"AWI ship help" Topic

Does anyone outside of Navwar make American ships for the War of Independence of American Revolution? Navwar makes a few in 1:3000 scale. Looking to see if anyone else makes them. Any scale is fine.
Thanks.

War Artisan.

GHQ and Langton Miniatures have the best 1:1200 lines.

Between them you'll have a great selection for frigates, privateers, gunboats and the like. That should cover most of the needs of the Continental/ State navies and private vessels.

For a lot of the specific vessels, you just have to make your best approximation. Nobody makes a USS Alfred for example, but as far as I know no plans have come down to us anyway.

Warlord Games has a nice 1/700 series useful during that time

I use all brands and scales of Napoleonic ships. There were no significant differences in hull construction between the two periods, and only a few minor detail differences that you can see:

• The rear driver sail was now an irregular quadrilateral, but it ended inside the poop rail and only extended as far forward as the mizzen mast. In the SYW the driver was a full lateen sail; in the Napoleonic Wars it was a spanker that extended past the poop rail on two spars (the gaff above and the boom below). In the AWI, it was midway through the conversion, basically a lateen sail with the front triangle cut off and the new vertical edge attached to the mizzen mast. In the AWI the upper spar was usually still a full-length lateen-sized spar, but it only had a sail hanging off the rear half past the mizzen mast; there was no lower spar, the sail just attached at the rear bottom corner to somewhere in the vicinity of the poop rail.
  
• National flags flew from poles sprouting from the stern. In the Napoleonic era, the national flags usually flew from a line between the spanker gaff and spanker boom (or poop rail).

What this means: you can convert any Napoleonic 3-masted man-o-war into an AWI man-o-war by shortening the driver sail, replacing the spanker gaff with a double-length spar centered on the mizzen mast, and putting a national flag into the poop deck. Zoom in on the Barfleur and Ville de Paris in this painting to see the flagpole, short driver sail, and long driver spar that I'm talking about:

The main differences in hulls were in classes of warship in common use. Some ship types were very familiar: the 74 was already the standard two-decker ship of the line by the AWI era, the French had recently developed the two-decker 80 and built a bunch of them (mostly as flaships), and three-deckers were already commonly 90, 98, or 100 guns, with a few exceptional ships already around (e.g. Ville de Paris 104, Santissima Trinidad 112). However, there were more 64s in use as standard ships of the line in all the major navies, ship sizes like 66s and 72s and 76s and 78s were common in Dutch and Baltic service, and many AWI battlelines had a 50 or two in them, right up until 1783 (it was the AWI that taught the naval establishment that 50s were too small to be in the line). On foreign stations, the major navies also had a few two-decker 44s; these had disappeared by the Napoleonnic Wars.

Almost all of the smaller ship classes you can find in the Napoleonic Wars already existed in the AWI: cutters, snows, schooners, topsail schooners, brigantines, ship sloops, brig sloops, xebecs, bombs… you name it.

For my 1/2400 fleets, I just used Napoleonic ships straight out of the box. Really, I'm the only one who knows the driver sails are too long, and at that scale it doesn't make much difference anyway.

I have converted a few 1/1200 ships to long driver spars and stern flagpoles, and will probably do more if I ever resume AWI naval gaming.

- Ix

Note that some ship classes hadn't been invented yet, so a little research will (unfortunately) rule out a lot of common Napoleonic models. For instance, most 2-masted brig models are based on the large British Cruizer class 18-gunners developed in the 1790s. Before that, most brigs were smaller and had fewer guns.

Likewise, the Spanish "upgraded" a lot of their large men-o-war by decking over the waist and adding guns in the 1790s; this made the Rayo class into 100-gunners and Santissima Trinidad into a 130. In a large enough miniature scale, you'll have to choose hull models that look like the earlier versions of these.

- Ix

Brilliant summary by @Yellow Admiral.

Just wanted to add that there are several vendors who do excellent ships for 3d printing.