Ships and Planes

The Ships

Bit of a departure for me this. At least partly. One of the books that I fairly recently bought was a bargain from Naval and Military Press. It wasn't something that I was looking for but because it was great price it was a good opportunity to spread my wings. The book in question was Lepanto by Nic Fields. [Insert barrel-scraping pun about  the French version of Puss in Boots].

It's a great introduction to the subject, at least from my point of view being a complete novice. It's broken into three main parts. The first concerns the various parties and factions involved. The second part deals with the nuts and bolts of the technology, the men and how galley warfare worked. The final part covers the lead up to the battle and the actual combat and its aftermath.

There is a fourth part which describes some of the stories of participants, which included the Spanish Golden Age writer Cervantes. 

The Planes

Bit of a ruse this because the planes in question aren't flying machines but the drawings of a fortress I am planning to build. These are rough (very rough) attempts at drawing using the guide given in Duffy's Fire and Stone. I did two versions on spare pieces of A4 paper I had lying around. A4 works because it is about 30cm in length, which is a bit shorter than a mile in the ground scale of my preferred battle rules, where 2cm = 100 yards.  This would allow for a pretty big city. From memory, I think Prague in the mid-18th century was about a mile long excluding the Kleine Seite.

The idea is to create a template on paper, and then to use this to cut out the material for the walls.

The Duffy guide (based on one of Vauban's 'systems') has bastion faces of 50 toises (100 yards). Or in other words 2cm. All the angles are worked out so the flanks of each bastion covers the face of the neighbouring bastion. The first drawing came out more 'wonky' than I would like. For example, bastion #3 in the picture below could be moved so the apex is further 'north'. However, I'm not that bothered about a really regular shape as nothing is in reality.

The first system. I can see here that I haven't drawn in the walls joining bastions 8-9 and 9-10.

The second attempt was to get bastions on a bigger scale. The reason for this is to fit my 3cm wide artillery bases in the bastions. I doubled the scale so that the bastion faces are 4cm long. The problem is that where the outer trace takes a sharper angle, the bastion neck is very narrow and the gun bases might still not fit. Allowing for the depth of the walls I really don't think I can go less than 4cm long faces to have an internal length of 3cm. I personally don't think this looks as good as the smaller scale with more bastions.  Another advantage of the larger scale is it will look better with my 10mm ECW and AWI figures.

The second system

Both versions are also deficient in three key aspects:

1. No gates
2. No river - there probably should be at least one waterway involved
3. No covered way or ravelins etc.

1. could be fairly easily addressed. For 3. I need to plot the whole thing on a bigger sheet of paper. 2. is a bit trickier and will need more thought. I think I need to look at several examples of city plans from the period. Also I need to look at how many had the earlier Italian style bastions with retired flanks and how many had the straighter 'later French' style, especially as I seem to be basing a lot in the Italian theatre these days. Though to be honest, the thought of carving recurved bastion flanks scares me.