Nice - especially the sea effect.
I have the 1904 RN Atlantic fleet (painted in black and gold) which I've used in an engagement against the Russian Baltic fleet, following the Dogger Bank incident. We used Naval Thunder - Clash of Dreadnoughts and the Rise of the Battleship supplement for the fleets. We've also had game based on the Battle of the Falkland Islands but set in the Eastern Med between Black Sea Fleet and Mediterranean Fleet vessels
The last game in the series was a fictional Franco-Japanese action based on the premise that both France and Japan set their eyes on Hainan Island with vessels from the British China Station and German Tsingtao squadron also getting drawn into the action. A follow-up RN vs IJM game never took place sadly.
The ships we use are Navwar 1/3000 scale (complete with archaic ordering system!!). Getting pics of the actual models was impossible, but I managed to find out plenty of info for fleets and stations online and all the vessels or their class types were listed in the rules.
I love the pre-dreadnought period, much more than the later WW1 stuff, but the RN do tend to outclass most other ships in both numbers and quality!!!
I was set on 1/3000 with a mix of Navwar (a fax is not archaic) and WTJ until I saw Paul's sculpts at Warfare... considering WTJ rapid prototyped miniatures are available also in 1/2400, the decision was easy. As rules I am using both David Manley Fire When Ready or MJ12 Grand Fleets. After playing the WW2 version of Naval Thunder I am utterly non impressed with them. Rolling for each barrel is tedious, and the damage system is frankly stupid (plus for small engagement I found the Admiral Trilogy faster and more pleasant).
Well the RN has numbers (but alos worldwide commitments), but not so much quality advntages. Ship for ship i think the IJN had the advantage on paper, yet looking at what a properly trained Russian squadron was able to do at Yellow Sea made me wondering about a lot of stereotypes on the Russian Fleet. Certainly one Russian Battleship (the Retvizan in our case) was able to tackle on the whole IJN battleline and despite a lot of damage survive. Then you have the problems with the various compounds used in shells (especially the derivate of the Poudre B, like the Shimosa compound). One of the problem I see is that for a long time historiography was dominated by a strong pro-RN (and by default pro-IJN) bias. A lot is due to Mader and his admiration for Fisher (but well, Mader tend to be a tad clueless in technical matters). But let's face it even Mark Evans was not spotless. In his discussion on the RJW in Kaigun he avoid talking about the problem of Shimosa shells (with a lot of premature explosions in the turrets...) instead portraying them as super-duper rounds.
I think that the period is interesting because fleets tend to be more balanced, there is less long range fire (and standard accuracy is everything but accurate) and the fleets are more balanced. As much the RN is the 3,000 pounds gorilla in the showroom... it was also overstretched. Plus alliances were shifting quite a lot in the period, before crystallizing in the two big blocks of 1914 and there is the scope for different scenarios.
From a modeling point of view the ships are sufficiently small to be done in bigger scale without being too big or too expensive
