"Imperial Chinese Navy Chen Yuen 1894 - S-Model, skala 1/700 " Topic

"Do not embrace, I do not distinguish, even names I can not remember. And yet some of them had episodes in both fleets, where the slightly changed name. Mm-hmm. Kosmos.

Chinese (?) Company S-Model has offered models of several of these oddities-brzydaków. After a long and careful deliberation I chose Chen Yuen. Reason: because I firmly grotesque, because he has a lot of plaques, because lufki."
Using translator.

Bizarre model?

From here
link

Amicalement
Armand

Great little models. S-Model (plastic) and Ocean Moon (resin) have released the whole Chinese fleet for the 1894-95 battles. Ocean Moon is now doing the same with the Japanese fleet, to which you can add Seals Models and Model Krak if you're impatient.

That allows you to fight the Battle of the Yalu River on a 1:1 ship base. The fleets are small (15-50), the big ships aren't too big (10-15cm), and show a lot of variety, from old fashioned and big freight ships to small gun- and torpedo boats.

Philo Norton McGiffin was present and has left us a nice eye witness account about the look of the ships going into battle (quite different from the parade look on most boxes). There are several recent Chinese books about the topic, but the most English title is Olender's "The Sino-Japanese Naval War 1894-1895".

Cheers.

Many thanks for your guidance my friend!. (smile)

Amicalement
Armand

Sure. What makes this battle even more interesting for us wargamers, is that it's a great What-If.

The Chinese lost because their fleet commander was incompetent and their ammunition useless because of onshore corruption (some grenades even had sand instead of powder!).
But the training, drill and motivation of the crew in both fleets was high, with the Chinese perhaps having the upper hand in fire-fighting. Ships' captains were also on a par, with both fleet seeing a similar small number of commanders ignoring orders.

The Chinese crews put a great number of hits on the Japanese ships, but the great majority of those hits were duds. Also, the battle plan of the Chinese commanders was all wrong. So these two combined made the Chinese lose the battle. In other words, a great What-If: because the players will be the commanders, and they won't use a special 'save' roll for all those duds.

Cheers.

Hi All,

Here is a model made by my late father of Chen Yuen. He made it out of wood sometime around 1976.The other ones are made of layers of card and they date from before that. Most of the plans that he used came from Jane's Fighting Ships.

Been there, done that in 1/700.

link

Now that these models are available I may go there again. :)

Modelkrak are hard to get ahold of nowdays and require a lot of work, btw. A belt sander is essential!

VIrtualscrachbuilder, I will say it again- your work is fantastic!

@Kropotkin- your father´s work is very nice, and they make a great (and useful) keepsake.

I have both fleets in 1/3000, and Yalu is a battle I love to re-fight.

I find as the Chinese I can win quite often if I use the more modern line of battle tactics, but if I use the pre-1890s end on tactics I am, so to say, sunk. Of course I make no allowances for the alleged cement-filled shells and less than enthusiastic behavior of some of the Chinese captains.

The S-model looks great by the way!

Thanks! I do love Kropotkin303's father's stuff as well.

Thanks guys for your remarks.

I seem to remember that the wooden ships were made from Basswood and that dad chose it because of the amazing fine-ness of the grain, which would have been important when shaping ships of this scale.

Excellent ships!

Amicalement
Armand