Well, another one bites the dust.

The painting diary is not yet updated, but I've finally finished the British foreign stations in 1914 project. 45 ships plus sundry extras. This started with me getting the ships to fight Coronel and Falklands, which are neat small historical actions (even though Falklands is almost ungameably one-sided).

Never one to do the obvious thing, I thought about expanding my diminutive fleets. As almost the entire German foreign stations force was present at those two battles, it was a simple matter to buy the rest of the cruiser force. To complement them, I decided to paint the entire British counterpart.

Luckily, Doug Thompson had done most of the legwork for me. His excellent list is available on the net at http://www.gwpda.org/naval/fdrn0002.htm

All that remained was to get the classes of each ship (Conway's helped here, plus some invaluable help from the guys at TMP) and map them to NavWar's order codes, which is not always as simple as it sounds -- NavWar is in the habit of renaming ship classes when it suits them (e.g. the 1902 Devonshire -class is sold under the name Argyll, possibly to avoid confusion with the 1927 Devonshires). Phil at Spirit Games once again proved invaluable in obtaining the objects of my curiosity.

The project took roughly six months to finish, which is pretty fast by my standards, especially when I'm not working on a deadline. I have to admit I spent much of that time painting something else or even not painting at all, but as I said, I wasn't on a deadline.

Painting ships is a fun diversion for two main reasons: First, the painting techniques and styles that work with 1/3000 ships are completely different from my usual fare of 28mm figures.

Second, it's very fast to produce results. Even apart from the all-black German destroyers, warships at this scale consist of just a couple of colors (unless you feel like trying your hand at dazzle camo schemes). Painting a complete squadron is a matter of a few hours only.

Now, the remaining problem is where to go next? The British currently enjoy an overwhelming superiority over the poor Germans. Should I move to something completely different, like Imperial Russian navy in the Baltic? Or should I build on the current forces? Unfortunately, even the US Pacific and Asian fleets were pretty tiny in 1914. Apart from Japan, the others basically just had the odd ship here and there.

Comments welcome.

P.S. Preliminary pictures are in the photo section, but I intend to do a new photo shoot and a full pictorial.