Project | Battle of Lake Erie (Part 4)

Large amounts of overtime work have kept me fairly busy and away from the hobby (one of them at least). To make sure stuff still gets done, I try to do at least one thing a night, even if it's rigging a single thread. It's paid off, even if it can be quite slow at times. I've got two more schooners done for the United States, and the last sloop-of-war for the British, which also happens to be the last square-rigged ship in this project. 

The sloop-of-war is finally wrapped up from back in part 2. I've covered how I do this conversion before, so I won't retread the same ground. I need ways to tell similar ships apart that don't have named sternplates, so I've been messing around with different solutions. I used a flag from the frigate set, to denote the ship as the flagship and to set her apart. It turns out that the scale looks better than the brig flag which I used on my previous sloop-of-war (man am I tired of typing that out). I'm sure it's ahistorical, but I stuck a blue pendant on her as well. Sue me. 

I went with white on the lower hull just for some visual variety, and I'm digging it. I'll definitely revisit this look on a larger ship at some point further down the line. I've got tons of 3rd and 1st rates that this would look great on. 

This time I opted to use sails from a frigate trimmed to fit. I left the mainsail just a touch oversized, so it doesn't quite line up with the spar underneath. Altogether though, tt looks a bit better than using the bomb ketch sails. Of course, I need to make sure I don't use up all my frigate sails in the process. 

I really like how the stern gallery came out on this one. I'm getting the hang of keeping the window framing quite clean and spiffy. Plus my greenstuff sculpting doesn't look half bad. 

Now on to the schooners. Both of these are for the Americans, which have a lot of schooners in this battle. To make things interesting, I converted one of them by removing the square rigged topsail and installing gaff rigged topsails on each mast, along with a new larger headsail.

This was very easy to do, I just took thin styrene sheets, sketched out shapes that would fit in the spaces I needed them to, then sanded until they fit. I put a little bit of a bend in them to suggest the movement of wind and to match the curve of the sails already present. 

It's hard to tell in these photos, but the bottom of the hull is the same dark green that I use for the inner hulls of my United States ships. It gives it a really lovely look in person, so that will be appearing on other ships. It's cool to see how many looks you can squeeze out with a fairly limited color palette. 

Finally we have the typical topsail schooner. She's painted with a more natural wooden color to her. 

I don't have very much left in this project, one final schooner for the Royal Navy, two more for the United States as well as a cutter. In the home stretch now.

-The Space Dinosaur