Torpedoes Away!

56S Class Torpedo Boat

I wanted to include some 1880's torpedo boats in my pre-dreadnought Italian fleet but there aren't any in the Tumbling Dice range, excluding the much larger torpedo cruisers of the Partenope class, which I have on order. Instead, I've had to hunt around in the other sections of the Age of Battleships catalogue for something I can use as a stand in, with the end result being a pack of the Chinese ABC9 Fu Lung torpedo boat models that I just happened to already have for the Sino Japanese project.

 

Fu Lung as the Japanese Fukuryu

This might seem like a strange choice but the basic hull design was fairly widely used in the 1880's and 1890's, being constructed by the German Schichau company in various different shapes and sizes. As a result, the Fu Lung is close enough to the Italian 56S class to be visually indistinguishable in 1/2400th scale, unless you get your slide rules out and start counting rivets. The only slight difference is in the shape of the whaleback foredeck, but I think I can get away with that? 

The 56S class were built in quite large numbers for the Italians between 1886 and 1887, so spot on for my requirements. I've also got three models spare from the pack of four, as there was only one boat in the class, which means that they can now be repurposed for something useful. I'm now on holiday for a week, so I'm going to get cracking on the painting as soon as I can, once the last of the ships are based and the bases have been textured.