Large, Small, and Buggy . . .

I hope you will bear with me as I take a brief detour into the darkness of the far future as envisioned by the likes of Rick Priestly and Jervis Johnson. Today I want to talk about figures new and old, large and small . . .

'Bout that large and small . . . I finally got my hands on one of the classic era Ogryn models. Like all the casts from that period the fit was imperfect, but the style was impeccable. These were dark, lovely models. I love the crooked smile. Next to him is a very early halfling "adventurer", though he's kitted out more or less with standard issue Imperial Army equipment of the day. Obviously these are "old." Now lets take a look at some "new."

I don't generally have much temptation to buy contemporary 40K miniatures, and while these two ladies are both now out of print they're recent enough that they should be off my radar, but they're both quirky and well sculpted. These two in particular seem to hearken back to the pulp roots of Warhammer 40K and fit in well with a Rogue Trader era collection. The Last Chancers seem a clear reference to the likes of the Dirty Dozen and the fine lady in the kilt would fit in fine in Mad Max or Tank Girl. In point of fact, I've painted her up in Clan MacLeod colors. (Approximately the "hunting tartan." The "clan tartan" was too yellow for my taste.) More pulp has been wrought in the name MacLeod than could possibly fit in this blog, and I'd bet more than either you or I realize. (Maybe between us we can come up with a more complete set, but by the Faerie Flag I doubt we'll get them all.)

Gaunt's Ghosts, from whence the lady in khakis and cape originates, also feels like a very nice movie reference. There's a gritty feel to the models from that line that is strangely absent from too much of 40K these days. Since she seems so very competent and we're on a desert world I gave her decent desert garb, though she's stuck with a green autogun she picked up somewhere. (Must be an autogun. Lasguns don't need clips.)

And back tot he old . . .

These three fellows are an interesting mix of Bob Oley pirates failing to follow the lead of a "Confrontation Tech Gang Leader." Confrontation was a predecessor to Necromunda that came out in the pages of White Dwarf. I got this miniature in a mixed batch of pirates and wasn't initially sure what he was. Turns out he was probably the rarest miniature in the box.

Of course as an Old lead fan, I have been slowly attempting to collect the "adventurers." These fellows are all Imperial servants of one sort or another. The angry bossy man in blue was simply called an "official." I take him to be a sort of spoiled planetary governor. The minor nobility of the 40K universe, if you will. Accompanying him are a pair of priests. The gentleman in green was initially billed as an imperial psyker and later became Astropath Yerl. The fellow in white is named Techpriest Schlan. Between the two clergy, suffering the wrath of the rotten tongue, is Pilot Lorgar.

The trouble with the Imperium of Man is that there are so many . . . well . . . not men exactly. Surely not human . . . so many bugs in the system. 

Of course the bugs tend to become more human over time . . .

This fellow was apparently an Imperial Army trooper . . .

But he seems to have gotten lost and joined the cult. (Along with the space eunuch.)

Of course, at that time, where there were Gene Stealers there were often Zoats. I figure they're the brains of the operation. More will follow.

But Inquisitor Augustus can clean it all up . . . with a little help from his friend Ed.

Ed has popped up here in the past. He's a heavily converted vinyl E.D. 209 in need of some love and care, but if something needs cleaning he's your man. I figure one of these days he'll be a very nice objective marker. 

(Incidentally, what idiot decided that hacking up kits and putting them back together backwards with parts from ten other kits mashed in was "scratchbuilding"? It's not. It's kitbashing. Scratchbuilding works from raw materials up, which is to say no kits are harmed in the making of a scratchbuilt thing. Ed here would be misnomed "scratchbuilt" on many 40K pages. He is in fact kitbashed.)

. . . 

But I digress. I hope you enjoy this little bit of stuff and nonsense. I will return you to the wonderful world of Naval Wargaming in the next post, but stay tuned. More Rogue Trader era 40K will pop up from time to time. Maybe I'll even get a game going. Seems to be the thing to do these days and I've had it in the back of my head for some time. (Even ran a one-off where a group of plucky adventurers cleaned up a whole batch of greenskins and stole their wagon to boot. "We got a mule!" said the band's tough, referring to the ATV cum pick-up from Firefly. Indeed they did. No more appropriate vehicle was ever called a mule.)

Thanks for listening space-fans. Talk to you again soon.

Sincerely,

The Composer.

