From MarkG: WW2 Naval ships (72 points)

While my main project of painting up units for the Russian Civil War continues, as a side project I’ve been painting 1/1800 scale naval forces for WW2. I recently purchased “Nimitz,” the excellent set of naval rules from Sam Mustafa, which has motivated to start these. It also helps with motivation to occasionally take a break, and work on another theme, such as these.

Full compliment: Kriegsmarine on the left, RN on the right

These are all 3d prints that I made at home on my filament printer. The sheer amount of either free, or cheap, STL files on the web means I’ve been amassing files for pretty much any engagement I find interesting (many from Ghukek's Miniatures); thus, I have a big bag of further goodies for the Royal Navy, Kriegsmarine, Regina Marina, US Navy, and Japanese Navy still to paint.

HMS Hood and HMS Prince of Wales

Given that nearly each of the ships require a base with slightly different dimensions, I decided to use balsa wood. For the sea effects I followed Ken Reilly’s (Yarkshire Gamer) tutorial on the ‘U-Tubes.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQMlywFOoeg). I temporarily painted on the names, as I still have to print up ship labels.

Bismarck

For my first outing I’ve concentrated on the War in the Atlantic, with the key ships for the Battle of Denmark Straight, and the Battle of the River Plate. Who hasn't seen the film "Sink the Bismarck" and then wanted to wargame it. I threw in the Scharnhorst as well for some fictional encounters between the RN and Kriegsmarine. I’ll add a few more ships for this theatre in coming posts, such as HMS Cumberland, and HMS Rodney. 

Prince Eugene and Scharnhorst

Further on I want to focus on the Mediterranean battles, and eventually early war encounters in the Pacific, such as the Java Sea battles.

Graf Spee

For scoring, I found an entry from the 2023 competition, where Battleships and Cruisers were scored similarly to the effort involved with a 15mm vehicle, so 8 points each (if that is acceptable).

HMS Achilles, HMS Ajax, and HMS Exeter

Normal service with more RCW figures will resume next week.

HMS Hood

The points summary:

9 x 8 = 72 points for nine 1/1800 scale Battleships and Cruisers.

Goodday Mark, what a great renditions of these classic Warships! Believe it or not but when I was a lad I did read a lot of books about WW2 and some of these ships featured amongst their pages HMS Prince of Wales and Hood amongst them. So it's a joy to see them get this kind of high level attention from you! Not only have you done a sterling job on painting the vessels themselves, the bases are top notch to!

 

Cheers Sander 

From TomC: Victory At Sea USN [Maritime] (34 points)

 Ahoy fellow challengers, like the Loch Ness monster, I've been out of sight for a while, sorry I haven't been able to comment on all your wonderful work!

 I at least have a contribution to offer, this week is another brace of ships from Warlord Games's Victory At Sea starter set, USS Northampton and an accompanying Fletcher-class destroyer, both hopefully wet and offshore enough for the Maritime section.

 As a bit of context, the Northampton class, of which this was the lead, were all built in the '30s under the auspices of the Washington Naval Treaty, which restricted both their weight and armament (and which was also quietly disregarded by the Japanese navy). Northampton herself had a busy career, first with Enterprise for the Doolittle raid and Midway, with Wasp at Guadalcanal (where she was lucky not to be torpedoed), then Hornet at Santa Cruz, before being torpedoed by Japanese destroyers in her first surface contact at Tassafaronga. 

The photos I've seen of Northampton in 1942 show a simple single-colour scheme but there's a series of images of Northampton in 1941 in this unusual camouflage scheme with a fake bow-wave and countershaded forecastle. Couldn't resist! 

For completeness, there are some liberties I took with the scheme for my own amusement, the orange lifeboats in particular but also the edged smoke stacks (it's a lot of grey otherwise!). Tangentially, the teak deck is a bit of a guess, I couldn't find many images of such things and I have previously had mixed results from eyeballing colours...

The destroyers in Victory at Sea aren't named, but one can never have too many of them! I'm trying to keep them all distinguishable, luckily the Americans had plenty of different schemes to choose from, this being one of the simpler.

 This makes just over half the American vessels from the starter set, which definitely merits a group shot.

In terms of accounting, although the scale is off, the cruisers are c. a 15mm vehicle for 8 points, the destroyers less so at 6 points. Together with the Maritime bonus, that should make 34 points, otherwise known as very slow progress... onwards!

***

Sadly for you Tom, you are stuck with a minion who is, in general, quite ignorant of all things naval when it comes to historical gaming. I will happily charge into all sorts of new periods, but when it comes to ships from WW1 and WW2, I may remember the names and some high-level info about the battles, but am otherwise laughably ignorant...

All this to say while I love these pretty ships, I have nothing to offer as commentary...although so many seem to come to a bad end. Torpedo in her first surface engagement? That sucks...

Fine brushwork here, and great effect of the water vs. the ship. I have seen people struggle with the names of the ships cast right on to the bases, but you seem to make it work nicely! Well done, 34 points for you.

Polite reminder: please use the labels when composing the post! This helps ensure the data/meta data etc. for the Challenge meets the requirements of our Cthulu-like statistical gods...

GregB 

 

From TomC: Victory at Sea IJN [World Cinema] (34 points)

 Hello again everyone, I hope we're all keeping as well as can be, this hopefully marks the half way point of my Challenge total, so perhaps time to escalate from the stately potter I've been going at!

 Our destination today is the World Cinema studio, those with long memories back to when I previously posted might have noticed that it's been all USA all the way so far. I'm actually from London (the expensive one in England), so whilst more of the same would all have been well and good, I wanted to try some things out with some of the Japanese ships this time from the Victory at Sea starter. Phil did say that ships were his very favourite*.

