Out of the Ruins...

Today saw the completion of the fourth and last rural winter ruin. It is a fairly straightforward rectangular structure capable of fitting a T34 tank inside.

Then, despite it being 24°C and 95% relative humidity here today, it snowed...

Also, over the weekend the Austrian and Italian Navies from 1866 took to sea again. It was another bad day for the Italian Navy.

It Was a Bad Day for the Italian Navy...

On Sunday we played an ironclad game.

Seven Austrian ironclads and two wooden ships, took on six Italian ironclads and two wooden ships.

The Italian fleet before the shooting started

The Austrian fleet manoeuvred around a area of shallow water. On the port wing, two ironclads (Salamander and Erzerzog Ferdinand Max) and a wooden ship (Swartzenburg) steamed around the shoals. In the lead of the starboard wing were three ironclads (Prinz Eugen, Habsburg and Kaiser Max). To the rear were two ironclads (Drache, Juan de Austria) and a wooden ship (Kaiser).

The Italians steamed out in two groups on the starboard side were the ironclads Re di Portigallo, Principe di Carignano, Castelfidardo  and the wooden ship Gaeta. The port wing consisted of the ironclads Affaodatore, Ancona, Re d'Italia and the wooden ship Garibaldi.

The Italian Starboard wing was in action first, but found itself facing five Austrian ironclads and a wooden vessel. The Italians opened fire first at long ranges, but caused little or no damage.

The Austrian ships engaged and caused some damage, but when Habsburg rammed Re di Portigallo...

...she sent her straight to the bottom.

Castelfidardo then rammed Kaiser Max and while she did inflict considerable damage she failed to sink the Kaiser Max and suffered badly herself and lost her ram in the process.

Meanwhile the third Austrian command swung around another shoal to engage the other Italian wing. Drache swung to port but was rammed by Affondatore and sank.

Juan de Austria then headed for Ancona, ramming her midships and sending another Italian ship to the bottom. However, Juan de Austria was then caught in a crossfire from three Austrian ships and was sent to the depths herself.

The Italians sent Garibaldi to boost their collapsed starboard wing, but her wooden hull fared badly against the ironclads. Despite a desperate fight, she was soon lost. 

Only two Italian ships remained at this point - Affondore and Re d'Italia, both in reasonable condition, although the former was only slowly getting up to speed after her ramming of Drache.

The wooden ship  Kaiser took on Re d'Italia. She did some damage, but suffered more. However Kaiser was a big ship and could take the damage. She took a risk and steamed directly in front of the Italian ironclad and caught her in a bow rake, causing serious damage with a heavy broadside. Then Re d'Italia rammed Kaiser, but (just) failed to do enough to sink her.

In the process Re d'Italia broke off her ram. Kaiser fired again and just failed to sink the Italian. Meantime Affondore fired the killing shot on Kaiser, before the other Austrian ships despatched her.

Re d'Italia, the only surviving Italian vessel, limped away while the Austrian crews broke out the Schnapps!

It was a very bad day for the Italian Navy!

SMS Habsburg and SMS Prinz Eugen lead the victorious fleet back to Venice for victory celebrations (and repairs) 

Thanks to John (or Johann since he was playing an Austrian) for the additional photographs.

Ironclads in Action

Continuing my recent efforts to turn some rarely used collections out of the comfort of their storage boxes, I decided to get the 1866 Italian and Austrian Navies out onto the table for the first time in eleven years (although some of these models did masquerade as French warships in my alternate history of the French in Mexico).

I really had forgotten what great models these are, but one of the things that has kept them in their boxes has been the rules we have used. Since the 1990s we have used the Jackson Gamers "Ironclad Gunboat" rules (LINK) for our American Civil War ironclad games. They have really worked well for us, but Civil War ironclads had relatively small batteries (up to ten guns) whereas the ocean-going ships of 1866 had substantially bigger batteries of mixed types - SMS Kaiser carried 108 guns. Working out the damage potential of a broadside from a mix of rifled and smoothbore guns at varying ranges became a tedious task of counting how many guns could penetrate the armour and then calculating their effect, while separating out the guns that could not penetrate and calculating their effect separately.

So I decided to simplify the firing mechanics. Instead of calculating on an gun by gun basis I settled on three battery sizes - large, standard or small - and balanced out the blend of gun types and ranges by weighting those batteries with a higher proportion of rifled guns. The net result was to create a gunnery factor for each ship. That factor is compared to the armour rating of the target and then a dice result against an effect chart determines the damage done. I still like the original idea of a Critical or Lucky hit result that could see greater loss, damage to steering or even a magazine explosion, so I have retained them along with the movement, ramming and boarding rules.

So today we ran a game to test the changes. I set up a simple game with three ironclads and two wooden ships on each side. The Austrians had better armoured ships than the Italians, but the Italian ships were better armed. 

The Affondatore had rammed and sunk the KaiserMax, while Habsburg passed to Afondadore's stern.

