My Shipyard

I've been told that some of my ancestors were ship builders in Norway. It's possible that some of that quality has been passed down to me, at a smaller scale anyway.

I haven't posted much, but each time I post on a social media group about my scratch-built ships, someone is interested in how I built the models. So this will be my how-to post. Follow along as I make another ship.

Step 1: Blueprints

This is easier than you might think. There is a website called the-blueprints.com. First thing is you'll want to head over there. Find the "Ships" section in the database (link). Ships are arranged by classification and country, so if you know what you are looking for, this can be helpful.

For this example, I am going to make the Japanese armoured cruiser, Izumo (aka Idzumo). Click on "Cruisers (Japan)" and we get a listing of names of Japanese cruisers, through which we scroll until we find Izumo. 

Keep in mind, this listing contains all kinds of cruisers from different eras and maybe not all cruisers ever built, so mileage may vary. Also watch the check boxes on the right, they indicate whether the image being called up has top view and side view or just a side view. Both views is ideal.

So here we have top and side views of Izumo. Download the image.

2. Scaling the Image Download

I chose 1:3000 scale for these ships, but this will work for other scales, just insert the scale factor where I have 3000.

Do a web search of the ship and find it's Wikipedia entry. 

In the column on the right, you can find all kinds of info about the ship. For this, we just need length. Izumo is 132.28 meters.

Using a calculator, divide the ship's length in meters (132.28) by the scale factor (3000). We get 0.04409m, or 44mm. This is how long the model will be.

Open an image editing software, I used PowerPoint. Import (paste) the image onto your workspace. Crop the left and right sides of the image to the bow and stern tips of the boat. 

Resize the image length to the model length (44mm in this case). Make sure the image height is locked in with the length so that it scales both directions.

Repeat as desired for other ships. quite a few will fit on a letter size piece of paper. Print the ships.

3. Basic Ship Construction

Cut out the top view. Note where the superstructure rises above the hull of the ship. use the side view to help locate the extent of the superstructure. With these lines in mind, use a glue stick to apply glue to the bow and stern of the ship, leaving the superstructure glue-free. Affix cutout to a craft stick (like a popsicle stick).

Using a knife and the glued-on cut out as a guide, carve the ship shape from the stick. For these battleships at 1:3000 scale, there is generally no need to worry about the thickness of the stick if using popsicle sticks.

With the ship shape complete, use a sharp knife to carve the lines of the superstructure. As it isn't glued down, the superstructure cutout should just lift away (if it did get glued and the glue is not totally dry, it may still peel off using the knife blade and some care). Then glue superstructure piece to craft stick and repeat the shaping process. 

Finally, glue the superstructure to its place on the hull. I use Tacky glue for this. Write name of ship on the underside if doing multiple ships assembly line style. 

We could call this ship done at a couple steps above bare minimum and skip to basing...or we could delve into the land of high-fiddliness.

4. Intermediate Ship Construction (or A Reason to Use Some Special Tools)

Note funnels (smoke stacks) and masts on the ship (see side view). Find some metal or plastic rods of similar thickness. I used some worn out metal anode rods from some laboratory tool my brother uses at work for the funnels and paper clip wire for the masts. Cut pieces of rod/wire to their respective length in the side view plus the distance to the waterline (on some drawings, only the ship above waterline is shown, others show the whole boat, so watch for that). File off burs, bevel one end and flatten the other.

Locate the masts and funnels on the top view paper layer of the model (compare to side view if unsure). With a pin vice and appropriately-sized drill bits, drill holes through the model for the funnel and mast rods/wire to fit. Slowly so as not to split the wood.

5. Basing

Cut a 50mm length of a wider craft stick - mine are 20mm wide - and glue the boat onto it. Write the name of the ship and indicate which end is the front on the underside.

Press rod and wire into the holes, beveled side down. With the base there, they'll stop close to the right hight. Glue if needed. File funnel tops to the same level if applicable.

Paint or stain base if desired. The sticks I used were already blue.

Affix national flag on rear of base and write name of ship. Alternately one might print, cut, and glue name along with flag to the base. Consult underside of base to double-check which end is the rear.

And that's it! We now have a smart-looking model for wargaming.

Edit:

Oh wait! I forgot about the turrets.

Find a cylindrical object roughly the same diameter as the turrets on the top view. Things that work might be a bamboo skewer or a toothpick. a piece of plastic spru, etc. Cut a slice and glue it on. Or cut a tiny circle out of a thin bit of plastic, like a bread tag, and glue it on.

First Play: Quickfire

Another thing that's been on my mind a few years and I have now gotten to the table; some kind of pre-dreadnought game.

Pre-dreadnought type ships have almost a romantic quality all their own as they fill a relatively short gap between fighting sail and the modern battleship. Having been developed during that turn of the century heyday where discovery and invention seemed to take such frequent leaps in so many directions, the warships of the era abound in differences as theories in engineering and armament are tested, built, then discarded. I think it's why these boats fit so well into the steampunk sort of genre, if you're in to that sort of thing.

