling post, here’s Mel’s rather good tutorial video on sandbanks for small scale naval games.