Let's Make a Spanish Flotilla! WH: Trafalgar ship log

[lilljonas]

What will happen here?

I recently played my first game of the relatively new game Warhammer Historicals: Trafalgar, and now I'm about to build my first small fleet. Since it's something most gamers have never tried out, I'd thought it would be fun to post my adventures in this very different area of wargaming.

What is WH: Trafalgar?

The game is about naval warfare during the Napoleonic era. It is a fun little game that is all about positioning since unlike games like WHFB or WH40K, you can't just stop on a dime or easily change direction. I'll try to squeeze in some battle reports later on in this blog, since that would be the best way to explain the game. If you have ever tried Battlefleet Gothic, think of it as a streamlined version of it.

Will there be lots of historical fluff and trivia in this blog?

I don't know anything about naval warfare. You'll notice I don't know half the correct terms in English to begin with. So this will be mostly about painting, modeling and gaming, but I can't promise not too make this educational.

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Now, where to begin? As I said I've never been into naval warfare. When hearing that a friend at the club picked up the rules set, I was cautious to try it out before investing a ton of time and money into it. Nothing sucks as much as buying a ton of stuff and then finding out that you don't like it, so I can really recommend doing it this way.

The first step into the game was to just play it out on a big brown board with cut out plasticard tokens for our ships. We tried out a 2 on 3 500pts battle, and it was one of the most exciting games I've played in a long time. This is kind of a litmus test for these kinds of games: if it is fun enough with just bland markers, you know it is worth investing in the models and everything.

Next step would be to settle for scale and miniatures. Unlike WHFB and 40K, Trafalgar works for various scales. The most popular seem to be 1/1200, 1/2400 and 1/4800: the smaller the ships, the bigger battles you can reasonably recreate. To me the small battles with a handful of ships carefully jockeying for position around each other holds the biggest attraction, so the choice of going for 1/1200 was an easy one. They also more detailed, so I'd get even more of a modeling and painting challenge!

After some digging on the Internet, two manufacturers for 1/1200 stood out. GHQ is a well known maker of very small tanks and other vehicles, but they also do ship. While they look nice, my search ended when I checked the Langton Miniatures homepage. Those ships are just stunning, and the slew of detailed modeling add-ons like signal flags, photo-etched brass sails and the pure variation made it a simple decision. A bit pricey, but the Spanish starter set would be enough ships for most initial games. I added some other small knick-knacks, and waited a week.



And here we are now. A sight that is sure to scare anyone used to a simple plastic sprue of bits that you just messily slap together with plastic glue. Each ship comes in two separate pieces, one with the hull bits and one with the myriad of sail and mast bits. There's photo-etched ratlines (the things that you climb up the masts in), flags, resin sea bases etc just littering the box I got. I'll cover each part as I reach it in the construction phase.



Here are the ship hulls, from smallest to biggest. Ships were divided in "rates". 1st rate were the bombastic monsters of the age, 6th were the smallest frigates and unrated being everything with less than 20 cannons. We have a tiny little Cutter, barely recognized as a battle vessel with just 14 cannons. It is my only unrated ship and I added it to the 4 ship starter set just because it was so damn cute. Next have a 64 gun small 3rd rate ship, a 74 gun large 3rd rate, a Montanese class 74/80 gun large 3rd rate, and finally the Santa Ana class massive 112 gun 1st rate ship.

There were minimal amounts of flash on the hulls that was easily cleaned up. Next up it is time to attach the first piece of tiny fiddly bits and a coat of primer!

Finally, a scale shot because 1/1200 is hard to imagine if you haven't seen it before. The ships, together with an Epic ork and an old 2nd ed Space Marine.

[The Rogue Trader]

Loved your DBA blog and I am really looking forward to this. I am tempted by Traflagar as well, but using Tumbling Dice 1/4800 mini-micro ships!

http://www.tumblingdiceuk.com/sail_steam.html#napoleon

[richred_uk]

Ohhhhh I don't know whether to love you or hate you - I've been trying to persuade myself NOT to buy any of these Langton ships as they look soooo lovely, but I don't need more models, for a period I don't have anything in, at a scale I don't have anything from, for a gaming system I don't own, and that no one I know plays.

