"Black Seas - corvettes" Topic

Just a quick question for anyone who might know; is there any indication of when Warlord Games are releasing their corvette kits?

For the small campaign I have planned I need a number of corvettes. I've seen JJ's excellent tutorial on converting brigs to corvettes but as I'm new to AoS I think it might be easier to wait for a kit, rather than converting. That said, if the wait is going to be a while then I might well just jump in.

Also, has anyone tried converting a brig to a brigantine? This looks like it should be a fairly simple conversion, but if anyone has done it I'd love to hear how you went about it.

Best wishes,

Nick

I haven't heard anything about the corvette either.

The Black Seas range could immensely benefit from a wide variety of small ships – the scale is perfect for them. It should be filling out with a riot of rigging plans on small vessels with less than 2 dozen guns. Instead, everything is either an 18-gun brig or a tiny schooner, and we got galleons and galleys (which are themselves totally inadequate even for the period they belong to).

If you can make 3D prints, there are several more small ships by Henry Turner and a few by Simon Mann on Wargaming3d.com, and Henry recently (re-)added his ships to his Shapeways storefront in a variety of sizes. Note that both of these designers make their STLs in real 1/700 scale, and Warlord's ships are overscale. To mix in with the Warlord brigs, the smaller ships really need to be in 1/600 or even 1/500 scale. Henry knows this and has offered his Shapeways prints in these scales, but Simon's stuff has to be rescaled by the printer.

I have modified a number of brig hulls into other plans (adding a quarterdeck, adding or moving a mast, removing guns, etc.) but my 1/600 naval projects stalled over a year ago and I haven't tried rigging any of them. The styrene hulls are wonderful to work with and easy to modify with sharp crafting tools, styrene stock and styrene cement.

- Ix

Thanks lx – totally agree that WG's choices for expanding the range seems odd. Mind you, all the galleons, etc, are probably geared to those who want to play pirates of the Caribbean – I'm almost surprised that they haven't got a sail sheet with black sails and a bloody great skull and crossbones on the foresail.

Hopefully the range will expand in the future, which it probably will due to its popularity. I understand they're going to release ships for the great lakes, which would ideal in this scale. I just hope that one day we get a razee so I can refight Droits de l'Homme verses Indefatigable and Amazon.

That said, you're right about the styrene hulls; they offer plenty of opportunities for conversion.

All the best matey,

Nick

You may want to check out the line of print-and-assemble kits at WarArtisan.com

I have a few posts here with pics of assembled models.

The small War Artisan ships might be a bit of a chore at 1/600(ish) scale. The War Artisan himself usually does them in 1/300:
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But they're paper, and will rescale on your printer to any size you like, so it can't hurt to try.

- Ix

I have a mix of Warlord, WarArtisan, 3D and scratch built in 1/600 and they all look fine together. Also have WarArtisan in 1/900 and don't fine the smaller scale any more fiddly.

TMP link