The start of two fleets - 1/6000 Naval Wargaming

 Sometime, over the lockdown period, I was lucky enough to be linked in YouTube to a channel "Drachinifel". If you like finding out information about anything warship related from 1950 or before, I highly reccomend listening to him. Anyway, (and for the record no I'm not on comission!) this ignited my desire to do Naval Wargames again.

But what scale, and what period?

This was quite easy. 1/6000 is fairly cheap, easy to paint and you can have battles at a decent scale, without needing a tennis court. I purchased Naval Thunder: Clash of Dreadnoughts, read the rules and then I treated myself at Christmas to some WWI ships. This week I've painted them. Are they small?

It should be noted this is a destroyer, but gives a sense of the size!

Possibly.

If you want some quick and easy models to paint though? Amazing! Quick spray of grey, wash of Nuln Oil, paint the deck, wash, and then touch up with grey. All done!

So here's what I have so far:

For the Kaiserliche Marine we have 7 battlecruisers, an armoured cruiser and 8 torpedo boats. The battlecruisers are SMS Derfflinger, Lützow, Hindenburg, Von Der Tann, Seydlitz, Moltke and Goeben. The armoured cruiser is the Blücher. 

A proud collection of ships!

This is the core for a few refights, and a few hypothetical encounters.

Not going to lie, only noticed I'd put one on back to front when I clipped the photo.

The only minor thing with ships this small, is identifying them and putting them the right way around! As you can see from the ships above, you need to be careful as one of these ships is heading the wrong way! Fortunately, they are yet to be glued down, so for me this is easy to fix. The back of the base will have a number on, which will help identify the ship, but I may need to add a larger base to make identification easier. The destroyers in Naval Thunder represent flotillas, so I'm going to grab some circular bases and base a few on.

The Royal Navy forces are smaller, at the moment, though reinforcements are incoming. So they consist of HMS Tiger, Lion, Princess Royal, Queen Mary and 8 destroyers.

Splendid ships!

The Royal Navy ships are easy to identify, but that's more likely because the British built more ships in individual classes.

From Top to Bottom: HMS Queen Mary, HMS Lion and HMS Princess Royal. By the end of the war, only two would be left, as Queen Mary would detonate at Jutland.

 

Two destroyers accompany HMS Tiger

Once I get the Queen Elizabeths, this is the core of the Battlecruiser fleet, so I'm pretty happy with these!

It took me less than a week to paint everything you've seen on this page. If you're looking for a easy painting challenge - 1/6000 might be for you!