To War on a Japanese Liner

Just prior to WWII Japan had one of the largest and most modern merchant marines in the world. Military subsidies and government support kept the major ship-builders busy constructing fast new liners and tankers by the score. During the war most of this shipping was taken over by the military and subsequently sunk. If you want to game WWII it's instructive to examine the brief but interesting period between impressment and loss. Several of my newest endeavors have been of this sort, including two ships bought from Viking Forge: Asama Maru and Hikawa Maru.

These are two of the ships Viking Forge casts for the Seabattles line; a very nice line of well sculpted models of generally smaller warships, merchants, and auxiliaries. Hikawa Maru is particularly interesting, as she is one of the very very few Japanese merchant ships to survive the war (the large red crosses no doubt helped) and one of the only Japanese ships of that vintage (merchant or otherwise) still afloat today. She's now a museum ship, which is a rare enough state. It's particularly nice to see a ship more typical (and less glamorous) than the Missouri or Queen Mary preserved and open to the public.

The variety of both generic and specifically Japanese merchant ships available in 1/2400 is impressive. With some careful conversion it can be made even larger. To wit, let's look at three merchant ships from as many suppliers:

In the above photo the two models in front of the pier depict OSK liner Buenos Aires Maru (in civilian colors) and NYK liner Asama Maru (in two-tone grey.) Behind the pier is a model of another NYK liner, Hakusan Maru. The three ships are from Panzerschiffe, Viking Forge/Seabattles, and GHQ respectively. I invested a similar amount of work in all three, building masts and adding details to each. (Even the GHQ ship). Each has advantages and disadvantages, but to my mind all three look pretty good together. For the price, Panzerschiffe is the only way to go, but their variety of available merchant ships is not endless, so if you want a more colorful fleet without scratchbuilding it other suppliers are also useful. Typical Panzerschiffe merchants run $3-4. Viking Forge merchants usually run about twice that, with larger ships costing somewhat more. GHQ merchants run anywhere from four to six times the price of Panzerschiffe, thus making up the smallest percentage of my collection. Even so, some of their ships are quite pretty and I'm willing to shell out every once in a while.

In addition to the companies above, C in C also casts some fine merchants and Viking Forge has some in house sculpts, which you can see below compared to one of the Seabattles ships and a different Panzerschiffe liner.

The two tankers at the left are the Viking Forge and C in C models. Both depict "Kawasaki" type tankers taken over as fleet oilers. Both have had masts added. The Viking Forge model (in the rear) has also bee armed and generally militarized. The Panzerschiffe model, foreground on the right, is older work which I did more quickly and with less research or detail, but even so I think it makes a nice addition to a convoy. The escort in the foreground, sold as an "Etorofu" type escort, is another Viking Forge house sculpt, though a much more recent one than the tanker. Their new work is really quite good, fully up to the standards of C in C or GHQ.  The masts are added, but it's a nice little model even without them. The detail is crisp and the casting is clean. (Cleaner, in fact, than most of their Seabattles casts.)

One final option for 1/2400 merchant ships is available through Panzerschiffe. In addition to the ships in their general catalog they sell a number of "merchant groups." This is a sort of "budget" line that seems to be specifically aimed at convoy gaming. Where a typical merchant might run $3, these generally run a little less than half that, though you must buy them by the group. Each group is $20 and most contain about eight ships. (A few have more and one has seven.) Below are two ships from MG-7 next to the VF/SB Hikawa Maru.  These are less detailed ships (and I have added less detail) but even so, they can serve to flesh out a convoy nicely. (And I think if I invested the time they could look quite nice.) And if you want simple markers in which you don't need to invest the effort of painting, these little merchies, like all Panzerschiffe, are cast in grey and could be used for a game straight out of the box.

If you want to specifically model merchants and auxiliaries 1/1200 might possibly serve you better, but for wargaming the variety of models available in 1/2400 is, I think, quite suitable. There's a little something for every budget and every skill.

Winning the War on a Tide of American Oil

Whatever your politics or the state of your scientific literacy it's fairly easy to see WWII as an "oil" war. Suddenly everything was mechanized and everywhere you went everyone wanted a little slice of the oil-pie. It was a war about burning gas: tanks, airplanes, trucks, diesels, ships with bunkers full of unrefined sweet Java crude . . .

Somewhere someone once said that the Allies "floated to victory on a tide of American oil." I've heard it attributed to Churchill, but googling about isn't really helping much here, so I won't worry so much about who said it. The truth of the matter  is, I think, more or less self-evident.

