“Oh a life on the ocean waves”

I’ve now completed the second lot of ships in my Prussian naval force, this is an ongoing “Dystopian Wars” project I’ve started with my oldest son Myles. Though naval gaming is not usually my cup of tea I must admit the miniatures are rather nice and I have now had my first taste of actually gaming with my painted Prussian boats, just a small scale encounter battle between myself and my youngest Matthew (15) while Myles ran the rules and acted as umpire. I have to say that the rules appear to work pretty well and even better, I won (hooray!), Though to be fair Matty did suffer “the round from hell” where by combining the fire power of my three Uhlan Cruisers I managed to roll thirteen hits against one of his cruisers, this and a couple of other good rounds for me took a large chuck out of the heart of his force, unusual as his dice rolls are usually annoyingly good, but anyway I’ll shut up about it as this isn’t a “battrep”. Suffice to say I now have a much better idea how to play with my “Germanic forces” (at least against Myles’s Antarctic chaps) probably the easiest way to describe them is to compare them to 40K races in as much as the Covenant of Antarctica are a bit like “Tau” with good long range ability whereas The Prussian Empire stuff is more like “Orks”, “get in quick and hit em’ hard”. To this end I’ll probably paint up my battlecruiser and a couple few more fast “screening ships” next, but I’m getting ahead of myself (again) for the moment I’ll go through how I did my “Saxony” class corvettes.

So after cleaning them up slightly (not a lot really, the castings are pretty good on the whole), they were given a coat of matt black before I gave them a dry-brushing with a little chainmail, then I added the decks in chocolate brown that was then highlighted with leather brown. Next the undercoat for the hulls was applied, this was dark grey the same as last time and then the two layers of stripes were added, these were applied with long strokes of an almost dry-brush, first with pale light grey and then with black. Over this I added some dots in coffee. This just left the tops of the funnels and a couple of other details to add in bronze and they were ready to have their coat of quickshade and a finishing coat of matt varnish.

While I was doing these ships Myles was busy beavering away on his “Diogenes Corvettes” with his ice blue and cream colour scheme, and unbeknownst to me he was also painting up his “Aristotle Class Battleship” (damn him!), this came as a bit of a surprise when he turned up to quickshade them along with mine. I’ll have to pull my finger out and get my battle cruiser done now or relinquish mastery of the oceans to him! However this will not be next week as I already have what I’m doing then picked out and on my table now.

Oh well quite a short one this week, still size isn’t everything they say, till next week, cheers Roger.