Jim Duncan's Navy

Before I left for central London this morning, I received the following email and photographs from Jim Duncan. He has very kindly allowed me to publish them as a blog entry.

Read and enjoy!

Bob

Here are some slightly better pictures of one of my fleet.

The base is thick card, the hull is three layers of foamboard cut in a ship shape with the top layer recessed to form the maindeck aft of the foredeck. The peaked bow is made from cereal box cardboard and the bridge is another couple of pieces of foamboard. The turrets are carved from balsa wood with guns made from cotton buds. I only used a single barrel on each turret to keep the overall size limited. The mast is a cutdown cocktail stick and the funnels are large drinking straws cut to size. The flags are cut from cereal box cardboard and glued closely to the mast and funnel for resilience. The smoke is made from a pot scourer pad and has been sprayed black. The rest of the paint job is a heavy covering of acrylics including portholes and anchors covered by several coats of gloss varnish. This model is several years old and has fought in several battles without a scratch thanks to the resilience issues covered in its simple construction.

I have two fleets of these, unfortunately lost somewhere between my loft and my garden hut. I hope one day to find them again and put one some more 'cotton wool ball' battles. The main combat system involves throwing a cotton wool ball at a profile target lying flat in a box across the width of the table (usually six feet), the number of balls used is dependent on the number of turrets bearing, the range, the bearing of the target and the speed of the target. Victims of successful shooting usually lost either a turret or a funnel signifing loss of shooting power or loss of speed. Sometimes the bridge would be hit with a subsequent loss of control. A ship would eventually blow up.

Ships suffered accidental and catastrophic magazine hits when the firing captain dipped his cotton wool ball in his beer before firing!!

Great fun was had all round.

Jim

What a lovely model ... and what very simple, fun rules! I hope that Jim can find the rest of his fleet and share more photographs of them with us in the near future.