The grand fleet of the Murakami clan

Bit of a showcase post this one as I've been slowly casting and painting ships to do some Japanese naval gaming at some point in the near future and now I have enough for at least one force...Potentially two ;-)

The smaller ship will be going in the catalogue at some point soon but I thought it would be good to get a few done first to show them off.

The flags aren't glued and can be replaced with other clan mon depending on what fleets are chosen. I'm also penning some simple rules to go with them but they will need some playtesting before I post them.

On to the pictures :-)

ttfn

Now for something a bit silly...

I have always liked pre-dreadnoughts and ironclads from the latter half of the 19th century, the Japanese battleship Mikasa being a particular favourite. There's a post lower down about the Mikasa so I won't go into it here, suffice to say I've made a start on a 28mm VSF version.

What's this, I hear you cry, why not a proper version! Well, I want something that can be gamed on and a 28mm version of the real thing would be over 2.5 metres long! Bearing this in mind I started to draw a VSF version over six months ago, using a proper set of plans as main reference (scanned colour reference chart from one of the kits).

These were literally dragged into autocad and drawn over and then scale down to a manageable size for 28mm, although it's still over a metre in length! Obviously the shape is still the same but some elements have had to be reduced or left out to make sure that it all fits.

First off the main hull deck was cut out along with the veneer decking. I'm using veneer as it is an awful lot quicker than laying down balsa wood and given the nature of the model I want it is more in keeping with the style that I'm after.

The amount of detail will be simplified but will still keep the main elements and feel for the ship.

All the smaller guns are from HLBSC (well recommended) and the larger ones will be scratchbuilt. It's taken a bit of jiggerypokery to make sure that even though it is smaller it still 'works' and one of the ways I've been doing this is draw a small selection of parts, cut them out and fit them together; if anything doesn't work, re-draw and cut out again. This way I'm limiting the amount of re-cuts as the drawings can be altered in progress.

The crew are from my Japanese Boxer Rebellion range and I've got about 40 primed and ready to paint...

Still along way to go and the most difficult bit is yet to come which is the lower hull and it's 'look'; as with all neffs you can't just copy the hull shape as it looks wrong so a fair bit of thought will have to go into it.

This is a long term project and I might not do anything on it for a while but I have been pressured into getting it ready for Salute next year... We'll see :-)

ttfn

Some boats...

I've had a hankering for some Japanese Sengoku naval warfare for a while now and with the master for the smaller fune complete and moulded, this is now imminent :-)

First off, I've completed two of the larger kits as the main backbone of the first fleet. The mon is for the Murakami clan who were well established in the Inland Sea.

The right hand sail has been sewn and I intend to do the same with the other.

Below are the pictures of the smaller fune master before it went into the mould, I find painting them helps keep the detail and can also pick out any major defects that would be a sod to sort out afterwards.

I'll probably do four or five of these for this fleet and the same again for the opponants (on whom I've yet to decide).

It'll have a slightly smaller mast, rudder and sail and all the sails on all the ships are removeable for ease of transport.

I've started limited work on scratch building an o-take bune which were the monsters of the fleets, three or four stories high with a castle on top. The model version is about 20" long at the moment.

I'm also working on some smaller craft that could be used for river raids and transporting cargo etc, probably about half the size of the small one above.

cheers

James

Mikasa

A few days ago I got a chance to go and see the battleship Mikasa. A fantastic must for anyone in the Tokyo area (even though it took about and hour in the car to get there, it's easily reached via public transport).

It's in the top three memorial ships in the world with the other two being in Boston (USS Constitution) and Portsmouth (HMS Victory) and is in rather good condition, even though it is buried to the waterline in concrete...

Unfortunately, the shop and guide book (English version) aren't that good considering but there are a English information points around the vessel where you press a button and a chap tells you parts of the history of the ship.

There are also plenty of display boards below deck that have both English and Japanese explanations and you can spend a good hour or so just going through them.

Needless to say, I took plenty of photos (about 350 odd) but the vast majority are for reference and the ones here are the best of the rest. It was surprising to see that they have built a 200 seater cinema in the bows but unfortunately there wasn't anything showing when we were there. There was also plenty of height below decks but with the modern addition of air conditioning and moving through hatch ways I still managed to bang my head four times...

One of the more pleasing things about the Mikasa, apart from the fact that it is an excellent bit of kit, is that is was built in my home town of Barrow-in-Furness and there also might be a possibility that my great grandfather worked on her. Unfortunately there wasn't anyone around to tell :-) There is also a street of the same name and it was only until a couple of years ago that I made the connection between the two :-/

Above is one of the 3" battery guns of which parts are still working and therefore were getting a lot of use by the kids :-) Fortunately it wasn't that busy (being a week day) and there wwe're no tour groups so I was able to get several pictures without anyone in them.

