Tshushima is Just Around The Corner...

Morning again to everybody!  Welcome back to Palladian Guard, where today I'm rounding off another  long-running project.  My Russo-Japanese war ships, from the War Times Journal site.  These are going to be used for me and Headologist to indulge our newfound naval interests - with the added bonus that almost no terrain is required!  I must apologise, especially to Mad Padre, because we haven't managed to get a game in yet and so there's no AAR at the moment :(

A close up of some of the detail on the Russian ships.

Anyway.  The last post on these ships looked a little bit at painting them - a very simple black wash then painting the decks brown.  But I'll talk a bit about something that affects a lot of historical wargamers.

Accuracy is, as you know, something I rate very highly.  All of my Second World War models are, if I do say so myself, meticulously (although not infallibly) researched.  I wanted to get the same sort of accuracy for the ships, but I had a problem.  WTJ's own site has a very well-researched and comprehensive painting guide - but when I painted up the ships, they all look exactly the same.  I didn't want to go down the route of painting big flags on bases (I'd rather not base them, to be honest), and although their store numbers can be used to identify them and are on the undersides, that wasn't very practical for gaming.

So I decided to make a concession to realism and paint the Japanese funnels grey with a black top, and the Russian ones brown with a black top.  I gave the Russian ships a line of red paint to represent the lead oxide anti-fouling paint on the hulls - giving them all a very distinctive look on the battlefield.  I suppose the moral of the story is, realism is great and it gives you the chance to do lots of reading, but when it starts to make the game difficult to play maybe it's time to make a few concessions.  After all, whatever our interests in the real world, when we pick up the dice we're wargamers first and historians second.

Anyway!  Enough waffle, I'll let you look at these lovely models.

Thanks again for all your continued reading and comments! Every one is read and appreciated. Oh, and belated congratulations to my ol' pal Headologist for his fantastic 100 followers as well, richly deserved it was. Thanks again - next time, back to WW2 we go with some German Fallschirmjäger, and after that I've received the parts for a very exciting collaboration project ... more to follow in the next few weeks!

The Colonel