I came across the vessel in the rather poor line drawing (mine! in Spain recently. Looking for all the world like a Confederate sidewheeler chugging up the Mississippi. These boats are in fact salt lake tugs, towing trains of barges on the huge shallow saltpans North of Cartagena and there are twenty of them in all.)
Each is about 8 metres long, 3 metres in the beam, and has an astonishing draft of less than a third of a metre (about a foot). They date from the 1890’s and the Scots design never altered. Each has a double set of paddles each side and double rudders at the stern with a low funnel and strong stem and sternposts for towing. They are painted uniform green and orange overall and numbered. The crew is one man, a boy and/or dog. Until recently they were wood burners but now have small diesel engines and are capable of only a couple of knots. Since they operate on salt lakes they cannot sink, and when their useful lives are over the boats are lifted out and scrapped. The salt is a fairly lethal opponent of the working parts.
The craft gave me an idea for a fantasy/science fiction vessel. Once again, I turned to the “Peter Pig” 11600 ACW Range, since the first sight of these craft carried me back to Dixie. I found roughly what I was looking for though sadly not even the innovative Confederates had built a warship with two sets of paddles it seems! Number 4 in the ‘Pig’ ACW list is CSS NASHVILLE. (priced at £4.50) Another one of those incredible huge vessels which did absolutely nothing, her engines were too weak to move her, her armour too heavy for her keel, draft enormous, etc etc, etc. Another CSN disaster!
The model however is just perfect for the purpose I had in mind. Just over 13 cm long, 3.5 cm wide and exactly 2 cm to the top of the paddle boxes. This is another of the delightful two-piece castings, resin hull of good, clean quality and a tallish funnel that I discarded. The model also has four tall ‘sweeps’, air intakes which I also laid aside and later used with some of my Babbage’ conversions of the ‘CSS Manassas.
The layout of gunports is as in the drawing, two forward, two aft and two each side of the paddle boxes. eight in all. The roof of the armoured ‘citadel’ has a big pilots house forward and several grid like hatches. The enormous paddle boxes are most impressive.
To create what I wanted, I simply found a large pen top from the spares box, to make a low but ‘baffle-covered’ funnel and put an additional layer of 20cm plasticard atop the pilot’s house to make an armoured roof. In the four ‘sweeps positions, I fitted small turrets to represent upper deck guns. In my case I used ancient turrets from an old 1:1200 Airfix HMS COSSACK, though anything would have done. That was it. No ships boats, no masts in this case, though both could be fitted wherever required. I called her “TITAN”
“TITAN” AFLOAT
I painted this ship simply, by spraying her a deep shiny brown called ‘bestial brown’ from the Games Workshop range, and only added a few other touches of gunmetal on some of the paddle-housing bands, and the gunports. The roof hatches I painted a glossy black and did the same for parts of the funnel structure. It is important to get the funnel right for the ship to look right. That was it, another five-minute paint job.
“TITAN” of course can’t sink.
She’s made not of steel or iron; her armour is of a very hard wood, which is impervious to the dense salty water over which this leviathan has to operate. She sails alone - no consorts or escorts. Rather like the aptly named and interesting title ship known as ‘The Gunboat DREAD’ in Daniel Walther’s brilliant ‘combat science-fiction’ story. Her armament, a main battery of eight heavy guns/projectors or whatever and her upper deck battery of four smaller weapons, makes this an immensely powerful vessel, though slow and hard to manoeuvre. Her weaknesses seem to be her big, low fore and aft decks, which her heavy weapons cannot possibly reach down to cover, and her huge paddle boxes.
The sinister vessel might of course be vulnerable to small fast ‘suicide’ craft, or to vessels disgorging boarders, if they could find a way into the citadel. Or to intense fires, or fire rafts.
In one game, when a host of small native craft (1/1200 Navwar pentaconters) attacked her at night, they set the sea on fire around, but “Titan” burned slowly and the fleet was destroyed. A combination of small torpedo towing one-man boats, and some very unpleasant Roc birds dropping huge stones had better luck. They successfully disabled one of her paddles and eliminated the light weapons on the upper deck. The big deck gratings being unarmoured would also be exposed to the plunging fire of ‘mortars’ perhaps?
I’m also toying with the idea of making this huge ship vulnerable to rainfall - she might become waterlogged? Or of using her big deck areas to transport fantasy/SF troops for a landing. How long, I wonder, would mines last in very dense salty waters?
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