But getting that Texas, Pennsylvania, or California distilate to the fronts where it was needed was a a complex matter, and that's where tankers and oilers come in. Some of the first merchant ships I bought were oilers: a pair of German tankers repurposed to serve as Cimarrons and two Shiretokos, one of which was apparently converted into a seaplane tender (the subject for a future conversion, no doubt.) But these early efforts were remarkably crude and unsophisticated. (And the "Cimarrons" were later rebuilt into civilian tankers.) I've gotten a little better at the game since.

Like most naval developments of the twentieth century, fleet oilers found their genesis in the Royal Navy and matured rapidly in the U.S. Navy. One of the earliest U.S. offerings was a class of oilers named after rivers (as would become standard practice) called the Kanawha class. I've chosen to depict USS Maumee, AO-2.

AO-2 differs identifiably from AO-1 in engineering plant, among other things. Where Kanawha was a conventional steamship of her age, AO-2 Maumee was one of the first U.S. ships of her size fitted with diesels. Not surprisingly, the funnel arrangements of the two ships are visibly different. Maumee carries hers farther aft. More about Maumee later.

Next up we have a trio of Cimarron class oilers from as many sculptors. The farthest, Kaskaskia, is from Viking Forge, though with considerable interference by yours truly. This is an older model that I include only for comparison. Second from the front is Platte, from a casting of a Seabattles original. In front is the GHQ model I used for Cimarron herself. The front two are a little closer to manufacturer's original, but both have aftermarket booms and radars, and the GHQ ship also has new masts. 

If you've spent much time studying auxiliaries, you'll no doubt have noticed that the armament was both inconsistent across classes and quite flexible over time. The Cimarron class is a nice example. Encyclopedia articles will tell you the "class" sported four 5"/38 DP rifles and a Mk 33 FC director. On paper the US Navy wished this to be true. In reality the armament varied considerably and tended to consist of whatever was available and more or less appropriate at the yard when the ships were taken over. (Though I suspect they all did have the FC set.) The careful viewer will note that all four of these are different. The REALLY careful viewer will say that this is quite appropriate. The EXTREMELY careful viewer will tell me where I have screwed up and exactly what each ship ACTUALLY sported in mid-1942. I hope that this viewer is an ordinance officer from the USN in 1942, which means, sadly, that he probably can't correct me anymore. (Which isn't to say I don't make mistakes, just that I hope they're pretty small.) If corrected I will GLADLY fix my mistakes. (Very gladly for vets of the ships depicted.) In the meantime, I'm doing my best. Please forgive any mistakes you see and feel free to offer corrections (with footnotes please). I want them to be right, but I will accept "close enough." (And I confess to certain artistic liberties to make them look better from a scale mile away.)

Anyway, in spite of their varried and colorful origins, I think they make a fairly convincing class. The forward two are beamier and more detailed, but not beyond comparison with the other (after appropriate refitting).

Of course in reality, much more crude traveled in civilian bottoms. Below are two that flew the red ensign.

Well, more or less. To starboard (from the ships' perspective, of course) is a ship I'm calling Inverarder. In reality this was a demilitarized version of an oiler ordered by the RN and intended to be War Hagara that British Mexican Petroleum was using as a tanker. Trouble is, while the model is about the right size and apparent age (it was a Viking Forge collier Mars) the arrangement of the War class oilers appears to have been quite unusual: engines amidships in a three island structure, much like a conventional freighter and not at all like an engines aft tanker. (Or collier.) Oops. Well, ignore that. I was having a devil of a time finding a tanker of about the right size and age still in service in Britain by 1941 (searching the 1942 E. B. Talbot-Booth, Roger Jordan's The World's Merchant Ships: 1939, and sundry places online), so let's just play pretend and ignore the defects on that one.

The ship to port is perhaps closer, but also rather fanciful. She's meant to depict (approximately) a British coastal tanker called Lunula operated by Moss and Co. I was able to find one picture of her online . . . afire and sinking after striking a mine in the Thames. The ship was already awash amidships and going down by the bow, so everything forward of the mainmast is pure speculation. (Given that there was no foremast sticking out of the water I assume she had none, but even that is far from a safe bet.) Still, the funnel colors are correct, and the hull was at the least dark. (Though many things look dark when below clouds of roiling black smoke.)

