Building a Chubby Armoured Cruiser...

ANS Amiral Charner - a small armoured cruiser 
just off the slipway...

A question arose in my last posting: how did I create the 'tumblehome' that features among my Azurian war ships? I hadn't actually considered that point, and, unsure whether I could satisfactorily answer the question even to myself, I thought to myself: 'Why not make a small warship for Azuria - a second cruiser? Take pictures of the process.' Note that my Azurian ships are based on historical French types. The Amiral Charner class seemed a fine choice.

Good idea, though I will admit right now the first picture was done very poorly, worse luck...

The overall boat shape I scribed onto a piece of 6mm thick balsa, then, before cutting out the shape, scribed an 'inner shape' about 3mm from the edge. I also scribed a line about 3mm down from the upper edge (obscured in the pic, unfortunately). Then shaved away the 'upper-outer' bit to create a bevel edge.

In the rather blurry picture, I have cut and shaved out the top edge, leaving the bottom edge as drawn. You will notice the inner line is continued until it touches the outer, before again diverging very close to the bow. The 'bevelling' is adjusted according. The front end was something of an experiment here, as I wanted to create something like the ram-like bow that the French favoured.

The above shows the hull, cut out and sanded (actually filed). Sanding or filing will round the edges and smooth out irregularities caused during the cutting/ shaving process.

The 'elevation' view. The ram-like cutwater is none too pronounced, but that is the way I wanted it. You can see the tumblehome slope doesn't go right down to the waterline. Near the bows the tumblehome is reduced to a vertical sides over a short distance before reappearing just before the point of the bows. The 'ridge' that you see along the side of the hull can be rounded off gently with a file or fine sandpaper.

Not sure what you call this shaping near the bows. Astern of those incised bits there will be sponson-mounted secondary guns. Along the lateral line will be the front of the main superstructure.

Shapes to be cut out for the secondary gun sponsons. In the above picture the sternward pair seem misaligned. Actually they aren't, and in the picture below they don't look it.

Gun sponsons cut from cardboard drinking straw favoured these days by various fast food outlets. Dry run for 'fit'.

Roofing the sponsons by gluing them to thin card, roughly cutting into separate mountings, and, when the glue dries, cutting to shape using the sponson itself as the cutting guide. Note from the pic that I have used the same drinking straw to create the single-gun turrets for the 7.6-inch main guns.

Another dry run for turret placement.

Above: something I failed to do in previous models: ink in the inner areas that will be difficult to come at when painting. I also painted the hull the characteristic Azurian blue at this point, rather than later. I ought to have done the deck as well. Too bad.

Almost finished. Bridge (mostly guesswork, this, but I'm not very fussed about getting the thing exactly right), funnels and masts with fighting tops. Funnels rather taller than they should be, and I have omitted the 'fiddly' bits... The forward mast has been finished; the sternward needs its top mast (a shirt pin). The 5.4-inch gun sponsons yet to be fitted in.

... and here she is, a very small armoured cruiser (the historical equivalent was less than 5000 ton displacement), of the Amiral Charner class. Perhaps I'll add lifeboats between the midships and rear sponsons. I don't think I'll be giving her an admiral name though. ANS Bruix or Chanzy are fine names, as is Latouche-Treville even if the 'e' of 'Tre-' is lacking its acute accent. One of the benefits of building single vessels of a 'class' of several vessels, is that if it is lost in battle, there is always a replacement!

Its waterline dimensions are 9.2cm x 3.0cm (I was rather generous with the beam scale - the original class were quite slender vessels). Using Bob Cordery's Portable Colonial Wargame convention for determining Flotation Points, this comes out at 10FP. A bit light for an armoured cruiser, but not ungenerous given this ship's diminutive size.

Now it just awaits its paint finish.

Chubby Marine Ship-building

Whilst the narrative of the Norromandy Landings - Operation Archduke - is only gradually advancing, I have been somewhat distracted by the desire to round off my Chromatic Wars navies, especially those of Ruberia (RED) and Azuria (BLUE). They have finally been completed, apart from a little bit of cosmetic work. I thought I would include some 'work in progress' pictures - not by way of a tutorial, you understand, but more to illustrate how the ships are put together.

Azurian Armoured Cruiser Dupuy de Lome
escorting a tanker. The book seems to be a suitable 
'studio'...

In the Dockyard - HMS Centurion

Preliminary sketches for the three pre-dreadnought
ships to be added to the fleet.

