"Scratch Building Vauban Fortress" Topic

Has anyone plans, instructions, etc on scratch building a Vauban fort, or at least part of one section for 15mm War of Spanish Succession?

Or is there a site that has the same information. There are some photos of an excellent Vauban Fort section in Black Powder. This is sort of what I'm thinking of.

Try Christopher Duffy's Fire and Stone.

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He also has ideas on gaming a siege.

Best article I found on this subject was here :

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And my quick and nasty attempt at doing the same here :

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The tissue paper + PVA idea worked out well though. The tricky bit is getting the angles correct where the sloping walls meet. I took the original author's advice on this and kept most of the walls vertical, only sloping the fleches where needed. Its a pig of a job, but worth the effort.

As Mal pointed out at one stage, the actual walls of the fortress should be almost level with the surrounding ground, as the fortress itself is sunken in a 'moat' – so you dont see the walls sticking up in the distance.

Or try " Fortess – A History of Military Defence" by Ian V. Hogg link

Chapter 4 has "a compass and ruler" guide to drawing the plans, along with cross-section diagrams. I used this to make the masters for this 15mm version – link

Cheap alternative here

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The problem with commercially made (so called) 'Vauban' models is that they miss the point entirely of the function of the shape and construction.
The bastion trace system, of which Vauban was just one designer/builder, sought to minimise an attackers approach to defence works by keeping an attacker both at arms length and confused as to the shape of the work and the directions of fire from defensive positions. Ideally an attacker would break through on one front to find another set of works , then another either to its flank or behind (and stronger than) the original. It was not the inherent 'strength' of the work that was the drawback for an attacker, but rather the the amount of time it took to reduce the work before the enemy could relieve a siege.
By design these systems took up a far greater amount of space than the position they were defending.
The one common factor (generall speaking) was that the defensive walls were low or appeared to be low covered by an almost imperceptably rising work called a Glacis, which covered the outer wall.
Most models available seem to concentrate on angled stone walls, measuring their height from the bottom of the surrounding ditch. The thing is the walls may have been 30 feet high from the ditch but from the attackers point of view they were only abot 10 feet above the surrounding country side. Indeed designed to be almost imperceptable from an approach- Look at pictures of Bourtange (1745) from the surrounding fields for example. Another good example is the Fronten du Moulin (1775) at Maastricht where you cannot make out the defences at all from the bottom of the glacis 100 yds away.
There are Bastion trace works that are made up of huge angular walls, byut these are often on high ground where there was no chance of constructing a glacis – such as Vaubans works in the south of france or on the coastline (and Malta).
However, fortified places that were near army lines of operation were very low lying.
None of the examples shown above have modelled the Glacis at all and are way too tall. The whole point of the system was to minimise an attackers ability to bring artillery to bear – the stones they were built of were not miraculously stronger than medieval walls.
Your model should be low 2.5 cms high max quite deep and have a Glacis with a gentle rise from 0 to 2cms about 8 cms width.

I fully agree with WYEAYEMAN above.

One of the main functions of the design of the angles of the wall was to ensure that no point of the wall could not be brought under fire from another wall or bastion. Enemy sappers or miners could not set up at any point along the walls or bastions without coming under fire so that no place was safe.

Also the curtain wall should be higher than the ravelins and the rear of the ravelins should be open so that any occupying enemy could come under fire and be completely exposed. This would apply to any works in the ditch.

Most commercial productions do not represent this. The best I have seen is the 15mm Battleground from Magister Militum. I cannot speak for their 25mm range.

Wyeayeman and Broglie are correct about the purpose of the design of these type of defences. The raised glacis was intended to protect the curtain wall and prolong the amount of work that besiegers had to undertake in order to effect a breach.

I would like to point out that the Terrain Warehouse UK model

is the only one I am aware of that has a glacis. The ravelin model is also lower in height than the curtain wall, which maintains the appropriate constant gradient of the slope from the bottom of the glacis up to the parapet. The ravelin also has an open back.

When I designed these models I wanted to include as much of the style of the fortifications as was possible, given the limitations of ground scale and figure sizes. I eventually decided that including the more exotic of the outworks would be impractical, but it was essential to include a glacis and at least a ravelin.

All the other models that I have come across only curtain walls, bastions and some of the out works.

i will be attempting to scratchbuild part of a vauban fort
in 28mm! it might take a while, the bastions will be 6 inches high and 5 or more inches wide so this will give a perspective on the size it will end up as

Is this the 15mm fortress you are discussing, TableScape?
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P.S. Oops. I guess May 2012 was quite a while ago so I won't expect an answer. And it looks like a new company is retailing the fortress TableScape originally linked.

And if you're really handy (I'm not), then you can follow these models by scrolling down and searching through the different pages mainly using the "Older Posts" button.
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