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 KenR: 1/700 HMS Cossack (40 points)

 

Second ship of the week and that's me back on track. I've a couple of Tribal Class Destroyers to do and this is the first one.

This model is the usual 1/700 scale made by Trumpeter and after the Photo etch fest of the previous IBG Models, this has zero PE which is definitely my favourite amount of the devil's work. It's still the same 40 points PE or not !

HMS Cossack had a short but exciting career, first known for her part in the Altmark Incident where she "bumped" into the German Ship and rescued around 300 British prisoners of War who had been captured by Graf Spee. This took place in Norwegian waters (who were Neutral at the time) and Germany claimed that it was a breach of International Law. Pot, kettle, black.

Cossack was involved in the 2nd Battle of Narvik and was badly damaged during an engagement with the German Destroyer Z17 and just made it back to safety. She was then involved in the hunt for the Bismarck, finding the German Battleship during the night and kept it busy until larger ships and aircraft could attack the next day. Cossack was rather lucky in that one of her antenna was shot off by a shell from Bismarck, a few feet lower and it would have been a different story. She was finally sunk after a storm when she was being towed back to Gibraltar after a U Boat Torpedo hit.

Above are the 3 Tribal Class Destroyers to date (2 done pre challenge) and HMS Punjabi is the next ship to build. I reckon I can get another couple of Destroyers done plus Warspite before the end of the Challenge, which will leave me with just 3 more to complete the warship side of the Project.

TeemuL: And Ken delivers, the second ship this week and project is again back on track. Quite an interesting career for this HMS Cossack, nice to read it. Great job again and it is nice to hear there are options even on this project, with different manufacturers and amount of photo etches. :)