28MM VBCW NAVAL (PART FIVE) - RICHARD MARSH'S RAPID FIRE! (AND INSPIRATION)

Taking at least a little of the Major General's advice, Richard Marsh produced a variety of WW2 era ships for his large "Rapid Fire" games back in the 1990s (and they seem still to be in  tabletop service today). Back then, the Revell/Matchbox kit of a Flower Class Corvette (in the Rapid Fire scale of 1/72) was reasonably widely available - in order to create a larger ship with greater firepower, RM cleverly converted the "scale" corvette into a "semi-cartooned" "Hunt" class destroyer.

The Revell HMCS Snowberry - a WW2 corvette in 1/72. The kit is unfortunately now rather
rare, and seems to sell on Ebay for somewhere between £100 and £150!

Apart from converting suitable plastic ships, RM also scratchbuilt at least one aircraft carrier......

A re-appearance of RM's famous "Operation Nostalgia" campaign at Salute 2000.
The "Hunt class destroyer" provides support to a landing on one of the islands of the
 Dodecanese, while the "aircraft carrier" prepares to launch Allied air support.

Same game, same ships, different time and location. The "cartooning" of the aircraft carrier is
noticeable in this shot, as, were it "to scale", it should obviously be many times larger than a destroyer.
Shades of the Major-General's "symbolic placeholder" design philosophy.

There is an additional difficulty with designing a model aircraft carrier, as the above photos also demonstrate. RM went for 1/72 aircraft (in keeping with the scale of the remainder of the game), but the wargames nit-picker will no doubt consider that, however attractively modelled the aircraft carrier itself, the two 'large' aircraft taking up most of the flat-top's runway space does not quite meet the "looks right" test........

Note: Richard Marsh's modelling skills recently inspired JP (no, not our JP, but Jaoa Pedro Peixoto of the JP Wargaming Place blog) to scratchbuild his own (31 inch long) "Bogue/Attacker" class of WW2 Aircraft Carrier, again in "cartooned" 1/72 scale - 

JP's "Attacker" class aircraft carrier. Note naval Ensign and British aircraft

The same ship reclassified into a "Bogue" class carrier. The Ensign gives way to the Stars & Stripes,
and USN aircraft types now populate the flat-top.

Quite apart from scratchbuilding an excellent aircraft carrier (and dual purposing it for both the RN and USN), JP has also put up a detailed and really useful blogpost on how the carrier itself was designed and constructed - see HERE. Acknowledging the inspiration of Rapid Fire and Richard Marsh, JP has also detailed his "Corvette to Destroyer" conversion HERE.

Fantastic stuff - but the nitpicker is still not sure about those 1/72 aircraft on a "cartooned" carrier..........

ADD EDIT:

Another - useful side on - view of Richard Marsh's Aircraft Carrier below: