Wednesday 1 February 2012

Convoy PQ-19 - part 1

Back by popular demand!  I ran this Fletcher Pratt game at the Sheffield club on 25 January.  It was played on a cordoned-off area of the floor approximately 15 by 40 feet in size. (For those outside the Commonwealth, and and young people, that's 5x13 metres)
The scenario saw a British convoy bound for northern Russia come under attack from German surface units.  Poor weather had reduced visibility to 60 inches and grounded aircraft. 
The convoy was made up of 6 Merchant ships - all unarmed, escorted by 6 destroyers and 2 cruisers (1 heavy, 1 light). 
Eight players took part, along with a four-strong umpire team and 19 toy ships.  As usual I'll let the pictures tell the story...
The convoy with it's close escort of destroyers.
Laden with goodies for our brave comrades.  All of these are wooden scratchbuilds - mostly bought (really quite cheaply) from a toy dealer while the smaller white decked vessel was found on Ebay.
The destroyers are all Airfix Tribals.
HMS Ajax (left) and the escort commander's flagship, HMS Kent.
The convoy Commodore didn't like the initial setup and decided to spread things out a bit.  It may have had something to do with the repeated mention of torpedoes in the briefing...
Grown men playing with toy boats.  Destroyer Captains Gunter (left) and Bish (right) with Tony, the Commodore.  I still say he looks nothing like Lionel Ritchie...
Tony's freighters plodded along at only 12 kts. 
Frank, the escort commander posing with my rather splendid (Soviet) officer's cap.
 The Brits were given several turns of moving to get the hang of things and sort out their desired formation.

Coming next - the baddies!

14 comments:

Paul said...

Goodness Tim, you are Mr Megapost lately, I can hardly keep up.

Sail on Lionel!

David Crook said...

Hi Tim,

Shaping up very nicely - I like the scratch built merchantmen.

Looking forward to seeing the opposition and am expecting something rather large 9and probably armed with obscene amounts of 11" guns....;-)

Or maybe not....

I also think that 'Lionel Ritchie' should have been made the Commodore....;-)

All the best,

DC

Paddy said...

Good stuff Tim! Hope you can persuade the hall you play in to lay blue lino at some point - that would top it off nicely.

Where's HMS Ajax from - obviously not a kit - is it a Mike Yarrow special?

Tim Gow said...

Paul
As you know, my posts are driven by photos. If there are toys to photograph the posts will surely follow!

Tim Gow said...

David Crook
You may just be right....

Tim Gow said...

Paddy
The parquet floor is actually rather nice - I expect F-P would have felt at home on it! 'Ajax' is in fact an old hollow cast metal model I picked up a few years back. It looks a bit like a shrunken 'County' so makes a decent stand-in for a light cruiser.

Paddy said...

HMS Ajax looks good. Now if your convoy ever needs an Escort Carrier then I've just made the connection that Magister Militum sell the US Bogue Class Escort Carrier - 8 of which were lend-lease to the UK as the Attacker Class (and others as the Ruler Clas). So this gives us a perfect 1:1200 model for HMS Pursuer, HMS Battler and HMS Fencer etc..

Tim Gow said...

Paddy
Thanks for the heads-up, but £16! I will have a much cheaper escort carrier appearing soon...

Paddy said...

Can't wait.

Peter Douglas said...

Tim

Looks good. The one thing I always worry about is the danger of ships getting stepped on. How did you avoid it?

PD

Tim Gow said...

Peter Douglas
Great care! Threats help too, of course. Fear of such damage and it's inevitability - is why I won't spend a fortune (or a great deal of time) on individual ship models.

Peter Douglas said...

Tim

The first naval miniature game I played was as a 13 year old. It featured Victorian ironclads and I nearly had to buy the scratch-builder a pack of ciggies when I knocked HMS Hercules over - luckily her rigging (and thus my pocket money) survived intact.

PD

Tim Gow said...

Peter Douglas
Clearly I have a cheaper hobby than smoking - as all but one of the ships in this game cost less than a packet of 20...

Peter Douglas said...

Tim

Yes but sin taxes have driven the price per pack up since I was 13.

Peter