I looked into buying ships, but I ended up making my own and I quite like how they turned out. Using drawings downloaded from the-blueprints.com, I looked up ship sizes and scaled the drawings to fit 1:3000 scale on a PowerPoint slide (one can fit a number of ships at that scale on an 8.5 x 11 slide). I cut out and glued the top views of the drawings to popsicle sticks, stacking superstructure portions to roughly match the side view drawings for height. Funnels and masts are made up of metal rods and paperclips, respectively. Large turrets are sawed off ends of bamboo skewers or cut circles from bread tags. The boats are glued to tongue depressors cut at 5cm lengths (luckily, some of these I found in our craft drawers were blue). To finish things off, the ships' names are written on and a little flag glued to the depressor.

Three Japanese battleships. From left: Mikasa, Asahi, Yashima. Not pictured: armoured cruisers, Asama and Tokiwa.

Russian ships. Front to back: battleships Tsesarevich, Retvizan, Potemkin, Rostislav, and protected cruisers Zhemchug and Izumrud. 

The 11 ships mentioned in the above captions are all I've made so far, but I wanted to play with them, so I found a ruleset to use online called Quickfire. It looked like the right mix of detail and quicker play I was looking for. 

Initial setup of my game. Russians on the left, Japanese on the right. At the ship scale and the size of my table, these fleets have just come into range of each other.

I got stat sheets filled out and for the sake of easiness I decided to have the boats start single file with the position and approach angles decided at random. I didn't take many pictures or really keep track of much of the battle, so I don't really have an after action report like I've done with other games. This game would take me about a month to play out as I took a turn or two or three on days I could spare the time.

Although I deliberately chose to start with Japanese and Russian ships, I just randomly picked which ships I made, so the match-up seemed a bit uneven when I got the stats all figured out. Although it was six Russian ships vs. five Japanese, in this game the Japanese cruisers are rated almost as powerfully as the battleships and the Russian cruisers were useless for firing anything but torpedoes (which have a range of only 4 inches and even then rarely hit anything).

Mikasa is set afire early in the game as battleships head right and cruisers go left.

Around turn 7 or so, the Japanese boats seem quite organized. The Russians less so, with their battle ships splitting left and right as the cruisers race through the middle.

It's a close call as Rostislav maneuvers to pass behind the cruisers to join Retvizan.

The ships remaining after turn 20.

End of turn 23. Yashima is the only Japanese ship still afloat, but is adrift. Izumrud has had its speed reduced to where she cannot turn, her ability to launch torpedoes is nil. Rostislav has only her primary weapons operational, but is still in good shape for maneuvering. I ended the game here proclaiming a minor Russian victory.

I keep saying, after playing games like this, that I should be using some kind of moral check. I'd have thought the rules for this game would include something along those lines. Probably would reduce the number of turns in a game like this. As it was, I had no other motive for either side than to shoot each other up and that seemed to take quite a long time. Here's the stat sheets at the end:

Stat sheets used for Quickfire. Pretty simple stuff, considering other games I've played or seen.

It took ten turns to sink the first ship (Tsesarevich). The first two sunk were Russian, it was looking bad for them until Retvizan made an improbable hit on Asahi, triggering blast damage that reduced her speed and started fires that caused even more problems next turn. It was amazing how often Asahi was ablaze before finally sinking at turn 17. Turn 15 saw an amazing torpedo hit on Tokiwa by Izumrud, sinking her that turn. It was the only damage dealt by either Russian cruiser the whole game.

Thoughts on the Rules

I rather enjoy these rules. However, I think I would enjoy them more playing against someone who isn't me. There were times I wonder whether I targeted the right ships in a turn, thinking someone else might have acted differently, but I'd just put that into the downsides of playing solo.

An interesting part of these rules is the division in gunnery and armour. If a ship fires using primary (heavy) guns, the receiving ship uses a heavy armour rating that is compared to attackers heavy gunnery rating to decide the hit value needed. The same ships have different ratings for secondary (light) guns, which are compared against a light armour rating. The variety of ratings and rates of fire of the ships is also interesting.

The firing process is different; one d6 to see if the guns put enough shots in the air to do any damage, then if they do, total two other dice and compare to the value needed to count a hit based on the gunnery/armour comparison (on a chart), on a hit total all three dice and cosult a chart to se if blast damage occurs. I caught on pretty good and found less need to consult the charts later in the game. A cool sounding optional rule is for the player to guess the range, then measure to see if they hit (I didn't do this).

Movement seems scaled well enough, it took about half the game for ships to get into short range (which increases the possibility of blast damage and explosions) and over half the game for any ships to get into torpedo range. Moves at the scale I used are measured in millimeters, the faster ships on my table topping out at 80mm per turn. An optional rule is to double movement, which would get ships into short range and the increased possibility of blast damage quicker, might have to try that.

In any case, Quickfire turned out to be a pretty good game. Building the ships was enjoyable and I think they look good for their simplicity. 

Have fun!