Boating about in mess (WW2 1:1200 coastal warfare)(now with tiny tiny airplanes)

[Commander Roj]

Cmdr.Roj there is always Heroics & Ros that do a coastal range in 1:600 and is one of the few ranges that they have available currently.

Flat pack: being new to this bit of WW2 can you recommend a small selection of ships for Germany and Britain to get me started.

BALM

That is true BALM, and they are nice, but I am very interested in The Solomons campaign at the moment. H&R are sadly lacking Japanese vessels, with only one.

[Wirelizard]

Only just seen this. Hmm, very tempting. I like this size for coastal forces action. I see they are available from Magister Militum in the UK. I have a lot of 1:600 aircraft, but I could use those in forced perspective...

It's a fun scale, 1/1200. I was a bit wigged out by the tiny size when I first started painting them but it's actually been good for my painting chops overall to force me to change focus! Edge highlighting becomes much more important, because an inch-long ship without edge highlighting (especially if it's partially camo'd) is just a fuzzy little blob but proper edge highlighting means that, suddenly, it's recognizably a SHIP again![quote

Flat pack: being new to this bit of WW2 can you recommend a small selection of ships for Germany and Britain to get me started.

If you want to do North Sea/English Channel stuff, I'd start out with a pack or two of Vosper torpedo boats, a pack or two of BPB motor gun boats (all "short" boats, 70 to 73 foot), a pack or two of S-boats for the Germans, and two to four merchants of some flavour or other. You could add some RN trawlers or German Vorpostenboot (also trawlers) which both sides used for coastal convoy escort, minesweeping, and such, or some slower less glamourous patrol craft - RN Fairmile B motor launches or German Raumboot (R-boats). Something like that mix will give you both offensive and defensive setups for both sides.

If you want to do later war, Fairmile D motor torpedo boats for the RN are pretty much mandatory, but they're terrifying opponents and will make life very, very difficult for whoever is playing the Germans.

For the Med/North Africa/Adriatic/Aegean ops I've not done much reading yet, there were more American boats down there which I know less about.

That is true BALM, and they are nice, but I am very interested in The Solomons campaign at the moment. H&R are sadly lacking Japanese vessels, with only one.

Americans and Japanese I've read only a little bit about, the Japanese seemed to have very few "true" coastal warfare boats the way all the other combatants had. Destroyers, armed landing craft, and various powered barges seem to be the order of the day for the IJN.

Last Square's Figurehead line has lots and lots of American options in 1/1200 and what looks like enough Japanese stuff for a good game. http://www.lastsquare.com/zen-cart/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=103_146 All the ships and boats I own so far are Figurehead and they're all really nice figures, cleanly cast and nicely detailed for the size.

[Commander Roj]

Americans and Japanese I've read only a little bit about, the Japanese seemed to have very few "true" coastal warfare boats the way all the other combatants had. Destroyers, armed landing craft, and various powered barges seem to be the order of the day for the IJN.

That sounds about right to me. US MTB’s attacking sub-chasers, destroyers and cruisers.

[BeneathALeadMountain]

Cmdr.Roj - Apologies I’d seen the category heading but not actually looked at it. I’ve been chatting to Andy from H&R a little over email recently - I’ll be brave/cheeky and ask him if he intends to do more at any point soon.

Wirelizard - Thank you that is brilliant, just what I wanted. I’m good when it comes to land based WW2 and just learning about the bigger naval things (hoping to do Solomon’s and Guadalcanal using GQ3 as my next big project, in 1:6000 if I like the figurehead DDs in person) but am only just beginning when it comes to smaller boats. I have various Ospreys and background reading but this will give me a head start and allow me to buy a few things to work on and play with during my seemingly never ending house arrest/COVID-19 lockdown shielding.

BALM

[Splod]

Sorry you feel like you've been talking to yourself! I've been dropping in to keep an eye on the log because small scale always tickles my fancy. I've always been keen on more modern naval engagements, with the current situation in the South China Sea providing a tempting source of inspiration. I'd probably go with 1/3000 for my gaming however...

I'll try and be better at commenting in future 

[Baron von Wreckedoften]

Hi, 

Another who has just "discovered" your thread!!!  I think the problem is not so much size/scale, as naval wargamers are used to "going small" - it's the subject matter.  Even amongst naval wargamers, coastal warfare is very much a niche subject - which is a shame, as it provides endless scenarios that are much easier to play out in an evening than another Jutland, Midway or death ride of the Yamamamamoto.

