The Naval Adventure Begins

My recent trip to Portsmouth Historic dockyard has given me an urge for some naval wargaming, and I've actually gone and done something about it.  The first question was what period, origanally I was going to go for WW1 but after talking to my mate he's convinced me to go WW2, after all he reasoned we can still line up battleships if we want but WW2 naval has a lot more variety than WW1.

So period decided we now needed a ruleset, after some internet reserch I've gone for:

I've gone for this as i like its reputation for being simple as naval games go and the good reviews I found everywhere.  I've had a quick go with the rules and they seem straightforward, but still with lots of decisions to be made, I'll post my full thoughts when a proper game has been played.
The book is in black & white and contains the rules, historical scenarios, generic scenarios and fleet lists for the British, Germans, Americans, Italians, Japanese and French fleets.  In the back is also a lot of black and white tokens you can cut out or photocopy that represent the ships and tokens for turning etc.  It would have been nice if these were in colour or even actual card peices, but really it's designed to be played how I intend to play it.. with miniatures.

So next question was what minis and what scale, again after trawling the internet I stumbled apon http://www.navwar.co.uk/ a site with a frankly outstanding range of ships from all periods at very reasonable prices.  The website is a bit of a pain to navigate and theres no pics of their models and the contents of the start packs is a bit vague and you actually have to print off your order and mail it to them.  It did feel like a bit of a gamble placing the order, but it has definately paid off.

This morning a whole bunch of 1/3000 ships arrived.

This is the contents of the WW2 early war British starter pack, all for the princley sum of £10.  Across the top you have the 6 capital ships (3 battleships, a battlecruiser and 2 aircraft carriers), the middle row is 4 cruisers and the final row is 8 destroyers.

I also ordered another 4 ships to sample their range, here we have the HMS Ark Royal (WW2), HMS Dreadnought (1906), HMS Warrior (1860) and HMS DAring (2007).  I wanted the ark royal to add to my WW2 fleet, and the other 3 are the ships in my (admittedly not very knowelgeable) opinion that are the most revolutionary designs in royal navy history.

I'm really pleased with these, and whilst I can't comment on how acurate they are to my eye they all certainly have the feel of the ships they represent.  Another nice touch is the way they all come with a little info sheet with all the ships vital statistics.

heres a few pics of some of the ships so you can see for yourselves.

HMS Ark Royal

HMS Warrior.  The sails meant there was some consrtuction involved in this whereas all the others are one piece castings.

Here we have HMS Daring (in the background) and HMS Dreadnought, one thing that supried me was how close they were in size, although according to the info sheets Dreadnought displaced almost twice as much.

I don't think these are going to take that long to paint and I'm hoping to have them all done by the end of the week.