28mm VBCW NAVAL (PART FOUR) - THE MAJOR GENERAL'S ADVICE

Inspiration for a VBCW "28mm" Aircraft Carrier Group need not be limited to interwar naval modelling. The Mad Mullah may now be retired, Ourgistan strangely at peace, and the Major General himself in a bath chair somewhere around Hastings, but the famous "Major General Termorden Rederring's Colonial Era Wargames Page" (see HERE) is still worth consulting for 28mm naval advice (and much else besides...)

 a Victorian era Ironclad, "HMS Tempestuous"

The Major General spent some time outlining his ship size philosophy :

"Real ships and boat are much larger than most people think. The ironclad model above is roughly patterned on the the 1873 turretship, HMS Devestation: it would be nearly four feet long, if modelled in accurate scale for 25mm figures. Clearly, we can't even approach literal realism within the confines of a 4 x 8 foot gaming table. The model is simply a symbolic placeholder for the ship, in a game with a tremendously compressed ground scale.

Since we cannot make [the ironclad] realistic, we have to settle for making it visually appealing and useful as a game element. We can do the first by exaggerating the vertical dimension and turning the model (toy, actually) into a cartoon representation of a generalized 19th century warship, and the second by keeping it as small as possible without seeming totally ridiculous. In fact, the model is only 9" long and 2.75" wide; each turret can barely contain three figures, let alone two naval guns and their crews. Yet it can happily steam back and forth on a 6" strip of blue paper along the edge of the gaming table, provide artillery support, land marines, look roughly proportional to the scale of the battle, and add to the Victorian visual effect. If it were much larger, say even 12 or 14 inches long, it would require nearly a quarter of the table for water, severely lack maneuverability, and visually dwarf the land action (which is, after all, the main subject of the game).

Moral: be ruthless with your ship sizes. The ironclad is 9", [other ships in use in the campaign, such as] the dhows are a bit large at 8+", the gunboat is 7.5" and the launches are 6." We know a steam launch is not 2/3 the size of an ironclad, but we live with the discrepancy in order to get a reasonable number of figures in the launch, and also keep the ironclad playable."

and:

"Ships and boats can be useful on the game table in various ways --

A ship or gunboat can provide artillery support for the troops on land. Usually a gunboat is played as a one-gun battery, though it may also have riflemen and perhaps a gatling-style machine gun. The ironclad can be played as having one or two naval guns which have no range limits--they can shoot to any point on the table that is not blocked by scenery, all shots computed as if at close range. The ironclad also has a Nordenfeldt gun (similar to a Gatling) to discourage boarders and sweep the shoreline. It is a good idea to give the ship another job also, so that the captain must choose when to abandon his artillery role. For instance, we have had several games in which the army evacuates civilians from an overwhelming native assault (the natives have no fixed number of figures; they just keep recycling the dead into new units) and the ship covers the retreat, but must at some point steam to the pier to take the refugees on board, at which time the town buildings block the ship's guns and the soldiers are on their own.

The ship can have a number of marines, which it can land at some point during the game, perhaps behind enemy lines, to help the soldiers on shore. The marines will have to spend a turn in landing boats and be subject to fire from shore. The captain may have to roll in secret to see how many marines he has on board (two units, one unit, a half-unit, none). The native commander must then gamble on how many men to detach from the battle to the shore in order to guard against a landing.

Reinforcements can arrive from upriver or offshore on boats after a particular turn, with a particular die-roll. Or the entire force of one side may be delivered by boat in an amphibious landing. If the landings are opposed by enemy vessels, ship-to-ship actions are possible......

Because of problems of scale, the ship is an underscale, but still fairly large, model located a few inches offshore, but representing a larger vessel farther out. Generally, line of sight is measured from the center of the stack for all guns on a ship and all shots against the ship. In certain scenarios, you may add 6" to the ranges of all shots from or against the ship, to represent the increased distance, or to keep the ship from controlling too much of the table.

A game may call for more figures to be onboard a ship than can physically fit on the model. You can alleviate the situation by allowing figures' bases to overlap when in tight situations like ships or buildings. Or you can just put as many of the ship's figures on deck as look good, and reserve an area for the rest somewhere to the side or off the table."