In the above picture you will see a plan of SMS Radetzky, and Austrian pre-dreadnought of c.WW1 vintage. The thing was deliberately distorted to 112mm length and 46mm overall beam dimensions - scales roughly 1:1200 length and 1:600 beam. However the  superstructures, gun turrets and guns had to be 'restretched' in the construction for 'the look of the thing'.

SMS Radetzky as built. It is now the flagship
of the Izumrud-Zeleniya Navy (GREEN).

Work beginning on HMS Centurion. The hulls for Majestic and Canopus marked out on 6mm thick balsa sheet. Note that, unlike the Radetzky, I have not traced out the hulls as continuous curves, being straight amidships for up to half the ship's length. The decision was entirely arbitrary, just to keep things simple. The bow is pointier than the stern, the curve to the bow and stern beginning 30mm and 20mm respectively. I actually leave a slight transom in the stern that gets rounded off in final sanding or filing.

Superstructure and guns added. The main superstructure is from 5mm balsa sheet. These pieces of balsa were, by the way, gifted to me by a certain 'Evil Uncle Brian' before he left for a dream job in the Other Island. Had it not been so, these navies would probably never have been built.



The main turrets are carved out from 6mm sheet, the turreted secondaries from cardboard drinking straw capped with thin card cutout, and the sponsons from semi-round balsa beading. The main guns are plastic tube from hoarded used cotton buds (I have had chronically itchy ears for over half a bally century! You didn't need to know that, did you?).  The lesser guns are bits of toothpick.

The final gun layout. I usually dry-run the placement of the guns to check on their placement/ arrangement before finally gluing then into place. Lifeboats and fighting tops await their turn.

More superstructure, lifeboats added, beginning of the bridge tower(?). Toothpick masts sorted with fighting tops and slender top masts added. They will wait until the fore and aft command towers have been emplaced (I don't know the correct nomenclature for these elements).




Gradually building up the superstructure, their appearance based upon my impressions of the real thing from pictures. I've placed the funnels upon a small plinth to be placed athwartships behind the main command tower.







The final touches. The forward mast is really too tall, and the fighting top ought to be below the height of the funnels, but I have decided to leave it the way it is.

Finishing off the fleets...

Azurian battleships Suffren (left) and Republique, construction complete, and with their dockyard undercoat finish. Close by, two recently built 'C'-class '30-knotter' destroyer torpedo boats from the Ruberian Navy. Below, the reverse angle.

Below, the finished units.

ANS Suffren 

ANS Republique. The rearward mast seems to have been knocked.

Probably the Republique is more cognate to Liberté, having 10x7.6-inch broadside guns, rather than 18x6-inch. Under the Portable Gridded Wargames I use, Republique is a very formidable unit indeed - a match for HMSS Agamemnon or Commonwealth in my Ruberian navy. Had I used the historical ships' displacements as a measure of flotation strength, this would not be the case. But these navies, though owing a great deal to history, aren't really historical.

Ruberian Torpedo Boat Destroyers

Ruberian Navy: 17th Destroyer Flotilla.
2 'C' class 30 knotters and a Destroyer leader
based in 1893-built HMS Havock.

The craft that make up this 3-boat flotilla have been much more carefully designed from the historical precedents. For that I have to thank the fine diagram posted in Bob Cordery's blog about a week or so ago. The torpedo tubes I've had to shorten to ridiculous 'lengths`, but otherwise they look more or less OK. 

H17 (Havock)

Now, the 'C' class vessels are a little anachronistic for my 'period', being of 1913 vintage. But I haven't worried overmuch about 'chronisticism' in these navies. But I wanted a 'Destroyer Leader', and HMS Havock was an early example. But I discovered that my scale convention would have made Havock - or H17 as it was to become - would have made the leader smaller than the vessels it was supposed to lead. So I adjusted the scale: 1:960 length; 1:480 beam. Instead of 48mm length, I made it 60mm.



Incidentally, these small vessels don't look as 'cartoonish' as the big units. But that is due to the pencil slenderosity of the originals. Reducing the length:beam ratio from 10:1 to 5:1 leaves a reasonably realistic looking craft.

C22 and C26

Ruberian Navy

Finally, the last three Ruberian capital ships built a week or so ago:
starboard to larboard as you see them:
HMSS Majestic, Canopus and Centurion

I an unable to explain why, but somehow these vessels look a deal more ... I don't know - dramatic? than my previous efforts so far. Mayhap it has something to do with inconsistency in my designs.

