Thursday, November 16, 2017

Now All I Need is Sixty-Six Cannon

     Behold below the Castillo. Now fully embrasured she awaits only a drawbridge to be ready to defend herself against Pirates, Englishmen and the odd Huguenot. Doors, window shutters and other such niceties are still required, of course, but hardly mandatory when facing invaders. Wait, there is the small matter of armaments; I have but six cannon with which to defend this erstwhile mighty fortress, sixty-six embrasures remain empty! Much Sadness.
      Actually, my research shows the the Castillo was never fully armed when under the flag of Spain (and, most likely not while in English or American hands) so the demands do not run anywhere close to a full 72 cannon. I do intend this for other purposes and will need many more cannon before I'm finished so if anybody has a line on cheap cannon (or just cannon barrels) please drop a note in the comments.

with the corner towers in place it does look very much more elegant


even this late in the game I find myself a bit overwhelmed by the size of this silliness

28mm cannons look puny 

the diminutive size of the Fort Matanzas in comparison

10 comments:

  1. Looks absolutely bloody marvellous! I'm very jealous.
    Cheers, Peter

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  2. This is really cool to see. I built the same castillo in the early 1990's out of blue foam. Yours is really outstanding!

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  3. Great work Anton. Lots of surface area to paint. Looking forward to a finished painted photo and plz post to TMP.

    Michael

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  4. Press moulding with Siligum might be the way forward

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  5. Very nice work! It’s funny how each detail leads to the next... Are you planning on using the whole fort for scenarios or maybe just half?

    In any case very awesome job!

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    1. I intend on using the completed fort for display games at wargaming conventions, my space at home will only allow deploying a half of it at any one time.

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  6. Absolutely fantastic!!!!! Congrats and I am excited to see the few remaining steps towards completion...

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  7. Wow! What a huge and impressive piece! I would love to raid that with my pirate crew.

    As for the cannons: You may want to take a look at my reference Setting Sail: Collecting Ships for Tabletop Games. At the end of the article, there is also a list of manufacturers of cannons. Minimi Miniatures is the cheapest one that I am aware of with GBP1.00/cannon. Games of War used to also sell cannons for 1.00 but not anymore.

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  8. Obviously that is an amazingly large fort, and it needs cannons to match... but possibly you could go with black painted scale "logs", which seems like a period way to disguise where the real cannon are.

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