Where the two ladies above both sank, both the girls below took torpedoes and lived to tell the tale. These are somewhat better depictions of two tankers from one piece of the grandly dismembered Standard Oil, Standard Oil of New Jersey or Esso.

The rear ship, a C in C T-2, depicts a ship called Esso Bolivar operated by an offshore subsidiary called the Panama Transport Company. That in the foreground approximates John Worthington, which served Esso directly. Esso Bolivar took a torpedo in the early days of the war while carrying a shipment of water, which may well have saved her from a firey death. After being hit she apparently soldiered on towards Guantanamo, suffering the indignity of continued shelling until the captain ordered her abandoned. Fortunately, the cavalry had heard her distress signal before the radio was shot out. A minesweeper found the U-boat still shelling the abandoned ship and scared her off before picking up the crew. The next day a rescue party went aboard, restored power, and sailed the ship to Gitmo.

John Worthington was slightly less lucky. She survived the attack, off the coast of Brazil, put in to Trinidad for temporary repairs, and ultimately made Galveston for overhaul, but the damage was deemed to great for economic repair. She was ultimately abandoned and sank in shallow water where she lies to this day.

Thus concludes the present edition of the NIFTI miniature naval gazette. We'll talk more about building Maumee, transporting dry(ish) goods, and escorting these large floating targets through sub-infested waters in the next issue. As always, thank you for your indulgence.

5th Annual NIFTI Fleet Review

Well, it's that time again. Actually, it's well past that time. In point of fact the fleet review has been ongoing now for more than a month, and I'm only now getting around to writing about it. While this is no excuse, life has been busy in NIFTI. Still, without further ado, the Review . . . 

Reviewing the Imperial Japanese section of the fleet.

New Cai Lay Harbor looking south from Bean Hill

Three Flowers steam around the North side of Soeur Trois in the West Bay

A pair of Secrataries patrol the East Bay

I won't spend a lot of time belaboring it, because I want to get down to reviews of new models in the near future, but I want to at least mention it and point you to the new review video:

I tried some new animation tricks in there. All very quick work. Haven't gotten so elaborate as smoke, wakes, or shell splashes yet. These will come another time. But I'm reasonably pleased with the results as experiments go. The animation begins about halfway in. Lots of slow pans of the fleet first. If you are curious, the pieces are my own "Fanfare and Fugue" and "March of the Robot Monster" as performed by some friends and acquaintances of mine. I anxiously await your thoughts.

Sincerely,

The Composer.

Commissions for a New War

A while back I painted several WWI ships for Sabryin Owlfeather: British battlecruisers HMS Invincible and Inflexible, and the German armored cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.

When Owlfeather bought his WWI ships he also bought some later combatants, including one named after the CO of the German squadron: Admiral Maximilian von Spee.

The German Panzerschiff, or armored cruiser, (which looks very much like a battleship you could put in your shirt pocket in this case) . . . 

Graf Spee

Von Spee's squadron encountered a superior British squadron and met its end in the Battle of the Falkland Islands. The captain of the German cruiser Graf Spee scuttled his command after it took serious but non-fatal damage in the Battle of the River Plate. (And in his defense, had he not scuttled his ship the Royal Navy would have been happy to scuttle it for him in short order.) Along with the "pocket battleship" Owlfeather acquired the several British cruisers that crippled her: 

HMS Exeter, Ajax . . . 

and Achilles.

The reader can be forgiven for thinking that Exeter seems to be wearing the white rose, as she's secretly a York mumming as her younger brother, thus I have proposed the nickname "Ersatz Exeter" for this lovely ship. (And she is a fine ship, whatever you chose to call her.)

The takeaway here might be that commerce raiding against a superior foe is rarely the recipe for a long life. But hopefully the models look acceptable. I don't know that I'll ever do much work on commission, as I get far too attached to models I build or paint, but there you have it. I do hope you will be pleased, Owlfeather. And if you want to fight the River Plate, bring em by. If you have the ships I have the ocean.

Industrial Scale

In preparation for the Grand Imperial Fleet Review that's, as usual, overdue I have been working on harbor improvements for the industrial sector of New Cai Lay. This has amounted to building a few new factories and warehouses, painting up some extant ones, and building a new wharf. I've described the painting in plenty of detail elsewhere, so I won't belabor that, but I experimented with some different ways to build the new structures.