More Ship Building

We interrupt the Little Great War narrative with the announcement from the Admiralty that the Ruberian Navy has commissioned 3 more line-of-battle ships, expanding the fleet to three battle squadrons. These are:

• 

  RMS Centurion

  
  



RMS Majestic

• 
  



RMS Canopus. I used a different construction method
for the masts and fighting tops for this one.

• 
  

The three battle squadrons will now comprise:

Commanding in Chief: Admiral Sir Jno Jellibene

First Battle Squadron - Weatherby Jack, Vice-Admiral of the White 

RMS Thunderer  Devastation

RMS Sans Pareil Victorious

RMS  Admiral Hood  Admiral Hawke (flag)

Second Battle Squadron - Lord Galesforth Mower, Rear-Admiral of the Blue
RMS Royal Sovereign
RMS Centurion
RMS Majestic (flag)

Second Battle Squadron: Royal Sovereign (leading),
Majestic, and Centurion

Third Battle Squadron - Sir Windermere Auger, Vice-Admiral of the Red
RMS Canopus
RMS Commonwealth (flag)
RMS Agamemnon

There is a chronology to these: 1st Sqn 1870s-1880s; 2nd Sqn early to mid 1890s; 3rd Sqn late 1890s - early 1900s. Second Squadron features side-by-side pairs of funnels; 3rd Sqn fore-and-aft pairs. Third Squadron is slightly more powerful than the 2nd; both much more powerful than the 1st.

There will be added 17th Destroyer Flotilla: S17, R21, R30

Of course, there will have to be a commensurate increase in the establishment of the Azurian Navy.  The Azurian Admiralty is thinking of more powerful units than it already has, something like Suffren and Republique, which might be a match, more or less, with some of the more modern Ruberian vessels. A couple more or so torpedo boats will have to be built, too, of course. So the Azurian navy will comprise 7 battleships, 1 armoured cruiser (a small one), 6 torpedo boats (or possibly 8) and 2 inshore gunboats.

A note on the names of the commanders of the battle squadrons. 
Have you ever heard of Sir Cloudesley Shovell? He served in the Royal Navy from 1663 to 1707, rising from cabin boy  to Admiral of the Fleet. He was killed in a shipwreck.
His is a name to conjure with, hence the names of my Ruberian admirals.

 
A couple of ship captains also enter my Ruberian dramatis personae navalis:
Captain Horatio Trumpeter - Protected cruiser Endymion Eurybia
Captain Richard Trevanion - Armoured cruiser Warrior

* * *

Meanwhile - the narrative of the Norromandy Beach Landing - Operation Archduke - is taking rather longer to get itself written. The pics have been uploaded, and one of them labelled; and the landing map also done. It remains to write up the D-Day action.

About the Battle of the Maunch - debrief

 My account of first major naval battle of the Little Great War possibly could stand some explanation as to rule set, game mechanics and issues arising.

The Rule Set:

Bob Cordery's Pre-Dreadnought rule set with slight modifications. Apart from the exception in respect of the Greek Hydra class ironclad battleships, the guns are allocated by ship type, and the gunnery factors standardised for all vessels. So, for example, a Coastal Defence Battleship is assigned older 8-10-inch main armament, and older 4-6-inch secondaries, and a fixed torpedo tube on either beam. 

When this ship is shooting, its primary gun range is 6 hexes, receiving up to seven dice (7D6), modified by range. The secondaries reach out to 4 hexes. 

Discovering the wide variation in numbers of guns carried suggested that maybe the system could be modified to suit. I standardised on the prescribed number of dice to represent the effect of FOUR guns - two twin turrets, say, firing in broadside. Quite a few of my ships - notably the Turcowaz (Turkish) and Azurian (French) feature single-gun main turrets, almost always fore and aft on the centre line. They might well have just those two guns available to fire in broadside. The French ships also seemed to favour two 'levels' of secondary armament, 5.4-inch and 4.5-inch, say to supplement a pair of larger guns.

What I have done is to create reference charts for each vessel giving shooting factors based on Bob's concept, but modified for the number of guns, as well as type, the vessel carries. The following is my quick reference sheet for my 'Blacklands War' navies:

The Turkish ships Turgut Reis and Hayreddin Barbarossa carried six 11-inch guns ('Q' turret with slightly shorter barrel length) hence the bigger numbers. A reasonable match for the more modern Greek Lemnos, which carried longer ranged weapons.