Re d'Italia tries to force its way between Kaiser Max and Habsburg

The Austrian ironclad Prinz Eugen steams between Garibaldi snd Gaeta 

Habsburg and Prinz Eugen steaming forward

The Italian squadron

Affandatore

The game was a lot of fun and proved the effectiveness of the modifications.

Annual Gaming Event - Day 5 - Ironclads - 1866

Sunday dawned sunny, but the wind had shifted to the south and blew cold. We were up at around 7:00 for our last day. Breakfast was served at 8:00 and afterwards we cleared out our rooms and packed most of our personal gear into the cars.

As per tradition the last day's game was a naval one. This one the same as the last couple of years, Italian and Austrian ironclads from the War of 1866. The game was somewhat fitting given that this year represents the 150th year anniversary of the Battle of Lissa, the only clash between the two navies, and only major battle between ocean going ironclads.

The scenario had six Austrian ironclads plus two wooden ships attempting to head off a flotilla of six Italian ironclads and two wooden ships that were attempting to join the main Italian fleet at Lissa. The rules used were those of the Jackson Gamers.

The action started with both sides pushing their wooden ships off to fight each other, away from potential damage of the ironclads. The first shots went to the Italians, whose ships had more rifled guns and thus a greater range, but first blood went to the Austrians when the relatively Italian ironclad Re di Portogallo was rammed simultaneously port and starboard amidships by Erzherzog Ferdinand Max and Salamander, sending the Italian ship to the bottom. 

The sinking of Re di Portogallo ... before...

...and after!

But the Austrian ships were stopped dead and had to back away from the wreckage and soon became targets for the Italian ships who shot them to pieces and then rammed and sank them too.

 But then two other Italian ironclads succumbed to ramming and sank.

Meanwhile the wooden ships circled each other. The SMS Kaiser, a 92-gun ship was poised to do massive damage to the smaller Italian vessels when a lucky shot struck her steering and she had to turn hard to starboard for six turns. The Italian ships hounded her and SMS Radestsky until one of the Italian ships was halted by damage to her engines. She was then an easy target for the other Austrian ships and eventually a critical hit saw her magazine blow up and down she went. 

At the end of the game only a single Italian ship, the Re d'Italia, was afloat. She sailed off towards Lissa with only minimal damage. The Austrian had lost four of their six ironclads and one of their wooden ships.

With that we packed away the ships, collapsed the table and swept out the garage. We had one final lunch and our gaming event can to an end. It is always the same, there is a year's planning and anticipation and it is all over so quickly. We packed the cars with the last bit of gear and headed off - well not so quickly for me because a flat battery delayed my departure by an hour.

Then as we drove into Auckland, up the Southern Motorway, in a stop-go traffic jam that saw us travel a mere 10 km in 40 minutes, we got a rude reminder that we were home.

The Count for the Year

Well it is the last day of the 2014 and I have finished the year by making four small Masai houses for the WWI in East Africa. This is part of a planned Boma that I hope to have finished by the time I go back to work on 5 January.

With those four buildings, 15 Franco-Prussian French infantry and nine Austro-Prussian Austrian hussars completed in the last couple of days (the latter two items had been sitting around in a partly finished state for some months), it is time to tally up all of the hobby work for the year, and what a busy year it has been - possibly the busiest for ten years or more.

Since my last tally in July, the count of new items completed is:

Ten bases of woods, around 5.6 metres of hedges, a large farm house, 4 x Masai huts, 4 x kopjes, 37 x British Crimean guardsmen, 58 x Crimean Highland infantrymen 4 x Crimean mounted officers, two Crimean British guns and 8 crew, 72 x Russian Crimean infantry, 33 Franco-Prussian French Infantry, 9 Austro-Prussian War Austrian hussars, 2 x scratch built Krupp 4.7inch howitzers, 20 x gabions, 4 x Russo-Japanese Russian field guns (each with five crew), 6 x Russo-Japanese Japanese field guns (each with three crew).

This gives a grand total for the year of:

464 foot figures

45 mounted figures

23 guns or HMG models

16 scratch built vehicles or weapons

37 scratch built buildings

28 1:600 scale ships (complete with that cursed rigging)

64 pieces of terrain

5.6 meters of hedges

Tarawera Weekend - Day 5 Sunday 7 September

This the last day of our magnificent event for another year. As tradition would have it this day's game would be a naval game. This time it would be ironclads from 1866 - Austro-Hungarian against Italian.

With breakfast consumed and gear packed for the return home we set up for play.

On the Austrain side there were 11 ships, seven ironclads, one wooden ship of the line, two frigates and a gunboat, while the Italians had eight ironclads and two wooden frigates. 

For the next three hours these ships swirled around two small rocky outcrops in the Adriatic blasting and ramming each other at short range.

In the end the honours were even. Each side lost two ironclads and one wooden ship. Both sides were deemed to have withdrawn to lick their wounds.

Then it was time to pack the table away, pack the last things into the cars and have lunch.  Then our great week of gaming was all over - what took ten months to prepare for was over in what seemed like no time at all. 

At around 14:30 we hit the road, arriving home a little after 18:00.