Hobby | USS Constellation (1854)

If you purchase one of the various starter fleet boxes for Black Seas, inside you'll find plenty of plastic ships along with some metal bits. These metal bits let you customize your frigates and 3rd rates into bespoke famous ships. The United States has 3 normal sized frigates in their box: Congress, Chesapeake, and Constellation. Interestingly, they provide 3 stern plates and 4 figureheads. Intrigued, I looked into it. The figureheads match the USS Constellation, but there were two of them: the first one of the original six frigates, and the second a sloop-of-war from the American Civil War era. The stern plate and the carved wood figurehead belong to the sloop-of-war, which now sits in Baltimore. The more ornate, angelic figurehead matches the original Constellation. I set that aside for now, and I decided to work on the 1854 version.

A couple of things to note before we get started. The 1854 Constellation is a Civil War era ship, and therefore does not technically interact with any of the Napoleonic-era ships that Black Seas is set in. But, all of those Napoleonic-era ships didn't just disappear; a lot of them got upgraded and were kicking even up into the late 1800s. The 1854 Constellation also marks the end of the sailing era for the US Navy, so I think it's still a worthwhile ship to model. If Warlord ever makes a steam-era expansion for Black Seas, this ship will be ready to go.

Now, on to the model. The supplied stern plate is ugly. It's a chunky block of metal:

This doesn't even show how thick it is from the top: 

A random citizen's ship: not at all a criticism of their painting, which I think is great. More just a view of how absolutely chonky this stern plate is.  

One of the defining features of the 1854 Constellation is her rounded stern, so I carefully set out to carve the metal out, sculpt planking, and cut away chunks of the stern until we got something more like this: 

Of course I didn't take any photos of the bare metal, plastic, and greenstuff, that would have been too sensible. So you'll have to make do with the after photos. The actual ship doesn't have stern lanterns, but I decided to keep them as they added a nice pop of color. 

From there the rest of the ship is fairly standard. The only other work I did was to sand the hammock netting by the spar deck smooth. This allowed me to paint it black and make it look like a part of the hull, giving the whole ship a flushed-deck look when compared with the standard Warlord Games frigate. This is a very simple trick that gets you quite a different look. 

I painted her to match her current livery. Technically, she doesn't have gunport lids, but I didn't want to spend the time carving them off, so I painted them red to match my other American ships. 

With all this combined and her paint scheme, I do see how ships slowly evolved, as, while subtle, she does look different from all of the other ships I've painted before, like she has slightly more modern lines. So as far as labels go, I'm putting this one into the Civil War camp. She served in that war as a training ship, but I'll still use it in games of Black Seas as a sort of what if? even if her armament isn't modeled in game rules.

-The Space Dinosaur