Critical points:

I have modified Bob's critical point for damage to flotation points to one third rather than one quarter (I see I have forgotten to adjust Hamidiye's critical point!). I did this slightly to increase a vessel's survival chances as it tries to crawl out of the battle. This bears in mind that a vessel so damaged has lost a main gun turret (diced for), half its secondaries and had its speed reduced by 1 hex - all in addition to any similar damaged received by 'critical' hits (of which we'll come to later). 

Flotation values:

Here again I have departed from the Portable Naval Wargame and adopted the system outlined in the Portable Colonial Wargame. To begin with I wanted to go with historical tonnage, but owing to vagaries of my early constructed vessels - notably the Hydra class - fell back on the formula:

FP = WxBxCxAx0.5, where

• W = 'waterline' length in cm ('waterline is really just the model's length measured underneath)
• B = 'waterline' beam (cm)
• C = construction: wood or iron/steel
• A = armour ranging from 1 for unarmoured, factors increasing through light (gunboat), medium (cruiser) to 2 for heavy armoured warships. I would like to add to the list a 'heavy medium' armour that would slot in neatly for a linear progression. 1.75 would go for armoured cruisers, say. However, this might have to be subjected to a bit of research. The reason for my looking at this is the recent addition to my Azurian Navy, to wit, the armoured cruiser Dupuy de Lôme. As 'armoured' cruisers go this is/was a very small vessel - less than 7000 tons. I added it just to give my Azurians at least one cruiser, and, apart from a pronounced ram-like cutwater, one of the less steam-punk-strange (and huge!) cruisers the French built.

Azuria's new armoured cruiser: Dupuy de Lôme. The guns
I have slightly arranged into something more conventional:
 the big two being in the centre-line turrets,
instead of the odd midships broadside location.
I've also made the cutwater much less proboscis-like.

Note that the measurements are taken from the model, not the historical vessel upon which the model was ...erm ... modelled.

Critical hits.

The pictures don't show this, but for every six rolled for hits, I drew a playing card to determine specific critical damage, according to the diagram 

What I forgot to do was to look up my... 

List of gunnery effects:

These are ideas based somewhat upon the Gridded Naval Wargames chapter, 'Mimi and Toutou Go Forth'.

When determining gunnery effects, only '5' and '6' count for hits.  Hits on a '5' count for 1 FP reduction only.  When a '6' is rolled, the target's FP is also reduced by 1, but card is also drawn randomly from a standard deck, which will include one Joker. 

Red Ace = rudder hit.  -1FP. Ship maintains present course, or turn, for 1-3 activations (die roll).
Black Ace = screws hit.  - 1FP. Reduce speed by 1 hex.  Cumulative.
2 = waterline hit, bow; -2FP
3 = waterline hit; -2FP
4 = waterline hit; -2FP

5 = waterline hit, stern; -2FP
6 = hull hit; -1FP
   6 Spade = forward magazine hit; magazine flooded to prevent exploding, turret may fire once more only

7 = hull hit; -1FP

8 = hull hit; -1FP

9 = hull hit; -1FP
   9 Spade = rear magazine hit; magazine flooded to prevent exploding, turret may fire once more only
10 = funnel hit
   Red 10 = -1FP. Forward funnel hit

   Black 10 = -1FP. Rear funnel hit 
   (if more funnels than 2, determine by dice roll)
   When all funnels hit, speed reduced by 1 grid area.

J = -1FP. Secondary armament hit.  See diagram and descriptions above.  If secondary armament arranged differently, the hit may be determined by dice roll.  Effects reduced by percentage basis. 
Q = -1FP. Primary armament hit.  See diagram and descriptions above.  One may choose to take the effect by gun rather than by turret as a whole, as earlier suggested.

Red King = -1FP. Mast hit, communications with other ships knocked out.  Vessels in formation, stay in formation
Black King = -1FP. Bridge hit.  Steering compromised, ship maintains course for 1-6 activations.  If it turned during the turn, it must continue turning in the same direction for remaining activations.  If shooting during the turn, must continue shooting at the same target, if available, otherwise, cease shooting.
Joker = Magazine hit, not flooded in time, causing a catastrophic explosion.  Ship sunk.

Failure to refer to this led, when a 6 or 9 was rolled, rolling a for a 6 to determine whether the magazine exploded. Two ships were lost to that cause, though it has to be admitted, they were doomed anyway.

Now we come to the vexed issue of ...

Torpedoes.

My thanks go to readers who offered their comments and observations on this topic. Early on I tended to misunderstand what the rule set actually intended to convey. Even now I'm not sure I've got it right. But it seemed to me that in game terms it paid to handle the torpedo boats boldly, get tore in and blaze away. 

