So given that I just completed El San Francisco it is time to begin on the next round of ships. I have figures on the way too but while I am at my family's house I will make the most of having access to my materials to make ships, buildings and other larger things.
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| One ship complete... onto the next one. |
So what to do? Well there are a couple of other ships that I was working on:
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| 4 of the six are compete. The top left and top right are yet to be done. |
These ships are a small dhow and a pirate cutter crossed with a Greco-Roman warship. But these are relatively small projects and so I can think about what to do next. And for this I will look east, Far East.
| A junk. But junk it certainly is not |
Turns out it is rather hard to get a good set of boat plans for East Asian ships, or at least I am not that good at finding them. Anyway I have managed to download me some plans. I have three documents that allow me to build ships from the following countries.
- China: I have a plan (as part of a longer document) for a sea going junk used for trade. A larger project but certainly an interesting.
- Japan: I have got the plans for a Japanese Warship what were held by the French Maritime Museum. An interesting design but slightly harder to use given the fact the writing is hard to read and in French (which I can't read).
- Vietnam: Compiled during the Vietnam War I have a large document full of junk and sampan designs (this was to help the US identify potential smugglers - but it is very handy for me). Many of the ships and boats are quite small and so wouldn't be that diffucult a project.
I once had from the library a book that had a fair bit to say about Asian war craft. You might try something from Admiral Mahan USN. I've just googled the name, feeling sure he was the author of a history of naval warfare that I read several years ago, but I can't find that he wrote a comprehensive history after all.
ReplyDeleteYou might be interested in the very smallest vessels used in warfare - the knee-boat. This is (or was) a long, very narrow skiff-like thing that you knelt in with one knee, whilst the other leg 'walked' along the bottom to propel the boat. It was basically a shallow water fishing vessel. There was once in China a naval battle in which a war vessel was swarmed by boarders who attacked it from shore using knee-boats.
The book I got this from had quite a few pictures of a whole range of craft, from all over the world. I recall making some sampans for a friend's Chinese DBM army.
I will have a look. I guess a knee-boat might be too small. After all the ships are designed around allowing figures with bases to be placed on it. There was a comprehensive book: Junks and Sampans of the Yangtze river by a British guy. But I could not easily get hold of an e-book of that.
DeleteOther than that I will keep looking for plans. I am surprised by how hard these things are to find.