Cruel Seas models - Terry the Tramp Tanker

I know a few of you are buying into Cruel Seas, and I thought a few words on what the first steps at expanding your collection past the S Boats and Vospers in the starter set should be.

If you have played a few games and you are British, the obvious choice is Dog Boats. The truth is that in a straight shoot out the Vospers will almost always lose. This is pretty much spot on historically, so what you need are Motor Gun Boats. Sadly at the moment this is a non starter as noone makes a suitable model. The Dog Boat is therefore your friend, as it basically is an MTB on steroids and can happily shoot it out with S Boats and win.

There is another option however. Warlord make a tanker model, and this really opens up your game play options for just about everyone. In theory it is the same as the card one in the Starter Set, but noone really likes playing with card in what is basically a model game, so picking up the tanker is a good idea, particularly as it has a number of attractive features - 1) it is universal, it can be used by all sides, and 2) it allows the Vospers something to use their torpedoes on. This is quite important as the real advantage of MTBs is they carry torpedoes (doh) and the 73 foot Vospers actually have twice the number of ready use torps as S Boats, making them very potent in this respect.

I picked my tanker up at Warlord when I was through doing some playtesting for BRS before Christmas as a prezzie for myself. RRP is £18, which seems reasonable on the whole. I'm not sure if it comes with wake marker or data card - mine didn't, but that may be because there were none on the shop shelf and a very helpful member of staff went around to the resin room and grabbed one off the production line for me rather than disappoint - which was nice (Cheers!). Not having the card etc is no great loss anyway as there are copies in the starter box.

The model consisted of a resin hull, separate resin bridge, and a selection of metal accessories - 2 winches, 2 masts, 2 lifeboats, 5 small vents, 2 large vents, 4 sets of companionways, a spare crane boom, funnel  and a gun and crew. Everything was crisp and broadly flash free. There were no assembly instructions - again I can't say if this is standard but I suspect so. Working out where stuff goes was not that hard, although I tried to follow the pics on the website this did cause me a problem as they have the companionways shown leading up to the forecastle when in fact I think two of them should connect to the bridge wings. I didn't help myself at this point by losing one companionway to the carpet monster that lives under my painting table - ah well. I also didn't make it easy for myself in a couple of other ways. Firstly I stuck everything down with enthusiasm - starting with the winches, which match up with two areas on the decks. The problem is this leaves no real space to mount the gun. I suspect the solution is to only fit the front winch and mount the gun aft. The second mistake was to stick the lifeboats and davits on - I really should have thought this through because it made painting around them a faff on  - top tip - paint them separately and glue them on last. To compound my problems with the gun I decided the best way to get most bang for my buck was to magnetise it so I could use it armed or unarmed. To this end I sunk a 2x1mm magnet into the deck and stuck another under the gun mount. I really should have positioned this where the aft winch was, so on mine it is a bit cramped - ah well.

Other than that the model went together quickly and smoothly. Here she is - after taking this pic I decided to move the front companionways to the bridge. You can also see the magnet for the deck gun.

I decided to paint it up as a rusty and worn out coastal tramp rather than anything nice and shiny. I may have got carried away but I (and apparently Papa Nurgle) are pleased with the result.

All in all a very nice model of a small coastal tramp tanker, and a great addition to your collection. I would happily recommend it. 

Cheers