A Sailor's Life For Me?

Still merrily coughing away here in Blease Towers so I haven't picked up a paintbrush for nearly a fortnight now though I intend to slap some metal work on the Zulu blades tomorrow. In the meantime, whilst SWMBO watches The Forsyte Saga she has discovered on ITV Player I've been looking at Lead (& Plastic) Mountain and thinking about next year's projects...

For a few years I've fancied having a crack at WW2 naval but have been put off with experiences with modern naval using  Harpoon twenty odd years back and the prospective "joy" of painting lots of grey models. A couple of years back I picked up a copy of Mongoose's Victory at Sea on eBay and a pile of Axis & Allies ships. They may not be brilliant, but they are painted (after a fashion).

These have (unsurprisingly) sat in a drawer for the last two years until I noticed Mongoose were planning a second edition of the rules and releasing a set of 1/1800th miniatures (the same size as Axis & Allies I believe). This piqued my interest until I saw the price (gulp!) but with my enthusiasm raised I then decided to revisit what could be done with the pre-painted plastics.

Of course I need to decide on a theatre of war and whilst I stocked up on piles of 1/700th planes many moons ago the Pacific is not very inspiring (despite reading an excellent book on it), as I want my ships to shoot at each other not just launch waves of planes.

A big of research and the Mediterranean seems the place to go...



Of course checking the pile of plastics and whilst I have a nice batch of British I only have one squadron of Italian destroyers (for some reason I have a lot of Germans, I think I was looking at doing a hypothetical Battle of the Atlantic). However it all seems jolly interesting and I have spent most of two episodes of The Forsyte Saga researching the Italian Navy, what it did in the Med and what models Axis & Allies have for them (quite a lot it seems).

All quite tempting, I think I need to find a good book on the subject...