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Author Topic: Coastal installations in 20mm / 1/72 for late Victorian coastal warfare - pt. 2  (Read 1796 times)

Offline cataphractarius

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With my steam yacht (see http://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=78918.0) currently waiting for paint'n putty to dry, I was looking for a quick diversion - and look what came across my way:



An old flower pot! So what might that be good for? Gunner Farquarson was his usual sceptical self ("Laddie has gone funny in the head, totally funny in the head..."), but I saw some potential...

Adding a door produced this (and yes, it's crude; it doesn't look that bad in reality, and it's not a "serious" project anyway...):



Now to the top - I added a central pinthle and space for racers on which a traversing carriage could be put. And soon it actually starts to look like a Martello tower - which was the original plan. The gun is just to give an overall idea of the layout, I'll have to change her for a piece suitable for our 1880s scenario, and obviously there is still some, ehm, structural work to do, but this should work.



Of course, Farquarson found a fly in the ointment - "Laddie, there's no door, hatch or whatever! Can't actually get up!" One day I'll throw him into the garden... But obviously there are still details to be added.

« Last Edit: June 09, 2015, 08:17:19 PM by cataphractarius »

Offline cataphractarius

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Martello tower part 2

With the steam yacht still stuck in the puttying/sanding process I turned again to the Martello tower. I had left the tower looking basically like a turned-up flowerpot with some cup-like structure put on top of it. What was still missing was the parapet. Due to its slightly complicated shape I had two options: I could either design parts that were properly fitting, or simply slap sheet onto it, trial-and-error-like, and afterwards cut it to shape.

Want a guess which course I went? :D

The end result got a first coat of primer - and looked horrible, mainly because the sides of the flower pot were totally smooth. Luckily I found somewhere among my paints a pot of structure effects paint. While the colour is gold - Farquarson was muttering in the back that Laddie had gone funny in the head again - the paste-like paint produced a fairly nice, coarse finish, looking a little bit like what I was after.

Another coat of primer produced this, which is starting to look more like a Martello tower than a flower pot.



A horribly blurry picture of the upper part of the tower nevertheless showing the structural effect of the paint rather nicely:



Compare the picture above to this:



Some improvement, or so it seems to me. I should perhaps add that the turret will not stay in this sandish colour.

When this is all set and dry it will be time to add a couple of details, like the hatch Farquarson always laments about, rails for the gun and of course the gun itself; currently there is still only an old Revell 9in gun on a naval carriage there to show the general layout of the thing.

The gun is an interesting problem. As many Martellos were out of use by the time of our scenario, I allowed myself some leeway in fantazising about a possible re-use by the local militia. One option would be to leave the 24pdr in place - which by the early 1880s had no military value whatsoever. One could put a quickfiring gun on top of the tower, but these I thought to be slightly too modern in outlook - and in the case of a nationwide crisis these would probably not have been given out to the local East Anglia militia for arming an obscure Martello tower on the East Coast.

While I'm still open to suggestions, the current plan is to use the SBBL 32pdr, an old 32pdr muzzle loader converted in the 1870s to breech loading. These guns were designed for sweeping fort ditches with cannister and had a maximum range of about 500 yards. Just the right thing to serve as a nasty surprise for that French expedition trying to sneak up a small East Anglian inlet.

Offline von Lucky

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  • Melbourne, Australia
    • Donner und Blitzen Wargaming
Love it. Go for big bada boom every time.
- Karsten

"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Blog: Donner und Blitzen

 

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