 

 This is a third of the IJN half of the set, one Mogami class heavy cruiser, the Kumano and one Fubiki class destroyer. The US get twice as many destroyers, so either its Games Workshop set balance or the IJN get the good stuff.

 The Kumano herself had a relatively unlucky career, oscillating in and out of repairs as she variously collided with other IJN ships and was attacked by the Americans, who eventually sank her while she was being repaired in Santa Cruz. 

 My miniature version has had a similar career so far, the cat slapped it off the desk once and then another time jumped on some books which fell on it, luckily only the seaplane crane suffered damage! Whilst the patented Warlord resin might be resistant to cats, the parts on the sprue have awkward attachment points, there's plenty of operator-induced damage on her... 

 One thing I wanted to test was the red script to differentiate these from the US, whose script I picked out in yellow. This works nicely I think (and I would!), so now there are plenty of ways to separate the Fletchers from the Fubikis.

.

 The other thing I thought I could try, since the IJN didn't go in for camouflage, was a directional lighting and tonality to improve the volume of the miniatures: there's always very dramatic shading in the old high contrast photos of the actual ships. So I added warmer tones and highlighting to one side and deeper shading to the other to try and give the sense of a larger entity but I don't think it went particularly well to be honest - glazing the Kumano's conning tower was not a harmonious experience. I did like the additional green tones in the wake at least! 

 You're not meant to have favourites but I did prefer this little destroyer to the Kumano (which felt slightly cursed). There are plenty of photos of these around and they seemed to have differing numbers of stripes on the smokestack which might have had all sorts of naval significance but I thought could be a useful way of identifying them as individual ships. I suspect, because I am lazy there's only so much room on the stack, that one will have no stripes, so it's all downhill from here!

 I came to the conclusion that the bars on the front are meant to be the number 11, which I suppose will have to be a sort of squadron number or something, they all have it!

 I was previously conceded 8 points for a heavy cruiser and 6 per destroyer at this unique and commercially exploitative scale of 1/1800, for a subtotal of 14 points, with a claim on 20 points for the World Cinema studio to take us to 34 points. 

 This should bring me to 142 / 250 points with five weeks to go... I'm hoping some time off work will let me close the gap!

*Exact quotation: "I rank naval gaming well at the bottom of my wargaming interests" 

Friday minion - Yep, naval gaming might leave me chilled to the bone and quite damp, like the worst the English weather can throw at us, but I could certainly be enticed to try a game with your tidy fleets, Tom. You've hit great tones and a pleasing amount of detailing despite the lack of camo patterns. 

Best of luck hitting your target: go, go go!

 

From TomC: Phil's Phriday Phletcher Phleet [Historical Drama] (40 points)

 The Minion Expeditionary Force sent up a flare and so I have done my best to send ships to get in the way help...

 Hi again everyone, only took a desperate plea from our beloved Minion for me to try and get another post in, some quick disclaimers about the title, only two Fletchers, but also one Portland class cruiser, which is what I'm using for the historical drama studio. This is the USS Indianapolis, which, to loosely summarise, was torpedoed whilst in transit, sinking in twelve minutes. The distress calls were ignored, the ship's failure to arrive neglected and forgotten about. Those of the crew who survived were left to the mercy of nature until a flying boat spotted them four days later. Once rescued, the Navy then tried to throw the captain under the bus, making him the only US ship commander to be prosecuted for losing their ship in action during the war in an attempt to cover the Navy's own mistakes. Nimitz reversed the sentence, but it took until 2001, well after his death (in 1968), to exonerate him.

 The miniatures themselves are from Warlord Games's Battle for the Pacific starter set, cast in their resin, and went together very quickly and could have been painted up very quickly if I hadn't thought that the Rule of Cool should prevail and that jazzy camouflage was in order. I must confess that I threw research to the winds and simply squinted at the studio paint scheme, which has had mixed results in the past (I am colourblind and my US Marines therefore have brown uniforms). I did have fun though! 

 I was inspired by some lovely NVA armour I saw recently here with yellow stars and so did use yellow for the ship information as I thought it would aid recognition for when I eventually get around to the Japanese half of the set, I can then do their script in red.

There are six Fletchers in the main set so I thought it'd be worth getting a couple in alongside Indy. There seem to be quite a few schemes available so I'm hoping I can outfit each with something slightly different as they're not named. The above Fletcher was in a simpler scheme to make the home run feel downhill when painting!

This was used as a test platform for Indy, the different greys are mostly Citadel: Dark Reaper and Thunderhawk Blue, Administratum Grey mixed with Fenrisian Grey, and Ulthuan Grey for highlighting. The water was Vallejo Prussian Blue, with Blue Green to highlight, up to white for the various waves.

 In terms of points, I am afraid that there's no precedent for the Victory at Sea 1/1800 scale* ships. I have put forward 6 per destroyer (x2) and 8 per heavy cruiser (x1), as they're roughly a 15mm vehicle or so, subject to Minion's discretion. 

 The location is Historical Drama, Indy is mentioned in Jaws! So, in total, 20 for the ships, 20 for the location, 40 all in.

*I originally gave the scale as 1/1700 - apologies!

Phriday Minion: Tom, glad you popped up to keep me on my toes this Friday. I rank naval gaming well at the bottom of my wargaming interests (though I'll stretch to NebulonB frigates and Star Destroyers if that counts), but you've done a mighty fine job with the dazzle camouflage on these beauties. I think the bright blue sea and picknig out the wakes helps them pop, and the yellow lettering is a great idea. 

20 points seems very reasonable to me, so I have wrangled those numbers into the Spreadsheet of Doom and onto your tally. Thanks for dropping by!