E9 Sea trials. Prelude to the Dardanelles

I built two 1914 E Class Submarines for the forthcoming attack on the Dardanelles.  E11 is currently having her control board rebuilt, but E9 is ready to go.  In my plan I set out the Sea Trials as a check on the rules mechanisms for the control panel.  

On passage from the UK Naismith's E11 developed a crack in her main shaft and was refitted in Malta undergoing Sea Trials before heading off to the first of her historic missions through the Dardanelles and into the Sea of Marmara.  Well it is my E9 that is ready first.  Strictly speaking it isn`t really known if E9 was fitted with a deck gun.  E11 certainly wasn`t, but my E9 is, and is therefore (technically) the better equipped of my two subs...

Sea Trials

Move from dock to mid channel.

Dive the boat.

Periscope depth

Use the periscope

Move underwater to firing position.

Target the Wreck with a torpedo from Tube 1

Surface the boat

Full speed to target range.

Use the deck gun to destroy the target.

 E9 and E11 moored alongside their depot ship Ganges.   

 The control panel.  Engines are rung off.  Hatch is open.  The Submarine is surfaced stationary.

 The engines are rung for slow ahead.  The rudder is starboard 20.

 E9 moves into mid channel.  A 4 inch move represents about a quarter of her surface speed. 

In action the deck rails would be removed, but I modelled them here to make E9 look more distinctive.   

 Rolling a 6 for this turn's movement I have to draw an event card.  Turns out that Able Seaman Harpo Marx has gone crazy again.  We are on the surface however so it has no effect.

The Dive begins.  Gauge is set to 25 feet.  The hatch is sealed.  The engines are switched from diesel so that the batteries will now begin draining.   

E9 at periscope depth.  The depth dice is turned from 1 to 2.   

The Periscope is raised.  Battery power begins to go down.

On the Periscope it's the target.  A Merchant ship moving at 10 knots.  The dice at movement also indicates another event card.  Its our long suffering Scottish Chief Engineer.  We must ring for a slower speed, but that would be necessary anyway to open the outer tube doors.  Not one of my better drawings.

With the speed at slow ahead the outer doors are opened.  The target is indicated, as is its speed and the offset. Strictly speaking the tubes are already loaded.    Our brave captain fires... at the unarmed merchantman.  One of the torpedoes can be removed from the control panel and transferred to the tabletop. 

Interestingly the Sea Trials required me to fire from Tube 1, and I have clearly fired tube 2 here...  Ooops. 

With thr torpedo fitting into a cradle to represent it skooshing through the water I dice to see if it is running straight.  Its a good one, on target.

A hit.  The damage will be catastrophic for the Merchant ship.  

The Submarine goes to 100 feet.  The depth dice is turned to 5.  That is its maximum operational depth.  Any deeper and interesting things will happen.

That gauge may well go to 165 feet but that is really optimistic.  Going deeper than 100 means you play the crush depth challenge with Edna, and she will kill you in the end...

Heading back to the surface.  Hatch still sealed until we surface.  Torpedo doors neglectfully left open, and I left the scope up! 

Surfaced.  Main hatch can now be opened.  Crewing the deck gun to finish off my target.    The engines are switched back to Diesel.   Electric batteries and Air begin to replenish.

E9 completes her Sea Trials and sets course for the Dardanelles.

The S-Boat and my rules design notes.

With its usual efficiency the Kriegsmarine designed the Schnell-boot or S-boat for their principal areas of operations, the North Sea.  As a class they were tough, seaworthy and very fast.  Much larger than the equivalent British MTB of 1940 they were designated "E-boats," the "e" meaning simply enemy.  They were better armed, and so superior that later Allied designs mimicked them.
My wargames MTBs are going to have their work cut out.

Beginning with the hull shape, cut from balsa and sanded into submission at 1mm to 1 ft,  I used the plans for a S-100 boat.  That meant that the bow had to be raised with a second piece of balsa, and the grooves for the torpedo launchers cut, almost to the waterline.

The rounded wheelhouse, in its aluminium cover was difficult to shape, and needed balsa, sanding and milliput to get the shape. 

The S-boat is a detailed model, requiring railings and canvas screens, as well as recessed weapons turrets and a mine laying rail. 

Once again I added a micro dice frame (even though it covers the mine laying rail over the stern.)

The S-boat is the only German WW2 Coastal forces model I have completed so far.  Even so this S 100 type (the hull is numbered S103) probably over matches my Vospers.  

This set me to considering my rules, and the design notes that will underpin them...

• The rules should be quick to play and easy, to learn, but give a simulation of Coastal Forces warfare.

• Personalities and leadership should be a factor in the game.

• Avoid book keeping and excessive detail. 

• Make the game mission driven. 

• I want my games to be playable as solo games, in a similar vein to Dan Mersey's Babbage rules.

•  My rules will have to work equally well on  a tiny table...  difficult one this.

• D6 is the only dice type I will allow.

Further notes...Instead of scenarios I will have Mission briefings, these are cards that include 1-3 encounter locations. A mission objective is located at the centre of the table, or else a nominated vessel at the centre.
Blinds
Aircraft strafes and bombing runs will cross the table in two turns.
Weather
Clock face vessel, aircraft appearance or event occurrence.
Combat should be swift and deadly, and e boats can take more damage than an MTB.
Damage inflicted on: engines, crew, command, hull, weapons, misc...rudder, props, raft, lifebelts, Jerry-can (fire) Aldis lamp.
Each hit causes some damage.

