Monday 16 January 2017

USN WWII Battle-wagons: USS South Dakota and USS Washington

Continuing on a nautical theme, but this time some 2400 years later after the age of the "Salamis trireme", I pulled out some old Navwar 1/3000 ships models from the attic. I had been working on (one of my many stalled projects, ahem) the Guadalcanal Campaign and long ago had made an initial start on the USN order of battle starting with the battleships (see below, USS South Dakota [top], USS Washington [bottom]):


Being impressed with the effects of the "gloss" followed by "mate" varnish, particularly for a certain satin, subtle shiny sea effect, I upgraded my previous paint jobs. The USS South Dakota and the bigger USS Washington fought a particularly interesting battleship v battleship night action at Guadalcanal in 1942 against the IJN Kirishima (and some heavy cruisers). A replay of this action is on the cards using the "Tokyo Express" board game.

Looks like my house will have a permanent "varnish" smell this year as I work around my existing painted ships improving the sea bases and tackling the "naval lead mountain".

2 comments:

Prufrock said...

Very nice!

BTW, thanks for your comments regarding the Fujimi IJN ships on my blog. They are mostly made up (not yet painted though), and are pretty good, too. I'll do a post with some pictures at some point so you can see what they look like. If you'd like a set, let me know and maybe we could do a swap or something.

Cheers,
Aaron

Geordie an Exiled FoG said...


Thanks for teh kind offer Aaron, however I think I have the ships in 1/3000 Navwar metal. I am envious because the modeller in me can see the plastic being put together in layers allows for thing that are impossible (even for GHQ and Lanton) in metal)

Looking forward to your posts :)