I got into this about a year ago, but still haven't played a game yet.  I decided on Coastal Patrol as I'm a big fan of TFL rules generally (but had also heard better things about them than I had about Cruel Seas from folk who had tried both); I was also thinking of trying Narrow Seas as I've heard good things about David Manley's approach to naval warfare (he apparently used to run an annual Naval Wargames Day at one of the RN establishments down on the South Coast).  I got a load of 1:600 vessels from PT Dockyard in the US (a friend brought them over for me), and some other bits and bobs from H&R and Tumbling Dice.  However, a cheap offer of a Cruel Seas starter set in the "For Sale" thread on here means I now have some 1:300 vessels for a basic "learning game"; I think H&R also do some duplicate 1:300 vessels, but only the "small stuff".  This is the first thread I've seen about 1:1200 vessels for this sort of game, though, and obviously it allows you to use larger vessels and also have a bigger scrap (and maintain proper scale weapon ranges). 

I like the slightly larger 1:300 scale for the smaller (as in fewer vessels) games, which are perfect for learning the rules, but once you get past the torpedo/gun boats level, you tend not to have much spare room on the table for tankers, flower class corvettes and the like, never mind destroyers, and you really have to go down to 1:600 (or indeed 1:1200) to maintain a sensible perspective, as opposed to the game looking like a scrap in an overcrowded dry dock. 

Rather oddly, I've seen the phrase "needed more play-testing" used about every set of coastal-based rules I can think of.  I wonder what it is about the genre?

Anyway, with my 1:300 vessels as a listed lockdown project, I shall be keeping an eye on this thread and possibly even weighing in occasionally with ill-considered, irrelevant - and irreverent - nonsense.

Splice the mainbrace!

BvW

[Wirelizard]

Right, let's heave this thread up out of the briny deeps too, as I've finally been doing some new stuff in the WW2 coastal naval department around here.

Had a chance to run a game at a local game event in early November and wound up with seven players when I'd planned/hoped for maybe three or four. It was glorious chaos - four people each running a single RN Vosper MTB and three people each running various parts of a German convoy. The Germans lost two of their four cargo vessels and had a couple of their escorts badly damaged but it cost the RN all four of their Vospers - three blew up outright and one abandoned by it's crew in sinking condition, survivors taken aboard one of the German R-boats... "For you zee war iz over..."

A few weeks ago I discovered a new source of reasonably priced 1/1200 ships, 3d printed resin sold by Antics out of the UK under the John's Model Shipyard name. I ordered a few and will definitely be getting more in the future, although a lot of the range is aircraft carriers, cruisers, and the like, not really in the coastal warfare line but there's some nice freighters and destroyers.

I've put up an unboxing review on my blog: http://www.warbard.ca/2022/12/02/3d-printed-1-1200-ships-from-antics/


Partial view of most of my order - a T2 tanker at the back, passenger liner back left, RN destroyer in the centre, and two more freighters in the foreground. I also got a quartet of U-boats, just for the heck of it.

I've also done a small order to Last Square for a few things from the Figurehead range - an RN Hunt-class destroyer escort, a similarly sized torpedo boat for the KM, and half a dozen packs of airplanes just for the heck of it, because absurdly tiny airplanes are awesome.

[Mako]

I just found out about this discussion too.

I've got some of the wonderful little Figurehead vessels, and even a few of their aircraft, though the latter are getting crazy expensive for small packs.  I prefer the 1/600th scale aircraft from Tumbling Dice, and Oddzial Osmy/Pico Armor for value, and a forced size perspective.  They're actually cheaper than their smaller cousins, and you get twice as many planes in a pack too.

I think these are best for larger battles with merchants, and/or larger vessels than the small MTBs/MGBs, S-Boats, and PT Boats, given their small size.  They're less impressive on the tabletop than their larger cousins, but the detailing on them is superb.

Hard to take good photos of the smaller craft though, and they aren't as impressive visually compared to their larger cousins, but gun and torpedo ranges can be more realistic.

I have a decent collection of them.  Time to pull them out and commit them to battle again.

Been wanting to do this for a while, so need to get cracking.