Ship yards of York (8): Arrival of 'Keith's ships'

The 1/3000 ships produced by Forged in Battle, that I was made aware of by Tim and Julian and then Keith *made* me buy, arrived today—and I could not be more pleased!

Ships and bases on a towel to dry after washing.

The models are excellent. They are robust, have a good amount of detail and an absolute minimum of flash—just a tiny amount on the bottom that I needed to trim to get them to sit flush on the stands. They are stable with a good weight to them once glued to the stand. In short, they look bloody marvellous!

Forged in Battle sent me a 'bonus' of an extra two 74s, which was most generous and a wonderful surprise. It is doubly good, since they are the most common ships of the line.

I received not 31, but 33 of these beauties!

The models are not as detailed as the Navwar ships, but there is sufficient for this scale.

The ships are a little smaller than those from Navwar, but it will hardly be apparent once they are painted and 'sailing' around a table-top ocean. Also, once mounted on the bases, which are thicker than the Navwar ones, they nearly the same height.

I was interested which were closer to a true 1/3000th scale, so did a comparison for Santisima Trinidad.

Comparison of the two Santisima Trinidads: Forged in Battle at left, Navwar at right.

I used the information about her from the Three Decks website. This records that the gun deck was 220' 6", which is 67.2084 m in modern measurements, or ~22.4 mm at 1/3000. The breadth is given as 58', 17.6784 m or 5.9 mm at 1/3000th. I measured the models, simply using a ruler, and the Forged in Battle version is closest with ~ 17 mm for the gun deck and around ~5 mm wide, compared with the Navwar version at ~19 mm and ~6 mm wide. So, I'll use the Navwar version as Santisima Trinidad and the Forged in Battle ship will represent a smaller 1st rate.

Ships on their bases ready for undercoating and painting.