BUT they do look lovely, and if Langton/ Tumbling Dice are at Colours in September I can see myself giving in.

And I'll blame you if you tip me over the edge and make them look all pretty!

[Leonathion]

This sounds really cool! Any alternative game is a nice breaker around here, especially if it takes place at sea! Bring it on

[alexh]

I look forward to the progress of this log, I might even be tempted to pick some of those ships up too.

[Intrepid Adventurer]

Holy CRAP! I did NOT know there was a game like this. I am so looking in to this. Thanks for bringing this to our attention!

So what does this game compare to? Battlefleet Gothic? In our despair we're started to convert the rules for use with 'normal' boats. Should we try this instead?

[mrtn]

I'm sure this will turn out interesting.

[GundamMecha]

Great blog, those ships look really fantastic. How will the sails and rigging be done? With cloth or paper or tin foil? Will you try to make rigging for that scale with wire or something?

[lilljonas]

After cleaning up the flash and gluing the back of the hull, I attached the bowsprit to the hull. This is the big stick sticking out in the front. Don't worry, I'm looking all this up on wikipedia as we speak so it's not like I knew that name either. The rest of the masts will be left off the hull while painting until it's time to do the rigging. But since we'll do the rigging from front to back, I think we'll be better off starting with this one attached.



I'm thinking about priming the masts and the sails white, but black will do for the hull.



First I painted the deck. I painted it with a sloppy coat of Bubonic Brown, slathered on a heavy layer of Devlan Mud and then picked out the planks again with a more careful layer of Bubonic Brown. Finally I added a few highlights with a mixture of Bubonic Brown and Bleached Bone.


The Rogue Trader: That looks like a very affordable way to get a large fleet, but as I'm a sucker for detail and modeling I'm happy with my choice of scale. Would be nice to see a 1/4800 fleet though.

richred_uk: I'll do my best to do the models justice, and make your wallet cry.

Leonathion: Considering how relatively cheap many of these games are, it's a bit sad that more WHFB/40K players don't try them out.

alexh: Thanks, would be fun to see other paint them up and compare.

Intrepid Adventurer: It's somewhat of a mixture of Battlefleet Gothic (movement) Warhammer 40K (shooting with armour saves, rolls to hit etc), Warhammer Ancients (Command rolls) and some unique things rolled into one. Way better for the period than trying to convert BG straight off, I'd say. Try it out!

mrtn: Thanks, I'll do my best!

GundamMecha: Langton Miniature ships can be bought with either white metal sails or photo-etched brass sails. The starter pack I bough comes with metal sails while the little cutter comes with brass sails, so you'll get to see both variants. And yes, I'll try to do the rigging, probably cursing like a sailor while doing it.

[GundamMecha]

Originally Posted by lilljonas

GundamMecha: Langton Miniature ships can be bought with either white metal sails or photo-etched brass sails. The starter pack I bough comes with metal sails while the little cutter comes with brass sails, so you'll get to see both variants. And yes, I'll try to do the rigging, probably cursing like a sailor while doing it.

Thats interesting to hear, brass etch is a good solution for something like that. Good luck with the rigging, the fiddly things are often the most fun!

[Killshot]

Great looking ships you've got going. Not a period or type of warfare I am interested in, but I'll be watching this thread with interest. Are you going to mount them on bases?

[lilljonas]

I quickly noticed that holding the ship while painting the deck meant that I was chafing off the primer, and painting the outer hull would be difficult anyway without having something to hold on to. So I finished some details on the decks such as deck guns and the iron bar things, and then attached the hull to the resin bases.



To keep the ships from hovering over the waves I put down a layer of green stuff where I planned to put the ship, and then tried to even things out as best as I could. I'm not really well experienced with green stuff but we'll see how it turns out once it is painted.



