"What are sources for "Flat" paper ancient galleys?" Topic

I'm hoping to find some good sources of 2D 'flat' paper models of ancient galleys to use in some large battles.

I found some sets of Greek Triremes on the Junior General website, but I would like to have more variety of ship types in the fleet. Ideally, I would like to include merchant vessels, light warships (pentekonter, biremes), Quadremes, Quincremes, and the larger war gallies the Successors, Carthaginians and Roman Republic used.

If anyone knows of appropriate paper models I would appreciate their advice!

I'd love to know as well…

See if there is a vassal module for one of the Trireme type of games. If so the counters in the module may be useful. Vassal modules are actually zip files, rename them with .zip on the end to open them up.

For what scale are you looking? If you want smaller ships, which you probably do, since you looking for large battles, you might be able to use the counters from some of the older board games. I've never seen a good collection of top-down pics of e.g the Langston or Xyston galleys (most of the pics I've seen are either profiles of 3/4 views), but one might exist somewhere. If you could find one, that might be ideal.

If you want bigger (1/300) ships, you might be able to do something 2D with just the deck and oar pieces from the Roman Seas 3D models, but they'll look pretty odd without the sides/prows/sternposts. You might have to draw those in. Alternatively, I suppose you could build one set of the Roman Seas ships, take your own top-down pics of them, and then scale and print them to suit your needs.

That said, the 3D models look a LOT more impressive than 2D counters, and once you get the hang of it they're not too fiddly to put together. That would change quickly if you scaled them down much, though.

Doug

Drat, I should have been more specific – what I'm looking for are side-shot, fold-in-the-middle, models. The naval wargaming equivalent of paper character 'standies', not top-down counters.

Dynaman, elsrsyn, thanks for the help, I apologize for being too vague!

Elsyryn, you're right about 3D models being much more impressive (I have some Roman Seas paper models and some Tumbling Dice metal ships), it's just that I'm lazy ;) I want to try out an idea using about 4 dozen ships per side, but I don't want to put the time (or money) into expanding my 3D navies (which are currently tiny) unless the idea works. And a few local players are willing to play… 2.5D stand-up models seem like a decent compromise for the test run!

What about these. Print and assemble. These are fully 3D though.

Google Images will give you lots of galley images. There are a few side on views that would work nicely after scaling down.

I can't offer exactly what you want but do have some 2D galleys here …

link

They are 1/600th scale with a triere being about 75mm long.

Laser printed onto 160gsm card & designed to be glued to thicker card for playing.

Tony of TTT
tinytintroops.co.uk

Hi Tony, thank you for that suggestion. I think I'll try the approach Joker proposed (I'd really like the vertical dimension, if I can get it). If that doesn't work out I'll certainly take a look!

Bashy, thanks also. I have a few of the Hotz sets and I've constructed a few of the ships but I'm aiming for playing pieces close to 1/1200 (or even better 1/2400). They're not too hard to build at the original size but I shudder to think about trying to glue those tiny tabs after shrinking the template to 1/4 size!

what I'm looking for are side-shot, fold-in-the-middle, models

If you have the Roman Seas ships, why not just use the side pieces from those, scaled down, ignoring the other pieces? There will be a tiny bit of distortion in the long axis, since the bow and stern are meant to be bent inwards, but it should not matter much. Print one side on each side of a line and fold on that line, and that should give you a pretty spiffy two sided "tent" type ship model.

Doug

Elsyrsyn, that could certainly work, lots of waste space on each sheet, though, if I print them as-is (and I know the PDFs are locked to prevent cutting and pasting, I tried it once on one of the building sets when I wanted to make a relatively seamless custom building). I wonder if Eric Hotz would be willing to do a few sets of 'tent' models. I doubt doing that would cut into his sales of the 3D models, as they're very nice and anyone playing the Roman Seas rules would probably still want models that crew counters can be put in.

I'd buy nice looking sets in a flash if someone made any!

There are ways around the cut and paste locking. The old school way would be to cut and paste with … well … scissors and paste. Print a few sheets and cut out and paste (literally) just the pieces you want onto a blank sheet, then photocopy that at whatever scale you need. Some waste involved, but only at the beginning.

Doug

That is very true. Sometime old school is the best school ;)

Junior General has some

link

Ancients

Renaissance types

The boardgamegeek page for Metagaming's Ram Speed has some PDFs of simple cutout models in the files section:

link

You need to register on the site to download the files. There are some pictures of the models in action in the images section as well.

Thanks Toronto48, that's certainly what I'm looking for. Those might make a good base to work up some other ship types, too, although I'm a lousy digital artist.

Thanks also rhesse, I didn't know about those!

ramsravensandwrecks.blogspot.dk

My version of simple card ships.

PlasticViking3,

Those paper galleys look very sharp! There's a variety of other excellent galley-related stuff on your blog as well. Thanks for the link.

How feasible do you think it would be to take a similar approach to your 10cm galleys, but about 2.5cm?