I realised the other day that, aside from a fourth shell splash marker, I had nothing to indicate when a ship was Shattered in Broadside and Ram, or in other words, when it was in the process of actually sinking. I thought it would be a nice touch to have some sort of specific marker for this, so considered chopping up a couple of models to make sinking ships and floating flotsam. While I may still do this, it would actually be quite an expensive way to go about it and would also mean a fair bit of modelling and painting, so I had an idea for something less time consuming.
There is a pack of ships boats (ASN15) in the Napoleonic range which includes bases with twin longboats and single longboats, of which I just happened to have a set. I picked out the single boat bases and will glue them to 2mm laser cut mdf circles or squares, then paint them up as markers, with additional use for cutting out or amphibious landing scenarios. In their primary role, however, they will make excellent 'abandon ship' markers that I can place next to a sinking ship rather than just adding a fourth shell splash. I quite like this idea and it won't take so long to do!
Should be good. A year or so back I made some resin castings of my scratch-built model ships, not all of which came out right. Once I painted and mounted them on clear wreckage-strewn bases, the hideously mutated-looking results turned out just fine to represent shattered and sinking vessels. A quick method of making a mold is to use silicone caulking, Sculpey, plasticene or similar modeling medium. Press the stems and sterns of a model into it at an angle then use resin or even plaster of Paris to create a molding.
ReplyDeleteI must get some packs of those ships' boats, useful for all periods. I made some generic damage markers for the age of sail using hacked up old bits of mast/sails mounted on small round bases with a sea texture.
ReplyDeleteI'll be doing something like that at some point but this is a quick fix for the meantime. Great ideas.
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