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.

Little Great War - Azuria's latest battleship

Azurian pre-Dreadnought Chevalier Rouge...

Seeing Bob Cordery's Chris van Allsberg style picture of a generic French pre-Dreadnought battleship, I found it hard to resist the thought actually of making one. Not overfond of resisting temptation, I succumbed, with this result.

... or it might be Chevalier Blanc...

It looks vaguely similar to the slightly larger Carnot, also part of the Azurian fleet. It now has five capital ships, seen in line astern in the picture below: Charlemagne, Carnot, Chevalier Rouge, Hoche and Amiral Duperre.

Azurian capital ships in line ahead

Now, for the purposes of the Little Great War, I will be doubling up on the Azurian Fleet, there being, in fact, two: The Western Oceanic Fleet, and the Mesogesean Sea Fleet. It was the latter that got itself entangled with the Hellenic navy, for the loss of Amiral Duperre and two torpedo boats. The Oceanic Fleet's capital ships are to be named Gaulois, Charles Martel, Chevalier Blanc, Marceau and Amiral Ganteaume.

The Azurian fleet also features a couple of 'flatiron' gunboats of the Acheron class. Two are attached to each fleet: Acheron and Cocyte with the Mesogesean, and Phlegeton and Styx with the Oceanic. 

Two 'flatiron gunboats' Acheron and Cocyte...
They might be badly needed to repel a large scale amphibious landing...

This rather makes the Azurian navy larger in campaign terms than the Ruberian, although the latter does have the odd unit on detached service, e.g. RMS Blunderer in the Gulf of Parthia, and the gunboat Shoofly operating in Medifluvia. Separated by the while Iberian Peninsula, there will be little in the way of the one reinforcing the other. Probably. Furthermore, the Hellenic Navy will now be a handful for the Azurian to deal with - and the Turcowaz allies of the Azurians have the powerful units of the small Izumrud-Zelenian navy to worry about.

The gunboats, I admit, are overscale, but that was partly deliberate. Even so, with the fighting 'stats' according, they would be no match for, say, the Ruberian protected cruiser Endymion, the least powerful of Ruberian fighting ships. 

At the moment, with war about to break out between Ruberia and Azuria, a whole deal of planning is happening in Ruberian High Command at the Anditover Army HQ and the Admiralty. Probably the whole fleet will have to involve itself in protecting the amphibious landing upon the Norromandian Coast, with elaborate deception measures to persuade the Azurian High Command that the main effort would drop an army corps upon the Pas d'Artois, or a Division sized raid might be mounted in the Girondois region. Although Norromandia is closer to the Azurian Naval Base at Finisterre, it is thought that the imminence of invasion would bring out the Azurian fleet, where it could be intercepted and destroyed by the more powerful Ruberian Navy before getting close enough to the landing fleet to disrupt or stop the invasion. Admiral Jellibene is looking at a 'bait and clobber' scenario...

Well, that, in very broad terms, is the scheme. We'll have to see how this plays out...

Meanwhile - my apologies for the lengthy hiatus. Several reasons, for this, one being a week-long visit to see daughter and growing family in Queensland. Far from a vacation - little Eva was born the morning after our arrival (three days ahead of schedule, which was probably just as well!). Also problems with our house lighting that began before we left, and had to wait upon our return before they could be fully resolved. But I can't say the old umpty-poo has been up to much for several months, now. I've been 'finishing off' elements of my War of the Imperial Succession armies, some of which work in progress I posted two months back.

I've plenty of projects to engage my interest - it is a puzzle to me sometimes why it is so hard actually to set up a table, or to write something on this blog. I guess I'll never really know...
 

More Chromatic Wars Armies...

 

Here are the other belligerents in the Great Little War (Little Great War) about to break out.

The Turcowaz (TURQUOISE) - less its cavalry

Turcowaz: 3 small Divisions of regulars; 3 larger 
Divsions of bashi-bazouk, backed by artillery and machine guns.

Army of Izumrud-Zelenia: 4 infantry Divisions, 
and 2 Divisions of light cavalry. Somehow the weak 
Turcowaz cavalry brigade has snuck into this picture.

Izumrud-Zeleniya.

The Turcowaz is substantially the larger army, but will have a column of Ruberian troops to contend with at quite the other end of the Settee Empire. That could present a problem...

Chromatic Wars Chronicles - Armies

As advertised: the Armies.

