Building the Fleet

Tonight I started in on the WWII coastal forces I picked up at GenCon. These fights were the real spur to get me back into wargamming so it's appropriate that I start with them. The fact that they're also a snap to paint up (mostly shades of grey) was another motivator.

I had a couple of ships by Skytrex and a bunch of others by PT Dockyard. Skytrex is traditional metal while PT Dockyard casts in resin. This was my first time working in resin and, I'm sorry to report, it's clearly not my idiom. At 1/600th scale there's some very tiny, very fine bits to glue onto the models and on the Dockyard ships all these bits came suspended in a thin sheet of resin.

So the idea is that you cut the guns and stuff out from the sheet and then stick 'em on. All very simple in theory, but in practice it's way too easy to snap off gun barrels and sometimes the flashing is almost impossible to remove. The Skytrex stuff had it's fair share of delicate pieces, but at least getting them off the sprue wasn't a hassle.

So I suspect that my future purchases in this line will be of the Skytrex variety.

But aside from gluing my fingers together, I got them all finished and tomorrow I'll stick them on bases and prime them. I also put bases on a squad of my Spugs. I expect that the ships will go pretty quickly and once they're done, I'd like to paint up the basic foot troopers for the Spugs.