Now the Neolithic terrain pieces are out of the way, my gamer's butterfly brain has flown back to another subject - my pre-Dreadnought solo campaign based on a Moroccan Crisis-turned-hot premise. I found an excellent resource online in the shape of www.d-maps.com/ . They have a whole range of free downloadable blank maps of locations around the world which can be filled in with details as required. Availing myself of the North Sea and North Atlantic maps, I got to work customising them to my own needs.
And the North Atlantic - currently a work in progress.
I added a grid to both charts. The North Sea grid is (roughly) 96 miles square, that of the North Atlantic 600 miles square subdivided into nine squares of 200 miles. My reasoning behind these choices is that I'm taking the average cruising speed of a warship of this time as being around 12 knots, and the grid will give me a rough at-a-glance idea of transit speeds. In eight hours a vessel would cover 96 miles, in sixteen and a half hours it'd cover 200 miles, and fifty hours 600 miles.
The North Sea map shows the main British ports and bases which the German Navy can reasonably strike at, along with the German bases at Wilhelmshaven and Heligoland. I've yet to add the locations of various ports and naval bases to the North Atlantic chart. At the moment I'm trying to resist the 'mission creep' factor and not make this a global war. My intention - if I can stick to it - is to game German naval attempts to strike at targets in the British Isles and conduct a guerre de course campaign against British shipping in the North Atlantic.
My next modelling session in this project will be to make four Cressy-class armoured cruisers for the Royal Navy. The trouble is, due to the aforementioned mission creep, I'm now contemplating making four London-class battleships too. The class were part of the Mediterranean Fleet for most of their active careers, so it would be reasonable to have a squadron based in Gibraltar to guard the Med.
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