INTRODUCTION

About 18 months ago I had an idea for a VSF/Aeronef style game. I had wanted to do some air ship battles but didn’t find any rules that grabbed my fancy. So naturally I set about writing my own. My first draft went down in flames, just like every airship did on the second turn. A few tweaks and a second draft later, it was still unworkable.

Then a couple months ago I had a brainwave. A solution presented itself and I tried it out using my old ship stats and some cardboard cut outs for ships. The results were good enough to get me working on a serious new draft of the rules, as well as begin thinking about models for the new game. Among other things I knew I wanted to have a 1/300 scale game so I could paint up boarding parties, as well as opening the possibility of land/air operations.

I’ve posted a few things here and there online but thought perhaps a more permanent web page might make more sense. And here it is. I’ll be adding pages and thoughts here in more or less a random order as I bounce around between working on the ships, and working on the rules. Up first: some semi-tutorial bits about how I built my first fleet, the Prussian squadron.

GENERAL SHIP CONSTRUCTION: PLAY TEST MODELS

I knew right away that I wanted some half way decent models in case I took the game beyond a few close buddies. But I also knew I did not want to put a lot of time and money in to them. Originally I talked to someone with a laser cutter about doing some kits, but that proved too involved for what I had in mind (if the game gets anywhere I may develop a line of such kits in the future). That left me with scratchbuilding as there are no 1/300 Aeronef makers out there.

My first thought was overall look - I was thinking of American Civil War ironclads. Mostly low and flat, that was the look I wanted. So I bought some basic 1/8” balsa wood. Balsa is fragile and prone to warping, but for throw away models like these is cheap, readily available, and easy to work with. So flat decks of balsa would be my base (I will leave making deeper, more realistic looking hulls for the next go round). That left me with three major components to make. Decking, superstructure and guns/turrets.

Decks & Hulls

Decking was an easy fix. As they say, Google is your friend. I typed “wood plank texture” into the search box and got back lots of great images. I downloaded them and filed them away. So step one was to pick an overall deck shape. I’m not familiar with graphics editors so I went with what I know: Powerpoint. After all my needs would be very simple: make a shape and cover it in planking.

Drawing the decks was easy enough. Importing the decking images I was able to print wooden decks in color - cut to shape and done! Actually I also printed outlines to use as patterns to trace on the balsa. I used these to cut out my deck shapes using an X-acto knife.

Superstructure

With a hull covered with a nice wooden deck, the next thing I needed was superstructures - bridge, turrets, etc. Having just completed building several villages worth of paper buildings, paper superstructures were an obvious choice.

To start, I made the Prussian cabins simple rectangular solids. Simple, efficient but lacking in any design “flair.” So I laid out some boxes in Powerpoint. These proved just the thing but they needed some detail. Windows and portholes were just boxes in Powerpoint colored blue. But to add more detail I found transparent images online of hatches, ladders and other details. I imported these into Powerpoint and after a few trial and error pages, wound up with something like this:

Cut these out and assemble. Presto! The captain now has a pot to piss in! Here is an early work-in-progress shot of my first ship:

The turret, by the way, is a wood button I bought in a craft store. Check both the bead asile and the wooden shapes/crafts aisle. You’ll find all sorts of handy bits there if you keep your eyes open. Cheap too! I had the bare bones of a deadly flying warship. Now I needed some skin....

Part 2

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