Tutorial | Making a Brigantine for Black Seas

Black Seas has a great set of models, but if there's one ship type you get a lot of, it's brigs. Not that there's anything wrong with brigs. It's just that, at least in terms of plastic models, you jump from tiny little un-rated brigs up to 5th rate frigates. And there's also a jump from the even more minuscule gunboats to the brig. Yes, there are resin models that fill those gaps, but they are harder to acquire as you have to get them direct from Warlord Games, which gets expensive, or hope you get lucky on Amazon or Ebay. Luckily, other folks have noticed this problem and have converted up some solutions. This is my attempt.  

The basis for my conversion comes from JJs All at Seas conversions. He does some excellent work on the 1/700 scale ships from Black Seas. For this conversion you'll need 2 brigs. The below image is from his video tutorial of this process that shows the cuts you're going to make on the two separate ships. The red on one ship and the blue on the other. 

Two normal brigs

After the cuts are made: note that you do not make both cuts on each ship

I used a hobby saw to make the cuts. A mitre would have been handy to try to keep the cut at 90 degrees, but I didn't have one and so I eyeballed it. I got close enough, nothing some light sanding couldn't handle. What you really want to be careful with is making sure that the cut is perfectly straight across the ship, otherwise you end up with some wonky angles or you have to do more shaving than you'd like. 

Then you take the short bow and put it with the short stern and vice versa with the long parts. Now you have a smaller 14-gun brig and a larger 22-gun brig when compared to the 18-gun brig as standard. At this point it's up to you exactly what you want this ships to be. I've seen some people make cutters out of the 14-gun ship, but I chose to go with a brigantine. The larger ship will become a sloop-of-war, also known as a 6th rate. Set that aside for now, we'll work with that later. 

To make this part easier, use plastic glue. It'll melt the join and make it a bit smoother and fill in some of the gaps. This isn't too much of an issue on the brigantine, but the sloop gets a pinched in waist that'll have to be filled in, so anything you can do to minimize that will help. I didn't have to use very much greenstuff for the brigantine but I did for the sloop-of-war. 

Now on to the masts. For the brigantine you just need the mizzen-mast from the brig kit, plus some extra plastic rod that's the same diameter. I hade some leftover spears that I used, but styrene does just as well. 

Cut the mast right underneath the lowest spar. Try to make this clean and straight, as you'll use both parts. 

Take the part with all the spars and add a cut of rod underneath that's about the same length as the part that you cut off. Then take the lower part and glue on a rod on top. I tapered the top with some sand paper to give it a tip. You keep this bottom part so that the spanker booms can still glue on to the mast. And that's it, you can now put these masts onto the brigantine. 

I rigged it more or less like a standard brig. For sails I used the mizzen sails from the brig, and then trimmed the ratlines from that kit to fit. I thought about taking one of the jib sails and putting it above the spanker, but it wasn't really looking good to me so I decided against it. 

The ship technically does get mentioned in Black Seas, but for whatever reason they made didn't give it any rules. Instead, they gave rules for a barque, which is supposed to be a 3-masted square rigged ship that's bigger than a brig, and made it weaker. So I'll use the rules for the barque but still call it a brigantine. 

Here's the brigantine when compared to the normal brig. You can see that it's just a bit smaller, and carries much less sail. It fills a nice space between the brig and the single masted cutter (which I don't own yet but plan to eventually). This will be good for un-rated ship actions so that there's a little more variety here in the small scale. I painted it up to look pirate-y as I figured that this would be the size of ship most pirates could really attain. 

-The Space Dinosaur