It's had several coats of paint over the years and there are modern additions (air conditioning etc) but you can still almost get a feel of what it might have been like... Almost.

A very enjoyable day out if a bit hot. Needless to say that I will be looking into making a scale version for naval games with the possibility of doing an entire range but a little bit more research into the period and other ships is needed along with popular gaming scales, rules etc.

I'll leave you with a few more pictures of this most excellent battleship :-)

ttfn

A small generic tug boat

Ah crap, it's been to long. And here I was saying that I would get at least a couple of posts a week down...

Anyway, for tonight's viewing pleasure I have a 28mm Victorian tug boat that I've been meaning to do for a while now. If any of you chaps reading this frequent the Lead Adventure Forum (and if you don't I heartily suggest you do!) you will know that I am doing a Victorian sci-fi force of a Japanese colony on Mars. Many troops and flying things have already been done and will get put up here at some point but I have plenty of civvy things in mind to go with the force and this is one of them.

Basic construction is a blue-foam hull with card and balsa wood decking with a card wheel house and plastic tube for the funnel.

The hull sides are from card and took a while as I had to  bend the card (1.5mm thick) and tape it for a couple of days to let the wood glue go off completely. It's not the best way to do it but I was feeling a bit lazy and wanted to get it done. The card was cut off roughly at the bottom following the blue foam and then I took it into work and took a bit more off the bottom with the bandsaw (it was too high as it was). The edging is microstip.

The rear 'hatch' and stowage box are from sheet styrene and perspex with relevant details from microstrip added (hinges etc.).
The figure is an unknown bobby which is actually a rather nice sculpt and was pleasing to paint.

Other little details were added such as the small sand bucket and the ladders to get to the fore deck. Rivets were glued onto the doors, roof and 'boiler' block to add a bit more of a something. I wanted to keep it simple because I know I can get bogged down in detail and not finish what I started. Fortunately, I think there is enough here to look pleasing and to be playable also.

The shot to the left is of the tug with a coat of Halfords grey primer (one of the best all round primers out there I reckon). If you click on the picture itself you can make out the details better. The canvas roll on the side of the boiler block is from Games Workshops Imperial Guard range from one of the tank kits and have proved useful in the past for various projects.

Next was deciding on the colour scheme, something simple was called for but recognizable as a generic tug. In this Google images was my friend and the next shot shows the basic colour design I went for.

The white strip was painted first and then it was masked out with normal masking tape and a scalpel blade was stuck flat to a block to create a constant level to cut the masking tape around the shape of the hull. When doing this a few light strokes are much better than one heavy one because even tough the blade is stuck down (with superglue) it can still drift off line if you're not careful. The lower portion of the tape was removed and a deep red was painted on the bottom of the hull. When this was dry the process was repeated slightly higher up to create the upper edge of the white band, black was painted above this line and when this was dry the masking was removed to reveal an even white line all the way round the hull.

There were some slight mistakes but I left them on as the tug is a work horse and I didn't think the owner would be too bothered by a sloppy paint job ;-)

The deck was painted with Foundry Palomino light and then given several different brown washes to give some depth to the deck. The wheel house was coated with Foundry Granite and washed with a mix of Devlan mud and Thraka green inks again from GW (some really stupid names for their paints :-/  ). It was then dry-brushed with a light grey I had. The stowage box was painted with a light grey, washed with the above and the touched up with normal white paint.

For the rust I mixed a very watery but bright orange ink and used a fine brush to localise where the rust might form. The main hull was dry-brushed with the same light tan colour used for the deck as I wanted to tie the whole thing together and the windows were given a coat of very dark blue with no high lighting because I don't think it works to well. the funnel was given a band of white but I decided to leave the funnel the same colour as the wheel house instead of doing it in more traditional tug colours (tan, red and black) as it will match my Japanese aeroneff force. The chap on the front is a converted Copplestone Chinese general.

The final shot is of the rear and it shows the details off quite well.

I went around most of the edges with a very dark brown ink just to help emphasize  the shading. The rigging (two pictures above) was simply black thread with a touch of thin superglue to hold it in place and as soon as I can get my dratted printer to work again I will print out a Japanese navel ensign just so we know who's it is :-).

If anyone has any questions (because I've been quite brief) then please leave a comment and I'll get back to you. Thanks for reading (if you managed to get through it all). there will be another small post tomorrow about my Hail Caesar samurai and samurai terrain.

ttfn