Pacific Fleet In Full Glory

 After a long hiatus of never making time for the actual posting part, I have finally managed to sit down and upload finalized, finished, pretty painted pictures of a pacific patrol! (How's THAT for alliteration?)

With a full range of capital ships, cruisers, destroyers, and even a full sprawl of PT boats, I figure I can cover engagements from small skirmishes right up to full on wars.

Here you can see the full effect of my basing technique. I know the blanket is solid black, but on any dark water board you still get this nice luminous layered depth effect to the water which looks fantastic and realistic!

A fun thing about this fleet; it's timed to fit anywhere from 1942 to 1944, so sadly there's not a lot of dazzle camo on any of the vessels, though I have tried doing some smaller elements and lines on the destroyers. All the ships feature the nice dark blue which was apparently standard!

This is probably one of the most accurate colour matches. You can get a good scope of the depth of the water effects. Any ship larger than a PT boat also gets its own unique name! As much as possible I've chosen ships that survived the war, to limit any "but that ship was already sunk by then" issues.

Let's start with the bigbois! Here are the capital ships lined up for my fleet. From left to right there is the USS COlorado, the USS North Carolina, USS Iowa, then USS Essex (CV-9), USS Enterprise (CV-6), and the USS-Independence. Specifically on the carriers, it was fun painting the worn blue paint where so many planes have rubbed the paint. Also fun was painting a bunch of little tiny dots in straight lines...

From this angle you can also see the bizarre, and historically accurate, curve to the lines around the tower on the USS Enterprise.

Also something I always find remarkable doing scale modelling: Holy heck the sizes of some things. Planes are already large craft. Then the Independence dwarfs a plane, which itself is a pocket carrier compared to the Enterprise, which itself looks like the little brother to the Essex! On the other half, the Colorado is dwarfed by the North Carolina, which itself looks like a stubbier version of the Iowa!

Barely visible at the top is a PT boat, which itself is some 80ft (24m) long. I measured out of curiosity, and that is vaguely the equivalent length of ONE of the Iowa's main deck turrets.

For real.. the scales are insane.

On to the cruisers!

Since I'm just playing this game with friends, I care nothing for min-maxing or taking advantage of "better" or "worse" ships. Instead, here's a selection of the various cruisers that saw action in the Pacific during WWII. 

On down to the workhorses: the Destroyers! 6 Fletchers up front, backed up by 3 Clemsons. Most people would picture a Fletcher if they thought "Destroyer", but in-game I do enjoy the sheer volume of torpedos a Clemson can unleash.

And then there's the PT boat patrols. I looked for some time to find the right "number" for a patrol of patrol boats (heh) but could only find units far larger than a single base might justify. I settled on two per base in part to get the most out of my purchase of PT boats, but also because three started to push the base and look too dense.

Seriously though: these things are adorably tiny...

I'm hoping the PT boats will help counter the volume of torpedos the Japanese fleet can put out, and maybe give my opponent some second thoughts about his usual technique of Flank speed into my formation and unleashing torpedo-hell on me.

It bears repeating because it never ceases to shock me. This is a scale-up of the various classes of ships in my fleet and I want to put it in perspective. The tiny boats in the bottom right are the length of a quarter of a football field. A destroyer (two further up) is at least a football field long. Then waaay at the far side is the Essex, which could seemingly run an entire playoff round itself!

...wait, what's that as second from the right you ask?

Hmm, zooming in it looks like just flat ocean... why, what did you think it was?

Sadly the finish of this fleet was accomplished during June of 2020, so I haven't had a chance to take to sea with the fully painted, ready-to-go fleet. When we're allowed to get tabletop games in again, I'll try to take action shots!

Basing Victory at Sea with Realistic Waves

A short while ago, a friend of mine and I decided to start painting up Pacific fleets for the then-digital-only game Victory at Sea (now Warlord Games has released a ruleset. I haven't tried that ruleset so I can't judge it comparatively!)

We grabbed a bunch of miniatures from GHQ, with him taking the Japanese fleet, and I exploring the US fleet. I ordered a selection of destroyers and cruisers that would fit any engagement to start, but of course, being a magpie and rivet counter, that has since expanded to a wide selection including three battleships, three carriers, and a variety of cruisers, destroyers, PT boats, and subs!

Tackling bases was the interesting challenge I wanted to share with everyone today.

I wanted to ensure that I got the translucency effect of water on my bases, had ones that would allow me to grab and move the minis without grabbing the delicate 1:2400 ships, and look good in any photos. I was lucky some time back to pick up a product that offers acrylic paints with texture, and the two specific to this are an ultramarine blue and a pale teal (not photographed):

It goes on a creepy opaque, but dries a shiny translucent blue, and while it was theoretically purchased for pirate models I'll hopefully eventually get to, it worked handily for this!

Step 1 was basing them on clear 1.5mm acrylic I laser cut. I stippled some white on the underside of the base, in a scattered shape that would hopefully look like the churn of a bunch of high-powered screws of a war vessel!

In Step 2 I airbrushed a cone of teal from the aft section of each ship, spreading out and hazing as it went, covering the areas with white painted before.

Step 3 saw the beginning of application of the Blue Deep. The first application was to add a bow wave, and the borders of the aft chop. This was in the darker blue. I used a medium thickness brush that had started to go, so I didn't mind if anything gunked up on it. The consistency is similar to liquid greenstuff, so a rolling shape allowed me to goop it on, and then tease it into shape later with a wet brush.

Step 4 saw the addition of normal wave patterns. I avoided anything too large and distinctive, because I didn't want it to look like the ships were going through intense storm-waves!

Step 5: You can see here the look of the chop when it dries. At this stage, I added the teal liquid in the aft chop. In thinner coats, it doesn't hold a lot of colour, but does add some refraction to light passing through, helping add depth to the chop underneath.

Step 6: To fade the colours, I applied a very watered down layer of the darker blue to the edges of chop, and add more depth to the under-teal paint so it would look like water disturbed and filled with billions of bubbles.

Step 7 (not shown) is to add stipples and trailings of white acrylic to the top of select waves, and to the bow wake, to represent the chop and foam.

As you can see, the liquid paint wasn't applied so as to be opaque. We'll be playing on water mats anyway, and I'd rather have some of that visible through, so it really makes the ships look like they're cutting through the ocean that's already there!

And finally, a teaser pic of the finished fleet! More pics to come shortly, but as you can see, even on black it really feels like water and waves with ships cutting through!