Bang.

I haven't posted for a while since I was busy these past few weeks. The Man Cave walls are freshly painted a cheerful shade of yellow, getting rid of the awful beige walls once and for all. Coco Chanel may have championed the use of the putrid shade for interior decorating purposes but it does nothing for me. Edits for my next book are done, with only the cover art to be finalised. The bookends are done and delivered.With all that complete, I knocked out a quick piece of scenery for the naval gaming set up, in the shape of a massive explosion marker.

Paul Hague's rules allow for critical hit magazine explosions which utterly destroy capital ships, so I thought it time I made a marker for the occasion. 

Bang in progress

Bang done. The unfortunate SMS Weissemburg gets to model this fetching design.

I modelled it in much the same way as the torpedo hit markers I made earlier this year. Strips and irregular chunks of foam rubber were glued together. The process differed when I gave the assembled piece a good dose of spray adhesive, then shook dry, baked coffee grounds all over it. Once dried and stuck fast, I gave it the final touch, a go-over with Krylon black spray. The photo shows it as more brown that it looks in real life. I don't anticipate needing it more than once in any game move, but knowing my dice luck it might well turn out that I'll need two or three more.

Thoughts on Destroyers and similar beasts

Paul Hague's naval rules are focused on the Dreadnought era, which also work well for pre-Dreadnought fleets except when it comes to early destroyers. Light cruisers have record cards showing one box per hundred displacement tons, and since the class at this time displaced around a thousand tons this works out at ten or so boxes per ship record card. However, at this stage of the destroyer's development the type typically displaced two to four hundred tons - scarcely bigger than their torpedo boat prey - which equates to two or four speed damage boxes on the record card. 

A destroyer of this era would carry a couple of torpedo tubes and have a QF 12 pdr main armament if British, or a 50mm up to 88mm if German. Their speed averaged around 30 knots. 

The record card below shows the stats I worked up for the Royal Navy's '30 Knotter' class. I rounded up the displacement to give four boxes for speed, and ignored the 6 pdr secondary guns. 

In 1913 the nine surviving '30 knotters' were reclassified as the D-class in an attempt to get a more consistent naming convention for destroyers. Up until then the method was haphazard at best.

When it comes to inflicting damage I have to refine things a little more. The smallest weapon in Hague's rules is the 4 inch gun, the typical armament of destroyers in the First World War. I lump all the typical pre-Dreadnought destroyer's armament together and say the weapons inflict a total 1/2 point damage on a light ship target (Under the rules only guns of 7.5 inch and greater can inflict damage on capital ships). When it comes to recording this half point damage I'll shade the relevant box in grey or red. Another half point will turn it black and the vessel's fighting capability is reduced accordingly.

I'll probably get a trial game in sometime towards the end of the month. The weather has passed the hellishly hot and humid summer heat and settled in for a prolonged mild spell. It means I can now open the doors and windows and paint my man cave walls without getting fumigated or inviting a swamp into our home.

North Sea chart ~ v. 1.1

A bit of thought over this chart showed a slight modification was in order. I added the main Royal Navy base at Portsmouth and the openings to the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal (now the Kiel Canal) as these would be logical targets for attack or blockade.

Many years ago I read an account of the Hughes and Suffren naval campaigns of 1782-1783 waged off the Coromandel coast of India. It's a nice self-contained project requiring relatively few ship models and a definite time limit for those who'd care to look into it. Feeling a bit nostalgic I searched online for any accounts of these actions, and I happily found David Manley's rules for the Hughes-Suffren campaigns in pdf form. There's a number of mechanisms for campaign movement which I think can be adapted to fit pre-Dreadnought warfare, so I'm going to work on these and see what I can do. 

A Dangerous Quality ~ Book 1 of the Veronica Nash murder-mysteries

A cross-post now from my day job.

Murder comes to stay at the Chesterton Hotel...

Cover art by Martine Jardin

Norwich, England, Autumn 1922.

When Great War hero Captain Sylvester Brooke dies at the hotel where she works, Veronica Nash is certain someone murdered him. She investigates—and plunges into a dangerous case of deception, blackmail, and an unspeakable crime.

A Dangerous Quality ~ Out Now at Devine Destiny Books.

On bookends and such

I'm taking a slight hiatus from gaming related stuff to make a set of these 'fantasy inn' bookends for a customer. 

