3D printed Union ships for Blood Sweat & Iron.

I have finally finished painting the few additional Union ships that I printed a while back and I think they have turned ok again.

I did actually print out two more of the Unadilla class ships as I found out I could have more than one, so they will be the USS Tahoma and the USS Huron, both of these will need most of their masts replacing ( as my 3D printer can’t manage the fine / thin sections of these ships )

I still need to add those furled sails to the USS Unadilla as well, but I will probably wait until the other two are ready and do all three at the same time.

So for the rest of the ships I have the USS Milwaukee a low profile ironclad with heavy guns in turrets.

Then I have the USS Canonicus and the USS Passaic both low profile ironclads this time with only the one turret each.

And then I have three Union tug boats, these have been fun trying to find out what they are and their names, it has not been easy though and I haven’t been totally successful.

I found out that there were several of these little wooden tugs used during the American Civil War, but it was hard to find out their names, mainly because they were known by Alpha Tug No.1, Beta Tug No.2, Gamma Tug no.3, Delta Tug No.4 and Epsilon Tug No.5 etc. the only name that kept coming up in my searches was for Beta Tug No.2 also known as the USS Bazely.

I haven’t done any stats for these little ships yet as I am still trying to find out what if any armaments they actually had, the models themselves have small guns, one on the bow and the other on the stern, but these may be incorrect.

Once I have found out more information about these little ships I will do some new cards for them and put them on this site for download.

Next there are two Gunboats, the USS Lexington and the USS Tylor, I did say in a previous post that I was going to try and add a few bits to the decks of these ships to make them look a little better than they did but in the end I couldn’t be bothered, also I don’t think they look that bad as they are now they are painted 🤔

Well I am not sure what I will be doing next for my fleets, I may look at maybe trying a fort or some simple scenery as my table is a little bare when I am playing Blood Sweat & Iron and I think that some scenery might my table look better for my games.

I have seen lots of nice scenery for river battles on the internet, but I guess storage will be a factor that I will have to think about as two six-foot river banks could take up a lot of space in my room!

Any way next on the to-do list for the ACW ships are the name tags for the rear of the bases, once these are done I will put up some pictures of both finished fleets.

Until then come on over to my Discord server to chat about your games of Blood Sweat & Iron or just show us some pictures of your ships.

You will find a link to my server on the Community tab at the top of the site.

Please follow and like us:

5 Comments

  1. Zac

    Hi Mac
    More ugly ducklings eh!
    The wake on the base really works, nice work.
    As for scenery maybe your looking at it the wrong way?
    Instead of making banks maybe you should make rivers!
    The space’s between the rivers could be filled with hill’s and forests made with small tree’s,wet lands ect, so the lip made by the river terrain pecice’s is disguised.
    A river section could have a harbour maybe or an island.
    Anyway I don’t know how helpful that is but this would be how I’d aproch a river battle type thing.
    Also maybe some civilian ships might be useful.

    • Mac

      Hi Zac,
      Ugly!!!! no… ☹️

      Thanks for your comments about the rivers, I am still not sure how to do the scenery yet, I might try a few different ways and just see which I like best.

      At least the details on the scenery, such as houses , trees etc. etc. would be really simple to do and of course they would be very small, I think the scale is about 2mm

      I could if I was feeling lazy just buy some odd bits of scenery to put on the banks as there are a few companies that make 2mm scenery, or I could even 3D print some.

      Mac

    • Mac

      Hi Zac,

      I will have to get one out of my monopoly and check but I think they will be too big for 2mm, but I guess once they on a piece of terrain they would look ok even if they are not exactly to scale… hey I am not that fussed about scale anyway

      Mac

  2. Zac

    Hi Mac
    Its been years since I’ve played monopoly , to big for a log cabin or farmstead but for town house’s they should be okay.
    You could use em to bulk out a settlement with more detailed model’s on the outskirts and around a town square’s ect.

Leave a Reply to Zac Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *