I recently mentioned about the great deal I got on ebay. This got me into WW2 naval wargaming in a cheap and brutal way. I now had rules, ships, counters and even reference books, all in front of me.

Sadly, I knew little about naval combat, or even ships. I had to do my homework and for this I decided to dive in the deep. I opened a Scharnhorst battlecruiser pack. There are two of these ships in the collection I bought, so I read a bit and found there were two of these in the Kriegesmarine. One was the Scharnhorst, the other one was the Gneisenau.

Flipping through the Camo book I see the Scharnhorst had a nice camo scheme. I want to do that, but that would be diving in the deep where the sharks with lasers dwell. So I decided to paint the “simpler” Gneisenau Scharnhorst battlecruiser (say that out loud, and it´s funnier)

I was thinking about paint, cause I´m a painter first, but this GHQ model had to be completely assembled first. The tiny instructions and the strange (for me) naval terms (and in English… I speak freaking Spanish) were intimidating. So I went online for some clues and got a nice idea of how the ship actually looks before building it. Hint, hint, hint.

With these tools I went on to the table to build my first little boat.

Here´s the main part. The deck is one piece, and it has the places where to start gluing everything else.

These are the rest of the parts. There are some spare cranes and guns.

Here´s the catapult with the scout plane. I realized it was good to do this while I´m still on my twenties. Otherwise it would have been painful for the eyes and fingers.

First step was to put the four single 5.9 guns and the four twin 5.9 guns in place. I didn´t know what a 5.9 gun was until now. You can see I am giving the impression of battle on the right side of the ship. (It´s called starboard, you know?)

Next I put the stack and the two big cranes on the hull.

I then put the catapult and little plane on the aft superstructure, and glue that to the hull.

Then the rest is assembled. First I put the two small cranes on the fore superstructure. I also glue one of the 11″ guns to it. Before gluing that to the hull, I put the other two big guns on the hull.

And that´s pretty much it. If you are not careful, you will lose one of the small cranes under a fingernail. Really.

Here you can see the ship in my hand. I could easily crush the entire German fleet. Ok, bad one.

Here´s some more detail.

I then make a base for the ship in 2mm plasticard. I got this basing idea from a site I checked (meaning drooled all over) when I was considering getting into naval wargaming. The site is Agis Neugebauer´s VaS section of his site.

And that´s really it. It´s a nice experience and I learned quite a bit from just building the model. Not 24 hours after assembling it I had this.

And that means I really like this new aspect of the hobby. I might even start to play naval battles.

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