A Few More Items from Enfilade and More Reading Material

Work is currently keeping me pretty busy, but I wanted to follow up on my Enfilade posts with some a couple notes about items I purchased at Enfilade and provide some links to some more reading material for my regular readers.

First off, some of the stuff I bought at Enfilade. Friday afternoon/evening I wandered around the vendor tables to see what new stuff was available. One of the places I spent some time at was Monday Knight Production's tables. Will Thompson and his gang really support the Enfilade convention by buying up a good number of vendor tables and by putting on games most of the weekend. I hope he makes money at Enfilade and always stop off to see if he has anything that I might be interested in. This year I found a couple things that I liked. First off was some resin boats. While these are really intended to be row boats for 28mm figures, as I looked them over, I thought there were about the right size to convert into small sailing ships for my 15mm projects. So, I picked up three of them. 

28mm rowboat ready to become a 15mm sailing ship.

I will need to put an insert into the center section to raise it up and probably cut off the oar locks, but I think they will make some nice gunboats for my fleet. The boats are about six inches long and seem to fit right in with the size I was looking for, as you can see in this comparison photo with the Thoroughbred Sea Eagles cutter.  

Comparison between the Cutter (top) and new boat.

Monday Knight also does the Science Fiction Galactic Knights rules and miniatures. For those of you that are familiar with these, they are the old Superior Models Starfleet Wars line of figures. When I was a kid I used to drool over these figures and rules in the various magazines I used to buy or read. Every year at Enfilade I think about picking up some of the figures that I could never afford as a kid, but I typically resist and spend my money on something else. But not this year! This year Will brought along his newly resin cast versions of the Super Galactic Dreadnoughts for the game, he was running a convention special, and I couldn't resist.

My very own super galactic dreadnoughts

Will did a great job of casting the resin versions, the detail is really nice and they are substantially cheaper (and lighter) than the metal versions. I got a chance to compare a painted resin and metal version and was really hard to tell them apart (until you picked them up). I picked out the two ships that I always really liked, the Terran and Entolmolian versions, and happily handed over my money. 

Terran SGDN

 Entolmolian SGDN

I don't know if I will ever get a chance to play with these ships in a game, but even if I don't, it was money well spent. It isn't too often that I find stuff that takes me back to my early teens that I still want. I showed off my new toys to Kevin on Sunday and after relating his own story about the Superior Miniatures, he decided pick up a copy of the Galactic Knights rules (which he promptly blamed me for on his blog). So, I will probably get a chance to run them around sometime in the future.

Finally I want to suggest that those of you interested in naval stuff check out the Naval War College Review website for some interesting reading material. Currently they have issues of the Review going back to the Spring 2001 and there are some really interesting articles in them. While a lot of the stuff is too much along academic/political lines, there are articles that most wargamers would find interesting too. Here are links to a few that you might find interesting:

• The Development of the Angle Deck Aircraft Carrier: Innovation and Adaptation, an interesting article on the development of angled-deck carriers in the Royal Navy and US Navy.
• Asymmetrical Warfare at Sea: The Naval Battles off Guadalcanal 1942-43
• Reflecting on Fuchida, or a "Tale of Three Whoppers", by Jonathan Parshall, one of the authors of "Shattered Sword."
• Major Convoy Operation to Malta, 10-15 August 1942 (Operation Pedestal), an in-depth look at Operation Pedestal from planning to execution. A great article for anyone looking for some insight into the operation for a campaign game.
• US Navy Surface Battle Doctrine and Victory in the Pacific, a look at the pre-war doctrine, the lessons learned in early combat and how they were implemented with the fleet.

That is just a sample of some of the greate articles and analysis offered, along with book reviews of books that you don't often hear about, and all available online for free. I hope you'll take look through some of the reviews and the Naval War College Press publications and that you find something you like.