A pair of Vosper 73ft Motor Torpedo Boats

The 73 ft Vosper Motor Torpedo Boat was a pre-war design that was soon discovered to be woefully outclassed by the German S-boats.  With Torpedoes are the main armament they were not really intended to mix it with the heavier and faster diesel powered German craft, yet in reality they performed well.  This was mainly due to the different operational emphasis between the two forces.  The Royal Navy, as always, emphasised aggressive tactics, whilst for the Germans success was in the mission, and they were not in the business of fighting for fighting's sake.   

My Vosper 73ft MTBs with
the hull of an S-boat lurking
in the background.

My Vospers were built separately, and it shows.  I am very much still learning my craft in terms of scratch building these Coastal forces vessels.  For all that however they closely resemble each other and have the look I was going for.

I began with the hull in 1:300 (or more accurately at 1mm to 1 ft) cut from balsa strip, shaped and sanded.  The hull was scorched to give it a smoother look, and the cutaways for the torpedo recesses moulded.  I then began the bow section, with a second layer added.  The bow of the Vosper is higher than the stern, and the extra layer gives it the correct appearance.  Not that there are any weapons on the bow section.  The Vosper has an issue with forward firing!

The Superstructure was then added, in pieces, with a clear plastic window section that is painted silver behind it.  It just looks right.  The open bridge goes above this.   

Boat 27, with the tiny life raft on the fore-deck. 

The torpedo tubes are plastic cylinders cut with a sharp angle at the torpedoes business end.  I will fess up and admit that these are the plastic rod that holds an earbud together.  Thin slivers of these, cut crosswise form the lifebelts hung on the outside of the bridge superstructure.  In addition to this I used the same plastic rod to form the depth charge throwers, cut lengthwise, with a bamboo "barrel" shape painted in gunmetal to form the depth charge itself.

British Coastal Forces specialised in depth charge attacks.  Thrown accurately under the bows of the enemy they represented a devastating weapon.  Peter Scott's account of using this attack is one of the most exciting pieces of non fiction I`ve ever read.  It reads like a boys-own story of derring-do.#

The Vospers were given a pale cream deck colouring and a darker grey hull, representing an earlier war paint scheme.   The metallic fittings were finished in gun metal and the whole vessel varnished in satin.  

These models are for wargaming.  I added the dice frame to the transom intending that this should show the remaining flotation points for the vessel.  It does occur to me however that this may be better as a speed indicator.    

I have yet to add the Ensigns and some rigging, but essentially that's it.  The Vosper's are done.   
I`m quite proud of them.  

1:300 Coastal Forces Project

Since reading Robert Hitchins "We fought them in gunboats" as a library book back in the 1970s I have had a fascination for Coastal Forces wargaming.  When Skytrex first introduced their 1:600 range I collected quite a few different models, building up a force of 8 S - boat s,  8 MTBs, flak lighters, merchant ships, and even some larger destroyers.  They gave a great game.  My rules of choice were "Attack with Torpedoes" just the right mixture of playability and detail.

With the move to Cyprus I ruthlessly cut out any period which I had represented in two different scales.  I sold the 1:600 and the rules, as well as a few 1:1200, and retained the tiny 1:6000 models which I thought would allow me to game on a smaller table.

The 1:6000 are great at representing the larger ships, the Battle of the River Plate,  the Hunt for the Bismark, all look great... but the coastal forces in this scale are tiny and as such work well on one of my Admiralty charts, but pretty poorly on the tabletop.

After scratch building a 15/20mm scale Nile gunboat for Men Who Would be Kings, and reading "building waterline ship models" I decided to have a go at scratch building some WW2 Coastal forces, just to see if it could be done.   If the first model failed I would abandon the project... I told myself.

The first boat would be an RAF rescue launch, an early war 60 ft version, and since this would be my first model I wnated to make it unarmed.  The next issue was scale.  Turns out that 15mm to 1 ft is more or less 1:300 (or 1:285) scale.  Useful since this would allow me to crew the models with wargaming figures.

At 6cm long the rescue launch would be large enough to not be fiddly to maneuver,  but small enough to allow a reasonable size of table to be used.   Even at this stage I was thinking about writing my own rules to go with the project.

.

The plans for vessels like the launch are available online.  Very useful too, and I quickly aquired a thick 1 cm by 3cm by 100 ccm strip of balsa.  This would give me around ten vessels of varying size.  I reduced the plan view of the launch to 6cm on my laptop screen and traced the details I needed.  I could have simply printed this out of course!  The traced image gave me the shape of the deck.  I cut and sanded the resulting shape using the full plans as a guide.

Once I was happy with the shape of the hull I began on the superstructure.  Card and balsa formed and shaped gave me the look of the superstructure,  not perfect but passable.  I used filler to cover the joins, and ran a lighter over the result to get rid of any "hairy balsa" left behind.

The mast was fitted, using shaped bamboo, from a pack of kebab skewers.  The result is, if I dare say so, strong and stable.

The hull of boats like this seems to have been a dark blue.  I gave the upper works a slightly dark grey witj that yellow stripe around the top of the cabin. Edging the white painted numbers and letters in black fibre tip pen, I added more detail, and rigged the mast into place.

The life belts and milliput rescue raft were next, painted orange-red they give the model a colourful look.  Following that all I had to do was give the model a satin varnish coat, and fix on some hand drawn RAF pennants.

What's that?  Quiggles is down in the drink?  It's off to the rescue old boy!