The Good Ship Gilgamesh

Ahoy mateys! I have had a desire to build a ship for my 28mm fantasy gaming for a couple of years now. I was off work with an injury and got inspired to take action. 

After much google image searching and mental planning, I settled on the template below..

 

From this template, I sketched out the three hull pieces on poster board, after drawing a 1" grid on it.



 

 

I cut out the pieces from 1" XPS foam insulation using my Proxxon hotwire table cutter. I beveled the edges a little to make it "shipshaped". I used a pen and xacto knife to cut in the wood grain on the decks.

 

 

I carved out the stairs and doorways

 

 

I thought about carving the sides of the ship to the right shape. This was not working well with the tools I had and because of the awkward shape of the hull. I went with plan B instead. I peeled the paper off of a sheet of 5mm foamcore. I drew in the planks with a pen and textured the foam with a wire brush. I cut this sheet into rough semblances of the sides of the ship and hot glued them in place. I used my xacto knife to fine to the fit. I also rough out a piece for the stern.

 

 

At this point I had a ship! I started to add details from my bits box. A trip to Home Depot yielded a bag of nails to use as rail posts, wood decorations for the stern castle, a bunch of doweling for masts, PVC plastic tubing to hold the masts in the hull and crack filler putty to cover up my mistakes. The Dollar store provided string for rigging, grommits for the port holes and a resin Cherub for the bow decoration.

 

I made lots of paper templates to get the stern castle pieces right. The Proxxon cutter worked the trick for shaving this sheets of foam to cut into shape. I found a picture of Sir Francis Drake's flagship, The Revenge, and modeled the stern castle of it. I was very pleased with the results but if I were to do it again, I would give the ship more upward slope towards the stern and add some height to the stern castle.

 

 

 

I was finally ready to paint after about 12 hours of work. I got out my Modpodge and added brown paint. This gave an undercoat as well as a hardness to the model. Stay tuned for the finished paint job and the addition of rigging and masts

Memory Lane

I was surfing the interwebs recently and was inspired to find an old Yahoo Group that was very active from my days gaming with the Nova Scotia Historical Wargamers. The site had a huge photo section where the players dumped their photos of our table top exploits. I have pulled a few out for this post and hope you enjoy. The group had some excellent photographers!

Ancients:

The group played a lot of ancients and the rules of choice were Warhammer Ancients Battle.

 This is a shot down the line of my 400 model Celtic Horde

 Gary's lovely Imperial Romans

 Gary's Assyrians fend of the Celts

 Giant Rome vs Carthage game

 Celts vs Ross' Persians

 The Flank Attack Rolls in

 Setting up

Ross's Greeks

ECW

The group embarked on a few projects where all players agreed to collect and paint figures for a period. ECW was one of the more successful projects. Unfortunately one of the main troop providers moved to Ontario causing my Royalists to sit idle for many years. They were eventually expanded and divided into two armies and based for Baroque. Rules we used included WRG ECW, Warhammer ECW, 1644 and Victory Without Quarter.

Revolutionary War and War of 1812

As a group, we collected 40mm Sash and Sabre figures for AWI. I only collected a few units as I was leary of getting into another scale. They were fun to paint and the battles were HUGE.

Napoleonics

The group had collections in 28mm and 15mm. Rules too numerous to name including Ross' excellent homebrew rules.

Russians defending against Brits in a Black Powder scenario for Crimean War

 Put all the figures on the table game.

 Gary's amazing basement game room kept the quality of the games high

Shako Caldero Scenario 

 15mm Aspern Essling using Grande Armee

Friedland with Commit the Garde

 Waterloo with Napoleon's Battles 1400 figs in 15mm

 Raab with Shako

 Austrian Grenadiers capture Essling

Crimean War Cavalry clash 

Colonials

A few of the members had large colonial collections so it was heavily played. Here is a scenario of getting the releif column through the ambush to relieve the fort.

 Ross' pirate raiding game

Franco Prussian War

Mike was probably the most prolific painter and collector of figures in our group. Below are pics of his Franco Prussian War games in 28mm. He had excellent terrain and a lovely game room to play in. Also moved to Ontario...

World War 2

This period did not see too much action with the group but I found a few pics of my German infantry troops in 15mm as well as some Command Decision Desert War pictures