The ships and boats turned out for naval warfare and general maritime affairs, in “Fantasy” and “Science Fiction” wargames almost always disappoint me. So many are scratch built, poorly thought out versions of the trireme, longship or cog, designed merely to carry a mob of orcs/goblins/heroes, etc during a water borne version of a standard scrap.
Top: From the original article in the ‘ Practical Wargamer’ by Tim. Copyright WMA. (1); and (bottom) From a 19th Century Merchant guide c.1862 [The Illustrated London News]. (2).
I lay the blame squarely at the door of Tolkien, he wrote what’s become the basis for most fantasy games and worlds, in a pub in Oxford, about as far from the whiff of ozone and the breakers roar as you can get! Most competent Celts and Norsemen would have been straight down to the Grey Havens boarded a decently described and recorded ship, sailed around the coast to the Bay of Belfalas, sinking a few of the Corsairs of Umbar en route and hopped off on the quay in Gondor. Thus avoiding all that pointless wandering around forests. Obvious!
Enough of Orcs
The need arose recently to provide a fantasy/science fiction naval event originally for a small group of novices to the sport of wargaming, but suitable for solo play; and without vast numbers of wizards and such like cluttering up the game. I settled on an almost ‘Victorian’ period game. Steam driven ships, with limited speed and power, with fairly decent guns and some armour.
For quite a while now, 1/1200 scale has taken a back seat with many naval wargamers, in favour of the much better defined and easily handled 1/600 ships, which are around. It took only a few minutes to select a very basic, rarely used vessel from the ‘Peter Pig’ range.
CSS MANASSAS, the little ironclad ram converted from a steam packet by the Confederates at New Orleans led a brief battered existence and few would consider her among the best warships of the American Civil War. For my purposes she proved ideal. Manassas had a ram bow and a small cupola with a 32pdr gun pointing forward, virtually no traverse of course. On her high whale like humped back, a couple of hatches and a funnel were all that stood out from the plating. The 1/600 ‘Peter Pig’ Manassas (Cost £3) stands 1cm high and wide and a little over 6cm long, its in two parts-resin hull and metal funnel. An ideal fantasy ship model on which to base a small fleet.
The company manufactures a range of funnels in different heights. For one fleet I chose funnels of a towering 3cm height, for the other shorter funnels. I added ships boats, a pair on davits for some ships (#13 from the ‘Peter Pig’ ACW range£1.70), a single small boat on top of the rear deck hatch for others. A small drill hole accommodated a jack post aft. That’s it. One vessel I decided to make into an older, more elegant man o’ war. She received two flare-top funnels, side-by-side secured in holes drilled aft of the funnel position on the model. I covered this with a square of plasticard and mounted a 1/600 deck gun (#43 in the range-£1.70 a pack of 8) on top. This gave me a flotilla of some six ships armed for the most part with a single projectile weapon (which could be a gun, rocket even a flamethrower), and a ram. The most complex vessel only carried three basic weapons. Torpedoes, towed or spar, electrically charged hulls, and other “engines and devices” could be added at will of course.
The main class of ships completed, I needed ‘scouts’ or smaller vessels to support them. Not a problem. Both Navwar and Skytrex produce CSS Manassas in 1/1200 scale, about 3cm long and an exact smaller version of her 1/600 sister (around £1.50). All that was needed was to duplicate the somewhat taller funnels, and for one or two of them I added a small towed ship’s boat, since the hull isn’t big enough to carry one. The 1/1200 and 1/600 blend nicely as fantasy vessels in the larger scale, though for obvious reasons I denied the dwarf ship a ram. For torpedo boats of the ‘David’ semi-submersible variety, I used 1/3000 Soviet Submarines from the Navwar range initially, with their sails trimmed. Later I opted for the small Skytrex 1/1200 “Sputen Duyvil” torpedo boats, and for another fleet the tiny ‘Peter Pig’ two man version (4 for £1). Rowing boats from all sorts of ranges.
Painting them was a delight since it took less than half an hour. I sprayed one entire fleet shocking red - one of those ‘Games Workshop’ colours, and painted the funnels black or copper, as the mood took me. Boats white and red, ladders, hatches and flagpoles a sort of rich mahogany brown. An other fleet was white with deep buff funnels and white boats. I named the ships “BABBAGE” class, after the inventor of the world famous ‘difference engine’ (an early form of computer). A third small flotilla was all black with red and copper touches. I made one ‘merchantman’, by using a fore and aft ‘yacht’ sail from ‘Peter Pig’s’ Pirate schooner inserted into the drilled out funnel hole of the ‘Manassas, a squat retracted funnel behind it and I left the gun position in place. This I painted deep blue grey with lighter blue sails.
“BABBAGE” AT WAR
I don’t believe in the struggle between Wizards, elves and mages form of fantasy warfare. As with ships in any society, the ship is the being, which is served by, who or whatever crews her. The ship, and her survival and effectiveness are what matters. Everything else is subordinate.
