DANG 2016 - Ships

I got a little busy with work and other diversions while trying to finish up my ships for the DANG 2016 game. Now I'm back on track and ready to show off some of the ships for the game.

This year's game will be a hypothetical war between the United States and Germany during the 1902-3 Venezuelan debt crisis. I tracked down some information on speculative orders of battle, thanks to an old presentation on the Admiralty Trilogy website on the subject. But there was still the bigger issue of finding all the ships I needed. No one company had all the ships in the same scale, so after checking around, I decided to go with the 1/2400 scale ships from Panzerschiffe and modify the ships they did not have.

For the Americans, there were few modifications needed.

The American Navy for DANG 2016

Most of the ships were straight off the order sheet. The exception being the cruiser Chicago, which I represented with a Newark cruiser. Since this is a "come as you are" mini-campaign, I decided to paint up the Americans in the peacetime white and buff paint scheme.

US battleships

US newer cruisers

Overall, I think the colors turned out pretty well and are evocative of the period.

For the Germans I had to find a lot more replacements and do more modifications. For the German paint scheme I went with a white hull and light gray upper works. Except for the battleships, which are overall light gray. The images I've seen of German ships from the era have a very light hull color, which could be white or light gray, but I decided to go with white for the overseas ships since I thought the Germans would tend to follow the trend of the Royal Navy.

German fleet for DANG 2016

I wanted to have a Victoria Louise class armored cruiser and some other early German armored cruisers, but Panzerschiffe doesn't make those. So, I ordered the later Prinz Adalbert and Roon classes for modifications. The Prinz Adalberts became the Vineta and Prinz Heinrich, while the Roon became the Fürst Bismarck.

German armored cruisers

The modifications primarily consisted of changes the funnels and removing extra guns. The Vineta is still too long, but overall the modifications seem to have turned out well.

The Gazelle class cruisers and Brandenburg class battleships did not require many changes (I did add the walkway over the center turret on the battleships).

German Brandenburg class battleships

German Gazelle class cruisers

For the older German cruisers Falke and Comoran, I modified some American Marblehead class cruisers and for the gunboat Panther I used a Spanish gunboat. I think the conversions turned out well, but I really doubt anyone would have said anything if I hadn't made the changes.

German gunboat and older cruisers

I also got a pair of Japanese ships to represent the Italian ships that took part in the blockade of Venezuela. These also had some minor modifications.

Italian colonial cruisers

I think all the ships turned out nicely and will make good, sturdy game pieces for the mini-campaign.