"I started with a starfort and ended up with an island!" Topic

Once again I have lost control of the process and gone down an unexpected path. I just wanted to build a starfort for my 1/350th scale navy to duel with from time to time and things just took their own course. link

Looks more like an atoll in the Pacific than anything else.

To paraphrase Michaelangelo, our job is just to let the terrain pieces come out the styrofoam.

Nice work. Looking forward to seeing it painted!

Nice! Looks good even before painting and flocking. Excellent secluded port for your small squadron.

You beat me to it Prisco, It looks great already.
Like the use of the Monopoly buildings.

That's some great looking work, but given the number of houses and hotels, it would be a game-losing proposition just to land on the island.

Very nice work.

Monopoly houses? I find those to be somewhere between 1/600 and 1/1000 scale. Don't you have piles of 1/300 scale buildings in the dusty storage? AFAICT they just grow in the corners….

I love how your projects expand in unplanned directions.

If you decide not to keep the whole U, I recommend keeping that peninsula with the fort, and maybe carving a nice shoreline with a dock for the townspeople to use and a beach for the raiders to land on.

- Ix

Yellow Admiral,

This whole thing just kind of happened. Right now nothing is glued down except the old Crusader castle (just why I saw fit to glue that in place is not clear) so I'm not committed to any particular course of action. If I decide to keep the whole thing I will have to decide whether or not to base it, even as sturdy as blueboard is this shape might not endure much handling.

There is a pathway up from the water to the town on the inside of the bay and I was planning on building a quay to deal with freight. I will check in The Vault for those lurking 1/300 buildings, otherwise I might have to make those as well.

I read the title and a dark mustached with glasses face popped into my mind, I just knew who wrote it before even looking down to the authors name. Funny!

Some days I think projects have a mind of their own – other days I know they do.

Looking forward to seeing this painted and flocked.

Great start.

Hi

Beautiful model and as my terrain master once said "if it worth doing it's worthy overdoing". But one question how does the fort's gun fire at ships? they cant be depressed to fire at the waterline.

Wackmole, Ah you have seen the failure of my vision…….I'm still working on resolving that issue.
A water battery (or two) perhaps?

Most seaside forts had bastions and batteries built at lower levels that conformed to the shoreline in a very un-star-like fashion. Regular features like triangular bastions (and ravelins and demi-lunes and so on) were mostly common along the landward side, where infantry assault might occur and artificial construction had to substitute for the absence of natural features. Forts like Castillo San Marcos and San Juan de Ulua are exceptions probably because they were built on flat land right down near/on the water. In places with rugged natural features there tended to be batteries and bastions and towers built on spits, huge rocks, natural overlooks and shelves, etc., connected by walls conforming to the natural terrain. The inchoate sprawl of fortifications in places like Gibraltar, Havana, San Juan (Puerto Rico) and Cartagena de Indias are good examples.

But I'm just being pedantic. Starforts look cool, and are a bit easier to divide up into "batteries" for gaming purposes.

- Ix

Yellow Admiral -- to me it seems like Anton was already thinking along the lines you just laid out, hence his mention of adding, "A water battery (or two)." I say great minds think alike!

Yellow Admiral, My favorite is the Morro castle in Havana(on my bucket list if they ever get a change of management there)from the landward side a classic Vauban style hornwork fills the hilltop; toward the sea is a crazy-quilt stack of batteries. A good resource of starfort plans can be had at Starforts starforts.com

starforts.com is a Wonderful source for ideas! Thank you Mr. Ryzbak

Put pictures of how your project ends, please.

I had a chance last night to throw an initial coat of paint on it

Surely Pinatella is somewhere in the western Med? Nelson reported favorably, but in the end the British decided Malta was the better option.

robert piepenbrink, you are thinking Pantelleria (exactly as I was when I made up the name) which had the distinction of being the only fortified island to surrender to an air force (it was bombed into submission by Allied air forces after the conquest of North Africa). My project is a rather more modest affair.