Next I started painting the sides of the hulls. I'm not planning on having a uniform painting scheme because a) the Spaniards didn't have one and b) I'd like to be able to distinguish two ships of similar size reasonably easy without having to put name tags on the bases. I'm thinking of painting the ships in various types of red, brown and reddish brown and mostly keep the variation through different colours on gun ports and the stripes.

GundamMecha: oh yes, the fiddly part... the consensus on the naval miniature boards I've visited seems to be that the rigging takes more time than the painting, and I'm not sure if that means that people use sloppy paint jobs or if it really is that fiddly.

Killshot: Thanks, and you'll see the bases in this update. The ordinary ship-of-the-line have 40x75mm bases while the 1st rate ship has a 40x85mm base and the tiny cutter has a 50x20mm metallic base.

[dave3555]

Looking good so far. Good luck with the rigging - it really IS that fiddily to do!

Dave

[lilljonas]

So I finally got a day off from work, it's been hectic the last weeks. When I wasn't sleeping I managed to paint the rest of the stuff of the outer hulls, which means that I'm almost done with everything but the masts and sails. I'm not doing them today since I only have black primer at home, and priming sails black just sounds like masochism in my ears. There's a bit work left on the actual sea too, since I haven't decided how I want it.

I painted each one differently both to be able to see which one is which, but also to try out some different schemes since it's the first time I paint ships. Let's see how they turned out:



First out is the small 3rd rate ship. I went with white cannon ports, and I must say I think I like this one the best this far.



Then we have the "red" big 3rd rate ship.



and the "black" big 3rd rate ship. These were the most important to be able to easily separate since they are just a millimeter or so apart in size.



Finally there's the 1st rate ship, and the only ship I painted after an actual historical ship, the Santa Ana. This meant red and black stripes divided by a thin white line.

Now I'll just have to wait until the paint store opens tomorrow and hunt for some priming for those sails.

dave3555: Thanks, I have a feeling I might need that.

[Schmacker]

Those are cool looking little ships. Nicely painted.

[fluffy05]

Subscribed

One step closer to buying Trafalgar & a fleet or two.

[folnjir]

Great to see someone having a go at Trafalgar. Subscribed.

[The boyz]

Nice work so far lilljonas. I will be keeping an eye on this plog for sure. I'm hoping to give WH:Trafalgar a go at some point.

I was looking at Langton a while ago and although they are a bit pricey, the level of detail on the ships is fantastic. I'm hoping to get a few ships from them at some point, to have a play around with.

Anyway, keep up the good work!

[GundamMecha]

Great to see some paint on these, I really like those sea bases! Nice little touch.

What primer did you use for resin? I usually use Mr Resin from Gunze Sangyo. I find it bonds to the surface really well. A lot of spray primers can have a hard time bonding to resin.

[lilljonas]

So the local gaming store was out of white primer, and instead I picked up some generic white primer. Big mistake. The paint came out very grainy and not at all a good smooth layer. But by now I didn't want to wait to clean the paint off, wait for new primer to arrive and re-spray it, so I decided to see how it turned out anyway.

First of all, keeping track of the sails for four ships is a tough deal. My ships have as little sails as possible, and that's still eleven separate bits of sails and masts per ship. I took great care to keep everything separate for the gluing session, but with the chaos of the bad spray job I got them all mixed up once they were dry. Hopefully I get it mostly right when putting it together, though, and if most people know as little as I do about sails they won't notice.



I really don't like white primer, and it sort of clashes a bit with the hull even after a ton of dark washes. The sails are decent though, and will probably get another white drybrush. I just applied more white on them and then coated them with watered down Gryphon Sepia wash. Attaching the masts was hard on them, the sails came loose several times and as you can see a lot of the paint job will have to be revisited to clean up where glue and friction scraped it off. But overall I'm satisfied and I'm looking forward to doing the next three sets of sails.

Schmacker: thank you!

fluffy05: great, learn from my mistakes with the sail assembly!

folnjir: thanks!

The boyz: thanks, and to be honest I don't want more details at this scale, it's tricky enough to get the ones present done in a proper manner!

GundamMecha: I just used gesso for the resin too. Doesn't stick at all, but additional coats of black paint will fix it up.