Old Pierre

 Kings and tyrants come and go

I'll stand judged by what I know

A woodsman's life I'll ne'er gainsay,

Deep in the glades and far away...

The barons of England are in open defiance of King John. French and English armies march and counter-march across the land. Raiders strike at village and farm. Churches and manor houses are sacked. Deep in the woods Old Pierre plies his trade and keeps his own council...

 

A spare figure from the Blue Moon range provided the inspiration for this little vignette. The base is an old CD. Thoroughly dried twigs from our garden provide the logs and pollarded stump. Old Pierre's hut is a basic form made from 1mm cardboard. 

 

Gun sites and Splash markers

A little prep work is in order before I play out the Heligoland action.

I decided I didn't have anywhere near enough splash markers, so these are now under weigh. They're fabricated from off cuts of clear plastic stuck in place and made more water-like with copious blobs of hot glue. Markers for the Heligoland artillery emplacements are centre-right. Since this is likely to be a one-off game I'm not bothering with a lot of detail for these.

Along with this I had to buy a new blue sheet for use with naval gaming. I clean forgot to remove the last one before our cat decided to use it to sharpen his claws...

And now for a gamer's dilemma - nothing to do with naval gaming. I've sold a large batch of unwanted miniatures so now I'm contemplating what to buy with this windfall. I should get enough figures to more-or-less finish off my 10mm ECW collection (if a collection can ever be said to be finished...). 

But! As wargamers know, there's always a new period flaunting its gaudy temptations to draw our eye. Peter over at Grid Based Wargaming is running a neat episodic 1917 Middle East campaign. A tough modern Ottoman force, ANZAC troops, Imperial infantry in pith helmets, Lawrence of Arabia, tanks, aircraft, armoured cars. A set of brigade-size rules in the shape of If the Lord Spares Us from Too Fat Lardies. What's not to like? I'm sorely tempted to splash some cash on Pendraken's starter packs for this period and theatre.

Decisions, decisions...

Gaming Cloth Upgrade ~ 40 shades of green

The first go-around to upgrade my gaming cloth is done, and I'm pleased with the result.

The craft paint sticks well to the cloth, and the materiel wicks the pigment far wider than expected, giving a lot more subtle shades of green. I used a thick stippling brush for the job as it gets the paint deep into the cloth. 

As it stands the cloth's usable now, but I think I'll give it another go-over with paint using a sponge to remove and distinct edges and vary it even more.

Gaming cloth upgrade ~ Early steps

It's been a while since I last posted. The reasons are many and varied, but basically Life got in the way. So, now things are a bit more settled, here's my latest project. 

Last year I bought this section of green cloth from the local ReStore/Habitat For Humanity shop for a few dollars. It's seen a couple of games since, but I've wanted to get rid of the totally unrealistic uniform colour for a while. 

I'm not going to follow the mastic/silicone caulk approach used by others. A little experiment shows it'll take poster/craft paint well, so I'm going to do a small area at a time and see how it goes.

Apollo Second class Protected Cruisers

A little more progress with the record cards for pre-Dreadnought games. These are for the Royal Navy's Apollo-class. Under the rules the number of secondary armament guns and any torpedo tubes is halved to represent weapons bearing on each broadside being knocked out.

Technically the class was obsolete by 1903, most of them being laid-up. In 1908 Apollo and six others of her class were converted to mine-layers. I'm giving them a little longer lease of life.

Charts for the Pre-Dreadnought campaign

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.

Going down...

As a natural follow up from the torpedo and fire markers I made earlier, I created the probable consequences - these sinking ship markers, which I made more like vignettes. Top: Battleship. Middle: Light Cruiser. Bottom: Armoured Cruiser. I didn't bother making a Destroyer marker, since I assume they'll sink quickly, plus pre-Dreadnought destroyers are barely-there in 1/2400 scale anyway.

Blimey! What a carve-up! (© Sid James, Carry On Cleo).

The basis for these was a batch of resin miscasts from silicone molds taken from scratch-built ships, which I made to speed up production. The resin was old and reacted oddly with the catalyst, sometimes foaming up and making the castings honeycombed and brittle. Rather than throw them out with cries of disgust, I cut off those parts of the castings which were sound enough, like the bows and sterns, and filed them at an angle so they looked like they were rearing up before taking that final plunge to the sea bed. 

I opted to give the markers a generic look rather than paint them up as any one navy. A spray over with dark grey enamel paint undercoat was followed by a coat of battleship grey, red paint for the below waterline portion of the hull to represent the anti-barnacle coating, and lighter grey upper works. Masts were painted a basic white.

Cutting out discs of clear plastic, I glued the castings to them in a roughly off-centre position. Allowing the glue to dry, I smeared on a creamy mush made of tissue paper, spackle, and white craft paint to represent water foaming up as bubbles of air and steam escape the sinking hull. Once the mush dried, I gave the sea area a thin wash of blue acrylic ink and Future polish, before applying a thinner wash of blue over some of the white areas. A couple of streaks of cotton wool to represent escaping steam or sprays of water completed the vignettes. I decided not to add any debris or boats, since these would be virtually invisible at this scale.

Hopefully I'll get to try out the Quickfire rules over the weekend. In the meantime, since this blog has attracted the attention of a particularly annoying and prolific spammer, I'm afraid I'll have to moderate all comments from now on.

Torpedoes away!

Boom! Why does my torp go boom?

Because I finished the fire and torpedo markers today. They came together as I intended them to, so yay me.

To get the spray effect of water blasting up from a torpedo hit I glued scraps of black-dyed foam rubber to a clear plastic easel-like affair, applying them in increasing size from the top down. Once the glue had set overnight, I gave the foam a wet-brush once over with antique white followed by a heavier going over with plain white. The photo below shows the process at about the halfway stage.

Once all was dry, I tried them out on some model ships to see how they all looked in action.

Somewhere in the North Sea HMS Jupiter and SMSs Brandenberg and Gazelle come together in violent action. After a flurry of salvoes Brandenberg is dealing with a raging fire amidships, but Jupiter has her own troubles. Whilst she was concentrating on the German battleship, she didn't notice Gazelle sneaking up on her until it was too late. 

Bang.

Pre-Dreadnought - The Rules of the Game

After a thorough read-through of the Battlefleet 1900 rules I decided they're a mite too complicated for what I want. They also seem to have an issue with missing sections, particularly those governing gunfire: not ideal. WTJ do produce a basic set of pre-Dreadnought rules called Quickfire, which look more my speed as a solo gamer. The record sheets are easier to produce, too. I'm going to use the rules as-is then add more complicated factors like signalling as I grow familiar with them.

At the moment I'm planning a quick play-through of the rules in a scenario involving a handful of light cruisers and armour cruisers then work up to battleships from there. I already have enough shell splashes for a game, but what I need are some fire and torpedo hit markers.

Bring on the foam.

I cut up a chunk of foam rubber, making a lot of small pieces and three vaguely wedge-shaped bits of increasing size to represent fires of increasing ferocity. A splash or two of yellow and red acrylic ink mixed with spackle plus a dollop of black craft paint later, and I got something usable. The small black pieces are going to be glued in a suitably messy fashion to the two plastic 'easels' on the right. These I made from leftover bits of clear plastic, suitably glued and embellished by a few passes of the hot glue gun. The theory is they'll go hard up against the side of a model so they look like the massive black sprays of dirty seawater and Torpex soot that are the signature result of a torpedo hit. I've only made two such markers, as I figure the odds of getting more than two torpedo hits in the same game move are pretty remote. Watch me get proved wrong in the first game...