Those readers who have been banging around this blog for a while might remember that I scratch built Long Island a few years back. (In this case the escort carrier and not the land-form.) To some appreciable extent I reprised the same techniques for my new factories. (And to a lesser extent also for the wharf.) All are built of balsa, though not all in quite the same ways.

First off, let's talk about the wharf.

This one was pretty simple. At  essence I took a plank, glued some stuff to it, and painted it.

The fun comes in what I glued to it, some of which is itself manufactured. The hawser in the upper left corner is a tight spiral of .01" styrene on top of a cookie cut from a larger diameter styrene rod. Other pieces include small rectangles cut from stock, a pair of LCIs, a stack leftover from some model or other, a boat, and some styrene rod stacked up to look like . . . well . . . rod or pipe maybe. Or even telephone poles. Who knows? Something round and long. 

The tiny factories were a little more creative. For the first one I assembled several pieces of balsa into a rough structural shell. I didn't take any pictures of this on "in progress", but the shell is nevertheless obvious from underneath.

The single biggest problem with my earlier structural project, an administration building, was the lack of roof treatment. 

This I have corrected by adding small plastic cookies from a larger plastic rod as ventilators. The chimney is a piece of square balsa stock.

Of course, a simpler method for building a basic background structure is to cut out a building shape and just paint the thing. This isn't the most elegant, but if you don't put the buildings in the middle of the picture (as below) it works fine.

I'm interspersing my new buildings into the middle of a variety of Davco buildings that are technically the wrong scale, but which seem . . . more or less adequate given the lack of identifiable detail and the wide array of building types and sizes in your average city. So one of my goals is to mix in as wide a variety of shapes, sizes, styles, and apparent ages as practical. The next two buildings are of a more "medium" size, and are meant to be from the same complex. The body of the buildings is a simple balsa block. I added a strip to the top to create a clerestory roof, for interior lighting in the middle of a cavernous factory building, gooped CA onto the things to fill the wood grain, sanded them down, and made some roof details out of styrene: ventilators and chimneys, perhaps from a forge. (These remind me a little of a foundry that was near my childhood home.)

I'd been planning to add all other details, windows and doors, with paint, but I decided I wanted a little more variation, and added am exterior loading dock with awning to the building below. The dock and awning are simple styrene strips cut from a larger sheet.

Here's a couple of pictures of the buildings added to the harbor scene. I plan to keep this all separate in order to make it "modular." The next step is to weather the roads and maybe add some stripes and perhaps find a way to create foundations that hide the gaps between building and ground. (And generally create a more cluttered urban landscape to surround the structures.) This is all pretty quick and dirty, but if you squint a little it works all right.

Work, websites, and piano concerti

My most loyal followers might note that I am, as usual, overdue for the annual fleet review. I am sad to say that this will continue for a little while longer, but do not fear, ships will assemble in the harbor very soon. But first, a bit as to why this has not yet occurred. (After all, the Grand Empress just had her first jubilee. It is that time.)

Ships have lately taken a back seat to music . . . or at least thoughts about thinking about music. Or perhaps more accurately fury at a website lost. For somewhat over twenty years I, your humble composer, have been a minor functionary at the local ShowMe University Inc. I was mostly retained for the sake of hanging heavy things in the air once or twice a year. Well, said University has revamped their HR procedures. They used to purge the rolls of employees who had not worked for one calendar year. Now they do it every six months. One rigger who works twice, or maybe once a year never got the memo.

So I found myself without benefit of the free (though less than completely convenient) web-hosting services I'd enjo . . . excuse me, used for the last eight years or so. I have been reconstructing my website in the wilds of the internet, away from sheltered academic surrounds. In short, I am back. It took some real effort to get here, and there will no doubt be one or two bugs to work out, but I'm back. I may not be completely finished with my U career, since they do still need to hang heavy things twice (or once) a year, but the terms of any engagement will henceforward be different, more interesting. Indeed, more rewarding. And I will maintain my website elsewhere. More fun anyway. I pay a little for the privilege, but I have more freedom and better access. It's hard to complain now that the work is more or less done.

So if you can stand a little music, take a poke around my new demesne. I had long meant to talk about music on this blog and do so only rarely. I even have good reason to do so presently. I'm releasing the first elements of a Piano Concerto into the world on my new works page. This is yet another piece whose thematic material came to me in the shower one day. I like to think of it as Rachmaninov meets minimalism. Sort of. With luck it's one of my more approachable pieces. In any case, I hope that you might enjoy it.

Sincerely,
The Composer