The original rule set rolled 3 dice for a single torpedo, for each a 4 or 5 causing 1FP or damage, and a 6 causing 2FP of damage. Such an attack would strike 7 times out of 8, the damage varying from 1FP to as many as 6FP were the 3D6 to yield 3 sixes. The statistical expectation would be 2FP of damage for any given torpedo attack. For a long time I have been inclined to reduce the odds of scoring a hit, but increasing the effect for any hit scored.

First off, the boat had to survive the incoming fire for that turn before launching - my own modification to the original rule set. But, having done so - which turned out to be nearly always for a torpedo boat's first run - the torpedo hit only on a 6. Even so it still had better than a 40% chance of scoring a hit (the extra sixes, if rolled, simply added to the damage). For each six rolled, a further D6 roll determined the FP damage. Further, all torpedo hits counted as critical, and a card drawn to determine what.

The battle at its height. Of 5 torpedo attacks
(green dice) three score hits! RMSS Sans Pareil and 
Thunderer take very serious damage: 6 and 4FP
respectively.

Now, I quite liked this modified system, which featured in my recent battles, but it still seemed to me even so to favour torpedo attacks unduly, even if I didn't allow - an arbitrary ruling, I acknowledge - a vessel to fire torpedoes in successive turns.

I have a feeling, though, that Bob might accidentally have offered a solution to my difficulty in his 'Belle Epoch' naval war game. 'Accidentally'? I simply misread it! But here's the scheme I inferred.

Torpedoes still have a range of 3, but, at 1 hex range, and with the target broadside on, you get 2D6; at 2 or 3 hexes, and/or target end on, you get 1D6.
A six is required to score a hit. If 2 sixes are rolled, it still counts as a single torpedo hit, but damage dice are still rolled for both, and a card is drawn (with replacement) for both.
For 6 rolled on the torpedo dice, take 2FP damage, plus a D6 'damage dice' is rolled, the sum (2+1D6) is the FP damage to the target. It seemed to me that a damage score of 1 or 2 pretty trivial for a torpedo attack, hence the minimum of 3FP damage. 

At some point, I will give this scheme a play test. If it turns out to be a frost, I can always go back to the system I have used for this and the previous naval actions!

A target for torpedoes: a brand new freighter

Keeping a Battle Log.

I really ought to have kept a better one. I have done in the past. This time I kept an event log, but not a time log. That rather limited its use as a guide to recalling and recounting events.

The ill-kept log at the end of the action. 
The 'what happened' is all there, but the 'when happened'
... not so much

Log of 2nd Battle Squadron. The sketch map was made
 for a post battle aide memoire.

The Arrival of 2nd Battle Squadron.

This was entirely fortuitous, and not in a way that redounded to the benefit of David Doughty, Vice-Admiral of the White. From move 2 I diced for the arrival of 2nd Battle Squadron from the north edge of the table, keeping in mind that they should be no closer than extreme range of the old 12-inch guns (6 hexes).  I would have liked a greater separation, but the table's dimensions, and limitations of 'scrolling' the battle table, determined the parameters.

At any rate, the dice had to show a '6' to signal the entry of 2nd Battle Squadron into the action. Sure enough, it must have taken 7 or 8 turns before this '6' turned up, by which time, almost nothing was left of 1st Battle Squadron.

Now, the classic procedure is progressively to increase the odds with each passing move - requiring a 5-6 on the second turn, 4-5-6 on the third, and so on. This is OK if you want to be near certain that the event you want will occur within 4 moves of starting the rolls.

2nd Battle Squadron fights off enemy torpedo boats

I prefer to keep things uncertain.

There was close to a 50-50 chance the Jellibene would show sometime in the first 4 turns. Had he done so, the Azurians would almost certainly have been driven off for little cost to Ruberia. But suppose he was still so far distant when 1st Battle Squadron had been totally defeated. It was still just possible he could have intercepted the Azurian fleet before it reached a point at which it could do some serious damage to the invasion fleet, bearing in mind that there were two light warships escorting the transports and barges, and the armoured cruiser Warrior was close by as well (this will become clearer when I recount the D-Day landings). It ought also be borne in mind that the first wave of troops had landed, but with sea-going transports at the bottom of the sea or beached, they would not have got off again.

By creating this level of uncertainty, a whole range of possibilities came into being, of which the actual outcome lay fairly close to the middle.

Next time:The Landing

The latest additions to my Chubby 
Marine inventory