10mm Pirates

I decided to model the game in 10mm because I wanted some objectives to be met;

(a) to have a grand scale. i.e. large ships of the British Navy chasing pirates round the Caribbean.

(b) use a 6ft x 4ft gaming table, as this is my maximum table size, and achieve point (a)

(c) still be able to move individual figures on small bases, although I won’t be using them on the ships as I have sausages for fingers! I know 10mm is pushing my luck!

(d) keep it running as a project on OTT/ BoW to keep me motiviated to build it up, print it, and Paint it.

Things I can use;

• 10mm pendraken miniatures (OK these may be closer to 12mm) of various types in glorious white metal! So at least they won’t fall over when someone slightly knocks the table. In addition, Pendraken are fairly local to me so I support a local manufacturer in doing so.
• Elegoo Mars 3d Printer. I won’t be covering how to print and use the printer as it is well covered elsewhere. PS. I prefer to leave war gaming models solid.
• Lots of random Stl/obj files to make the towns and villages to pillage!
• AutoCAD/ Revit to model elements to export to .STL to Print. I cannot use blender or meshmixer as these things need a significant amount of time to get used to, and I don’t have mega amounts of time.

Finding the right ships..

I searched the internet and found some reasonable ships on free sites to print, but most lacked detail where it counted… So I ended up shelling out a good few pounds on a selection of the Printable Scenery Ships.

I picked up the STL files for the following;

• The Galleon
• The Frigate
• The Fluyt
• Rowing Boat
• Sloop

These are 28mm files and needed to be scaled by .33 to get to 10mm.

I maybe should not have bothered buying both the Fluyt and Frigate… as they are so similar at 10mm scale.

These were to be printed on my Elegoo Mars Printer, and given I was modelling in 10mm this allowed for the scaling down.

The middle section of the Galleon model pretty much fills the print bed of the Elegoo Mars at 10mm scale!

These ships are packed with detail, and the Sloop came out perfect as it could be printed in a single part!

The Frigate on the other hand looks good till you see the joint in the hull as the entire ship was just that little bit too big for the print bed.

I slipped in a Bolt Action mini for an idea of scale!

I decided to use red as my base colour for these ships, as I intend to wash this with green to make it brown.. but I will need to test it first on something else that didn’t take an age to print, to make sure it works as I think it should.

Here is the big issue… How to rig these tiny ships.

I created some masts based on the 6mm and 4mm dowel requirements at 28mm scale using AutoCAD scaled them by .33 and exported the files to .stl format for 3d printing.

I intend on printing these to use according to the Printable Scenery Instructions. My Issue with these and 3d Printing is the Elegoo Standard Resin is not very strong in thin slender pieces. These are currently sat printing for the next 9 hours!

If this does not work, my next option is brass rod.

I am considering if I need sails on these ships to complete the image I am looking for, but this is providing difficult for me as it will need to look good if I do end up adding sails. Firelock Games give a good guide on the sail configurations!