I'm open to commissions, so if anyone would like a set of these or bookends on any other theme, drop me a line.

Brandenburg-class battleships ~ record cards

And so on to the Brandenburg class, Germany's first sea-going battleships. Comprising SMS Brandenburg, Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm, Weissenburg, and Wörth, the class came into service in 1893, and had an unusual arrangement of three main gun turrets that foreshadowed the armament layout of the Dreadnoughts. The centre pair of guns were of shorter calibre than the others in order to avoid fouling the deck houses. With a respectable broadside of six 11 inch guns, 15 inch average thickness of armour belt and 16.5 knots speed, they could about hold their own against a Royal Navy battleship of the same period. 

Against the wishes of Admiral Tirpitz in 1900 the class was sent in its entirety to reinforce the German East Asia Squadron during the Chinese Boxer Rebellion. Commanded by Konteradmiral Richard von Geißler, they arrived too late to do more than contribute to mopping up operations. They served with the fleet until the increasing numbers of Dreadnought class battleships made them obsolete. 

Ottoman Odyessey

When Kaiser Wilhelm II began to make diplomatic overtures to the Ottoman Empire, Weissenburg and Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm were sold to the Turks in September-October 1910. Renamed Torgud Reis and Barbaros Hayreddin, respectively, after famous Ottoman admirals, they saw service against the Italians (then nominal German allies) and again in the series of Balkan Wars, providing artillery support to Ottoman ground forces in Thrace and engaging Greek ships during the ineffective naval skirmishes at Battle of Elli and Lemnos. A lack of suitably trained crew led to a steady degrading of the ships' sailing and fighting capacity, and they suffered badly in two encounters with the Greek navy armored cruiser Georgios Averof, leaving them in poor shape just two years after delivery.

Even so, both Torgud Reis and Barbaros Hayreddin managed to give a good account of themselves in the Dardanelles Campaign, shelling ANZAC troops along Gallipoli. Barbaros Hayreddin/Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm was dispatched by a single torpedo from Royal Navy HMS E11, which had penetrated the Sea of Marmara, in August 1915, sinking with half her crew.

After the war the two ships were in poor shape. Torgud Reis was repaired and remained on active duty until at least 1933 and endured as an accommodations hulk for another two decades, only being broken in the late 1950s. With that, I believe she was one of the final 19th Century pre-Dreadnoughts left. Two turrets were removed from her in 1925 and repurposed into coastal artillery to cover the Dardanelles, where they remain to this day

 

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.

Old School Naval Rules

Wonder of wonders I finally managed to lay hold of my copy of Paul Hague's Sea Battles in Miniature naval rules.

My interest here is the WW1 rules, which covers pre-Dreadnoughts quite handily. They are old school, which suits me fine since I'm not looking for complexity. The scale is for 1/4800, but can be adapted for the larger 1/2400 without trouble.

Hague divides warships into Capital and light ships. Each type has its own style of record card. I made out a set for the German Kaiser Frederich III class, shown below. 

Once I have a few sets of records made up for both sides I'll play a game to refamiliarise myself with the flow of play.

London calling

HMS London, that is, along with Bulwark, Venerable, Queen and Prince of Wales.

A powerful squadron of London class battleships and Cressy class armoured cruisers patrol off Cape Trafalgar of blessed memory.

Three London class ships were laid down in 1898. Comprising London, Bulwark, and Venerable they completed in 1902. HMS Queen and Prince of Wales followed, being laid down in 1901 and completed in 1904. The latter were more properly a sub-class of the London, being identical externally but with a different arrangement of armour plating. The class served in Home waters and the Mediterranean.

All but Bulwark survived the First World War. Bulwark became a casualty at 7.50am on November 26th, 1914 when an explosion ripped her apart as she lay at anchor in the River Medway. The explosion cost the lives of over seven hundred men and was heard as far away as London. At first sabotage was suspected, but as she had taken on ammunition the day before it was later thought that a defective lyddite shell was the culprit.

At the moment I'm trying to track down my copy of Sea Battles in Miniature by Paul Hague. The book was published in 1981, and has a number of rules sets for periods all the way from ancient galley warfare to the First World War. I remember the latter rules give a great, quick game and think they'd be preferable to the overly-complex sets I have now.

Introducing a random element in naval gaming.

Need I say more?