Ruberia

Ruberian Army: I Army Corps

Ruberian Army: II (Sangrian) Army Corps;
earmarked for an expedition into the Medifluvia

Ruberian Army: III Army Corps

Ruberian Army: IV Army Corps

And now the ...

Azurian...

Azurian Army: I Corps d'Armee

Azurian Army: II Corps d'Armee

Azurian Army: III Corps d'Armee

 Among the boxes above, the Army Corps comprise all arms, including an integral machine-gun unit.
In addition, both sides may field a small Cavalry Division of 2-4 stands.

As the war develops, the composition of the forces involved will be listed at each encounter. If the Ruberian II (Sangrian) Corps does get dispatched to Medifluvia, the formation will have a riverine gunboat and transports attached.

A World of the Wars

Royal Ruberian Navy: 1st Battle Squadron
and 12th Destroyer Flotilla.

For the last several weeks I have been working on the armed forces for my Chromatic Wars. These feature the armed forces of Ruberia (RED) and Izumrud-Zeleniya (GREEN) on the one side, and Azuria (BLUE) and Turcowaz (TURQUOISE) on the other. The latter countries in the respective alliances featured in the Kavkaz Campaign of a couple of years or so back. The armies - especially the larger Azurian andd Ruberian - have been reorganised into Army Corps. Izumrud-Zeleniya has an extra Division, building up to four.

1st Battle Squadron: top to bottom of pic: HMSS 
Thunderer, Victoria and earlier 'Admiral class'.

But the major work has been the ship building. Here are the lists:

I had to build the Ruberian sea-going fleet from nothing. It now comprises:

• 1st Battle Squadron of 3 early ironclad and pre-dreadnought battleships
• 2nd Battle Squadron of 3 later pre-dreadnought battleships
• 8th Destroyer Flotilla of 1 'S' Class and 2 'R(iver)' class destroyer/torpedo boats
  
• 12th Destoyer Flotilla, ditto
• Protected Cruiser Endymion (Capt. Sir Horatio Trumpeter)

The powerful 2nd Battle Squadron:
HMSS Royal Sovereign (leading), Agamemnon and 
Commonwealth.

Ruberian cruiser Endymion

The Azuria Navy is much less powerful. It comprises:

• 2 early pre-dreadnought battleships
• 1 early ironclad battleship
• Destroyer/Torpedo boat flotilla of 4 vessels
• 2 'Flatiron' gunboats of the Acheron class

Azurian Navy: Hoche (leading), Carnot
and Amiral Duperre

This fleet is based upon the French of the pre-dreadnought era, a time at which its ship designers seemed to be exploring the 'steam-punk' genre of naval architecture. Very weird designs - and I had to find ships that had fewer than the five or six funnels they favoured. I may add a later pre-dreadnought to the fleet to give the Azurian Navy a bit more beef. 

ANS Hoche

An alternative might be to requisition at least some of the 'Hellenistic' navy - at least the French-designed Hydra class ironclad battleships. The difficulty there, is that Helleniya is hostile to Turcowaz, so an alliance there is out of the question. But if France retained some Hydra class units in its own navy, then they could justifiably be added.

ANS Carnot

Ironclad battleship Amiral Duperre

Azurian Torpedo Boat flotilla.

Finally, I gave the Izumrud-Zeleniya two pre-dreadnought battleships. The Ekaterina II is, of course, Russian, and a fine looking unit it looks, too.

Izumrud-Zeleniya battleship Tsarina Ekaterina II

Although the second ship has a Russian sounding name, it is derived, in fact, from the Austrian - one of the last pre-dreadnoughts ever built. It is the powerful Radetzky - match for any single ship in my Chromatic World.

The powerful Izumrud-Zeleniyan battleship 
Radetzky

The Izumrud-Zeleniya Navy comprises:

• Pre-dreadnought Ekaterina II (Bolshaya Katya - Big Kate)
  
• Pre-dreadnought Radetzky
• Light cruiser Elizaveta
• 3 small torpedo boats
  

The last two 'dot' items have been 'requisitioned from the 'Rhumbaba' navy, which is not itself an 'actor' in this drama.

The Turcowaz navy has featured in an earlier campaign, the First Blacklands War. As a reminder, here is its composition:

• 2 pre-dreadnought battleships of the Turgut Reis class
• 1 ironclad battleship
• 1 protected cruiser
• 4 Destroyer/ Torpedo boats.
  

Later, I will talk about the armies, and perhaps make some preliminary remarks about how the war looks to be developing.