Hammerhead 2016

Down the M6 and across the A50 to Newark for Hammerhead 2016. A new show to me, but it has a bit of history and one of the bigger ones on the circuit, I think. The venue is a large exhibition hall on the Newark Showground, so vast amounts of parking all around. The building is suited to the event, not surprisingly as a purpose-built exhibition hall, so plenty of space and light, though you wouldn't say it has a lot of character. The food was supplied by the "Bistro" in the building, but "Caff" would have been a better name - chips with pasties, burgers and sausage rolls, and bacon baps. Fine by me, as it happens, but not a lot of choice if that's not to your taste.
As for the show itself, all the games were designated as participation-based, and as far as I could see they were mostly busy, though a few at the far ends seemed quiet. There was a good variety, from witch racing through WW1 to sci-fi with 3D printed models. There seemed to be quite a few aerial games - Wings of Glory, at least one jet combat game, and a nice looking one with Japanese planes attacking a US AA destroyer in 1943. The ship model in that one was quite large, but not as big as the one in another game using the third dimension. This featured an underwater frogman attack on a ship which only appeared in the form of the bottom of the hull, which formed the "roof" of the playing area. The divers moved up and down below this, presumably trying to attach limpet mines.
There was also a good selection of traders, all around the outside of the space. Personally I was slightly disappointed because there was no 6mm WW2 - Wargames Emporium and Magister Militum weren't there, and Baccus did not have any of their new WW2 infantry (I have a couple of these on order and due to arrive soon). I was also hoping to find one of the printed battle mats - Cigar Box or something like that, but there were none on show - just some plain coloured blankets. Still I managed to collect a fair amount of booty, on show in the picture below.

Centre rear is some stuff for the airbrush - a stand and some primers in various shades. To the right is some other paints - Basetex for the bases on my 6mm infantry, and a couple of metals for the bigger models. In front of those are two items from Ainsty for my Pulp games, and a Renedra Arab/Adobe house ditto. Then three terrain items in 6mm, fields and town bases, from The Baggagetrain. To their left are two packs of Pulp Figures, sailors for the ship I painted last month.
On the extreme left are the new rulesets which I always wind up buying at a show. I have finally cracked and bought General Quarters 3 (WW2 naval). For decades GQ1/2 has been pretty much the default ruleset for 20th century naval wargames, certainly for me. The new rules, which were a long time coming, are supposed to be much more detailed, which is not necessarily a good thing, in my view. Anyway, now I will get a chance to judge for myself.
The other rules are Lion Rampant from Osprey - Medieval skirmish/small battles. I've been thinking about these for some time, and I was persuaded by my other purchase, a box of Teutonic infantry from Deus Vult. - plastic and lots of mix and match heads and arms. I am looking forward to making and painting those, and they gave me an excuse to buy the rules, and vice versa. So there's 2-3 different genres there, plus the WW2 6mm, and I'm not sure which one will run away with me in the near future.

Naval gazing

Many years ago - several decades ago - I was very much into naval gaming, especially WW1 and WW2. As a teenager I read everything I could find about the German raiders in the Pacific in the first war, the clashes in the North Sea in 1916, and the actions in northern waters in WW2. As with my land gaming, I am always troubled when there is a gross mismatch between the model scale and the ground (sea) scale. When battleships could engage at 20,000 yards it looks ridiculous to see them apparently about a ship's length apart. So I went for the smallest scale models, the 1/6000 line sold at the time by (I think) Hallmark, now Figurehead. I built up a fairly large collection, pretty much the whole of the British and German WW2 fleets, and a fair selection of US and Japanese. I haven't used them for about ten years, but I was piqued by seeing a post on TMP about Toshach Miniatures and their deck templates for some of these ships. Essentially you buy a pdf download which gives you a sheet to print with images of the carrier decks, with or without aircraft. You can print this on decal paper if you wish, but I bought a sample ($3 for two ships) and simply printed them on plain white 80gsm paper, cut them out with a scalpel and stuck them to the decks of a couple of my models - Kaga and Akagi.

The results are very nice - in the pictures below I have the four Japanese carriers from Midway - Kaga and Akagi with their new-look decks, and Soryu and Hiryu as painted many years ago for comparison. These plans are not all that cheap - $3 for a sheet for just two ships means they are costing about a pound per model - but they do hugely improve the appearance of the models on the table. One problem is that they are only applicable to carriers, and at present anyway only available for a selection of US and Japanese ships.