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Sunday 16 October 2022

WW2 Warships

 I have been chatting with Goya about naval wargaming, as he expands his collection of 1/1200 WW2 ships.  This has fired up my enthusiasm to dig out my half completed fleets and finally finish them off.  My ships are 1/3000 scale by Davco.

Over the past few days I have based the outstanding models and painted them, creating two fleets.  The first is German, led by the Battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz, with supporting battlecruisers, cruisers and destroyers:


My second fleet is British, built up around the carrier Illustrious, with Hood, Prince of Wales, the older Revenge and Ramillies, supported by cruisers and destroyers.


I have a few more German battlecruisers to complete as I ran out of long bases and I am awaiting a resupply.


10 comments:

  1. These look nice - and well done on painting the Nazi flags! Do you have rules in mind?
    Colkitto

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    1. Hi Colkitto, Goya and I are looking at a variety of rules. As most of my games will be solo they need to be simple with minimal record keeping. I tried Bob Cordrey's Gridded Naval Wargames rules with some success. We are actually looking at some old articles in Military modelling from 1979 for ideas as well. I will most likely write my own with systems borrowed from others. I will also take a look at 'General Quarters', which look quite good.

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  2. General Quarters is a good staple - and pretty cheap, from Navwar. Or you could maybe try David Manley's Find Fix and Strike? Depends what you are after, but I'd take either of those over what I can remember about rules in old MMs ....
    Colkitto

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    1. Thanks, I will take a look at FF and Strike as I am always keen to tesy new ideas.

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  3. If you have the space I’ll put in a good word for Fletcher-Pratt, I played all the actions from Unternehmen Rheinübung with 1:1200 ships and they all went almost exactly the same way as the historical events. At the other extreme I used Damn Battleships Again (DBA) for my Russo-Japanese campaign (David Manley’s system published in a couple of mags) and found they gave a good fun that was very quick.

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    1. I steered away from Fletcher Pratt because of the size of my playing area, but I will have another look. I like 1/1200 scale too and I have a few ships in this scale, but they look a bit silly on a 6 x 4 table, especially the big battleships.

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    2. Yes space is a must for F-P - I used a local church hall for my games with battleships opening fire at a range of nearly 300 feet. For such a simple system it gave remarkably good games. I am tempted by the Jane's 'blind pin stick' system but never got around to making up the necessary gadgets.
      I did write up both an F-P game and the whole RJW 1/2400 campaign in the short-lived free e-magazine 'The Wargamer's Notes Quarterly' if you're interested.

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    3. CORRECTION - that should read 30 feet!

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  4. Bob here. For some reason I am Mr Anonymous at the moment! I did raise my eyebrows at 300 feet - a long walk to move the ships each turn!

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  5. I am back as Mr Bob, it seems that I had blocked third party cookies, which Mr Blogger does not like!

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