Ironclad Interlude

After a few weeks of travel and being away, I'm back at the blog.  In this post are some photos of the ironclads I showed off in the "Getting My Hands Dirty?" post back in March.

After thinking about it, and some discussion over at TMP, I've decided that I am going to have to base these ships as well.  Compared to the sailing ships, these ironclads are mere slips of metal and I think that bases will be much easier in moving them.   Also, some of the gunboats are easily under 100 feet long, so less than 1 inch in 1/1200 scale.  In a way, it's the opposite of the sailing ship problem; instead of being top heavy, they are so small that a sneeze might blow them away (or at least the resin ones).

Unlike the sailing ships though, these are going to be on clear bases.  Given that Civil War ship operations go back and forth between rivers and deep water, I don't want to own one set of ships on ocean bases and one set on river bases.  While I realize that I could use my ocean mats for riverine scenarios, this is an area where traveling has convinced me otherwise.  After looking at various rivers during my trip to Virginia, one thing I can say is that rivers aren't blue!  Brown, green or some mixture of the two, but not blue.  I'm thinking about going with this mat for my rivers: http://cigarboxbattlestore.bigcartel.com/product/full-river-4x6-plus-230 as it would let me place land on top of it while still having a very wide river if that were to be needed for a scenario.

Below are some photos of the ironclads after they've been painted.  While I'm happy enough with how the two Monitors came out, I'm not as happy with the CSS Atlanta.  I just don't think that I did justice to all the fine details that Thoroughbred put into the model.  For the moment I'm consoling myself with the fact that the pictures show the ship at much larger than full size, thereby magnifying my sloppy brushwork.

USS Weehawken

Obligatory shot with US quarter

USS Nahant. You can see why the different markings are necessary.

Their opponent, CSS Atlanta. The flagpole is removable so she can be the
USS Atlanta as needed.

Even this ship is not particularly tall, as the quarter shot shows.

Toby Barrett at Thoroughbred was nice enough to send me a little extra with the order, which was a 2 gun earthen battery.  So, those pictures are below.

It actually looks a lot better in person.  This photo makes the color look
like dog poop brown.

I tried to make the mud around the guns a slightly different color,
to show it being stirred up by people moving around.
I think it worked pretty well.

The detail is very nice.  This flagpole is also removable.

So all that remains now is to get in a game, and see what we think of the rules I've chosen.  Right now, I am going with Sail and Steam Navies, which appears to be well thought out, while still having as much detail as the old Ironclads game by Yaquinto.