As the ram is a self-explanatory weapon, I ventured to try out different types of device in the cupola. (On CSS MANASSAS, I’m told; the 32pdr in the bow was impossible to reload). Single shot heavy guns, early versions of anti-ship missile (erratic but lethal to friend and foe alike), flamethrowers, all had their evaluation. So did torpedoes and chemical weapons. One odd variant tried out on the smaller vessels was to throw spurts of inflammable liquid over an opponent, which would then catch fire if she used her own armament (don’t laugh we tried it in WWII). Countered effectively by hanging great big bunches of green seaweed on the target ships. A popular form of attack was a long rotating tow-wire with which the smaller vessels could come quickly behind the slower leviathans and disable the propellers.
Since the armament of the bigger ships was ‘in line’ with the bows, and all mounted forward, then line astern attacks were useless. The ships were most effective in line abreast like early Mediterranean galleys, which also had center line heavy guns. The maintenance of power and a head of steam became a key to survival.
The ‘waters’ in which the vessels were to operate had a great bearing on their effectiveness. No ‘demon summoned storms’ but an ocean with surprises seemed best suited to the “Babbage’s”. So, green Sargasso Sea’s with islands of impenetrable weed, a wide river as in the novels of Jose Farmer, rock strewn archipelago’s, all were tried successfully. I added some ‘krakens’ too. A few needing no control, such as the turtles which when they came on the board simply moved slowly across in a straight line, nothing could harm or damage them, but they would sink anything which they ‘ran into’. Electrically charged jellyfish, birds which hated the colour red, and could only be driven off by burning fuel at twice the rate to make noxious smoke, fleets of non-combatant native fishing boats to get in the way. All these were tried.
A real find was the Waddington’s “Escape from Atlantis” game in a local charity shop. In the box were ten small boats, dozens of islands, several sea monsters, and ten shark fins and octopii (oh, alright octopuses). Laid alongside the ships, the fins dwarfed them, and the octopods occupied a circle of 2cm diameter, so they were large beasts. After some thought, I determined that the sharks would be likely to accompany one fleet, which they regarded as friendly, a source of food, and recognised by the pitch of the engines. Any vessel, which attacked this fleet, would be rammed by the sharks (roll 2d12 for size - over 10 tons sinks you!)
I tried out packs of sharks and sharks which were friendly to specific ships, this was most effective and made for occasional mistakes. Since ten fins might be regarded as a luxury, I added one more 1/600 Manassas to the table, with a low wide funnel, painted black all over and with a sharks mouth (very USAF!) at the bow, to ‘lead’ the sharks. One ship plus ten big fish, a hard crowd to beat, even if you sink the man o’ war.
Incidentally, ’Peter Pig’ make great white sharks in their 15mm Pirate Range, if you don’t know of a source of the game I suggested, but they are smaller. I know that there are one or two other sources of sea-monsters (sic) such as East Riding’s ‘Evil Gong’ squid, etc (Mon 7 in their list at £1.50), so you can play around with a few variations.
I developed the idea with giant seagulls, which played havoc with the towed observation balloon; adding a sea serpent which would attack everything and which would briefly unite all combatants to drive it off or kill it. The ten tentacled denizens of the deep (I refuse to write octopii again) provided a whole range of possibilities. On one occasion, when a “Babbage” sank it stirred up a whole family of them, which set upon the victor in the surface fight causing her consorts to try all possible measures to drive them off. A towed torpedo destroyed one, and frightened the rest away, though their victim had become a wrecked drifting hulk.
I’m still using these fleets, which were ridiculously cheap for the whole lot and I’m still expanding the Science-Fiction (It’s not fantasy, by any means) element.
Without time-consuming hugely expensive models and masses of based up figures; and more particularly without losing sight of the basic science fiction principles of the machine’s technology, this makes a superb game.
Notes
Science-Fiction Steamships: Captions for Illustrations.
1. The basic ‘CSS Manassas’ hull shown with the two funnel variant and the weapon (or gun) port forward over the ram. Very simple, very clean outline. A number of options become immediately apparent for the 1/600 scale model-a small ‘ventilator’ as shown (Peter Pig make them), boats on davits and a small deck gun for example.
2. A mid-l9th century merchant version of the ‘Manassas’-known as a “Cigar Ship”. One was built in the USA in 1858 and suffered frequent machinery failure. It was 235’ long, 25’ in diameter. A second, almost identical was built by US engineers at St. Petersburg in 1861; and this could reach 9 knots. A third, named the ‘W. S. Winnans’ after the designer was completed at Le Havre in 1866 and the last, named “Ross Winnans’ was built at the Isle of Dogs in London, and launched in 1866 - she was 250’ long and 16’ diameter, with a propeller at each end (which gives an interesting propulsion option).
These ships were ‘science’ with only a little ‘fiction’ added!
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