Continuing on from my last post on Nimitz: And We’re Off! Nimitz On Table Action, At Last: Part Two… So my buddy Dave H has 3D Printed and painted a sample vessel in 1/1800 scale for Nimitz, from the STL range of Lee McColl’s available on MyMiniFactory. This is a couple of sample pics of the vessel, along with a comparison of it alongside my 1/2400 HMS Hood, and some quick thoughts and notes on basing.
Dave has given the vessel a quick 3 colour paint and a wash (basically decking brown and 2 shades of grey for hull and superstructure with contrast paints, then a wash). Its actually looking pretty good and ready to go. It’ll get a final dry brush to finish (and maybe one or two details picked out if needed). This was our test vessel to work out if one or both of us were going to go the 1/1800 route for building Early Pacific USN & IJN Fleets for Nimitz.
We are both pretty much sold on the plan. We think this will work well because the earlier pacific battles around the Coral Sea, Solomons, and Caroline’s (plus the Java Sea ABDA campaign) in 1942 to mid-1943 or so have very few Battleships present, or don’t have especially large fleets when large vessels are present. Nimitz also handles carriers well and provides a good mechanism for them to be in the game, but not necessarily on table but you can still have a model of 1-2 if you wish (for the campaign map and/or for unusual surface actions; e.g. in Halsey where a damaged carrier might get caught by a surface fleet or such like in the same grid).
So that’ll be our work plan next couple of months or so to get the first wave of vessels printed and get painting and basing. Talking of basing, I was thinking about this for a while and Dave and I have agreed a consistent plan based on that so more below…
For those interested this is a summary of how we will base our 1/800 vessels:
- Vessels will be mounted on acrylic (transparent) bases,
- Bases will have the Nimitz arcs ‘X’ etched into them at their centre point (the X will always be the centre of the base and the ship will be positioned centrally on top of it) – we’ll shade these in with light grey or similar so they stand out against the blue cloth but in a subtle way,
- The bases will be standardised sizes to keep things tidy (current thinking is BB & CV 14cm x 3cm, CA 12cm x 3cm, CL 10cm x 3cm, DD 8cm x 3cm),
- In cases where a class of vessel had several ships present in the area/time period we are looking at, but different actual vessels from the class were present at different times or battles, I will be using a label maker for the ship names. This means I can just remove the name label from the acrylic base (and give it a quick clean if needed) and stick a new name on at a moments notice as I need. Potentially I’ll go with a transparent tape with white lettering (if it exists, otherwise black) to give the name tag a minimalist appearance on the transparent base.
P.S. I was inspired to do the clear acrylic basing by JJ Wargames 1/700 Age of Sail games and David Manley’s photos on the Naval Wargaming (Historical) Facebook Group!