Hold the Line - Richard Grenville HMS's Victory, Temeraire and Neptune provide the punch to the head of Nelson's weather column attack |
The final model built as part of my penultimate group build of six models was one of the five generic British three-deckers to put alongside the named models of HMS Victory and Royal Sovereign together with the first of these five built at the same time, in March last year.
The first of my generic three-deckers added last March, loosely designed to represent HMS Neptune, hence the figurehead. |
Given the limited options in terms of figureheads and a cast stern gallery I decided early on to have these models represent the other British three-deckers generically and thus allow their use in other scenarios where similar ships were required, whilst retaining the look of the Trafalgar ships they would represent, namely Britannia 100-guns, Dreadnought, Neptune, Prince and Temeraire all 98-guns.
Of course, numbers of ships and guns are not the only consideration when assessing the merits of both fleets when also taking into account the tactical and command abilities that could and often did make up for any lack of numbers.
British first and second-rates distribution in the two attack columns |
So the final build in the project will feature another three of these big British ships, alongside the Spanish Rayo of 100-guns and the two British small ships, Pickle and Entreprenant.
Postscript:
The Trafalgar Project took another step forward this week as I got my first COVID jab on Monday and joined half the population in the South West of England to have had their first vaccination and have my second booked for early June so the prospect of being able to get back to social wargaming took another significant step forward.
Many thanks to the volunteers at the West Point, Exeter, Vaccination Centre and to Hamish Marshall, former BBC Spotlight News journalist who was working with the meet and greet party at the gate and who directed me to the car-park, and also to the Astra-Zeneca/Oxford Vaccine research and development team who put in the work with all those marvellous volunteer patients to produce a working vaccine in record time to allow the world to resume our lives with a semblance of normality despite having now to get used to living permanently with a new virus threat around the globe.
Personally, I felt a bit rough for 48 hours following the jab, with flu-like symptoms, so at least I know it was working, but am now getting back to normal with just a slightly tender upper left arm, so at least the painting can continue; so as always, onwards and upwards.
Sources referred to in this post:
The Trafalgar Companion - Mark Adkin
The message seems to be "It's not what you've got, it's how you use it"? Nelson and Collingwood made superb use of their ships and crews.
ReplyDeleteHi Jeremy,
DeleteWell yes I think so, but also that the qualitative difference between the two fleets more than compensates for the deficiency in numbers and guns.
This aspect of warfare is seen again and again throughout history and despite the old WWII Russian saying that 'numbers have a quality of their own', which is true, you are still probably going to end up losing with a larger, poorer quality force or if not, winning a Pyrrhic victory with very high casualties, with the possible aid of some terrain or weather, force multiplier.
This is what makes our hobby such fun, allowing us to test these theories on the table without anyone getting hurt in the process.
JJ