1/2400th Napoleonic Naval Basing

I've been really busy today, so have had little time to spare for wargaming stuff, although I'm hoping to put that right tomorrow. I have had a go at working out some basing options for my up and coming Summer holiday project in six weeks time, which is going to be  the assembly of two 1/2400th scale Napoleonic fleets, one British and one French using the Tumbling Dice range.

The basing system that I've been tinkering with is from A and A Game Engineering's Grand Fleet Actions in the Age of Sail, which use three different sizes of 20mm wide base as follows: 80+ guns = 55mm, 50-74 guns = 45mm and 20-48 guns = 45mm. I really like the simplicity and logic behind this system, which also makes it easy to magnet base the models using 20mm wide magnetic tape.

I've wiggled this a bit so that the Tumbling Dice models fit with sufficient space for a name label at the stern and the bowsprit at the front. I've added a larger 60mm x 20mm base for ships of 100+ guns at the top, lumped the 74's in with the 80's at 55mm x 20mm, revised the 50mm x 20mm bases to include 50's to 64's, and added a smaller 40mm x 20mm base for anything with fewer than 20 guns.

I think this will work with most rules and makes it easier to keep all the fiddly bits of the masts and rigging from being damaged when handled during games. The 40mm base is still pretty big for anything larger than a 16 gun sloop but to go even smaller would just complicate things. The 60mm bases for the 100+ gun ships of the line are also a bit superfluous but I do think they add a little gravitas, given the size of the largest 120 -130 gun first rates compared to a typical 74.