Vintage Wargaming: Author

Showing posts with label Author - B McKenzie. Show all posts

Sunday, 5 December 2010

Napoleonic Warships - Airfix "Victory" Conversions

While waiting for day 4 of the Adelaide Ashes test to start, I noticed that the blog has acquired its 111th follower. If you are not au fait with the great traditions of cricket, you might not now that scores of 111 are refereed to as "Nelson" and multiples (222, 333 etc) as double Nelson, treble Nelson etc, and are viewed with great superstition as likely to cause a wicket to fall. One test umpire (sadly no longer with us) would officiate standing on one leg until a further run was added.

No-one seems 100% sure why this tradition has grown up (cricketers are a very superstitious lot) but it seems to be called Nelson from the erroneous belief that along with one eye and one arm Nelson had only one leg. So the combination of a Nelson of followers and the Ashes made me think a naval episode might be appropriate.

This article reflects an earlier time in wargaming where you made the best of what was available, rather than having vast ranges of wargaming kit available. I have a soft spot for the small Airfix Series 1 ship kits, and i have even half heartedly started on a long considered project using the Golden Hind, Revenge and Mayflower models to create Royalist and parliamentarian fleets for Prince Rupert's later career as an Admiral.

There might be something in this Nelson stuff - Kevin Pietersen has just got out.

Sources, permissions and editorial policy

This site uses a range of sources to provide access to information about wargaming, for the most part from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. These sources are mainly paper based, may be ephemeral (catalogues, price lists, painting instructions etc), and in general are not easily accessible elsewhere.

I am particularly grateful to Don Featherstone and to John Tunstill, who have both given their permission for the reproduction of materials from their ground breaking magazines, respectively Wargamer's Newsletter and Miniature Warfare (and later Miniature Wafare and Model Soldiers).

Where possible I have made efforts to obtain permission for reproduction of any material covered by copyright.

Some of the source material is typescript, may be fragile, and in some cases to scan or photograph it may require the removal of staples and the destruction of the integrity of the original publication.

I have tried to deal with this in a number of ways, scanning or copying and adding as an image, or scanning for optical character recognition to provide text based posts. Where the content is more important than the aesthetic look of the original context, I have also taken the opportunity to make minor edits and layout changes to make the material work better on the screen. In these cases I may have edited for sense, corrected spelling or punctuation (including capitalization and the removeal of the wargamer's apostrophe). In doing this I recognise the advantage of working in an electronic format over the original editor working with typescript).

Of course these changes may lead to new mistakes and I would be grateful for any (polite) alerts to these through the comments system.

It is intended that this site will also include new writing on its subject areas.

This site is not commercial and will not involve any advertising or subscription. However, we do reserve the right to bring products we think may be of interest to readers to your attention, at our own discretion. No payment will be involved.

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Sunday, 5 December 2010

Napoleonic Warships - Airfix "Victory" Conversions

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Sources, permissions and editorial policy