Black Sea's Spanish Third Rates

The last two Spanish 74's are now finished after much cursing and gluing together of fingers adding the rigging, sails and ratlines!

The Santa Ana:

The San Francisco:

The earlier finished Neptuno:

For around £24 via Wayland Games (effectively £8 each) I think these look great. The models are easy to put together and paint up nicely. The box includes the sails, rigging thread, ratlines and a comprehensive selection of flags.

Rigging them is a pain but did get easier with practice and improves them vastly. Personally I'm not so keen on the sails, they are quite thick and plastic looking but they look okay.

The ratlines again I'm not that keen on, being printed on clear plastic they don't look as good as etched ones would but when I looked at using etched ones instead it would have doubled the cost of the ships! I also saw a Kickstarter for a jig which allowed you to tie your own ratlines from thread (how crazy is that?!).

So now I have three Third Rates (which can also be used as merchantmen or troopships), three Frigates and four Brigs which is a decent fleet I think.

As for adding any more I might be tempted by the Santissima Trinidad but as it is resin with cast metal masts I really don't see the masts working well, the metal Warlord use is far too weak for tank barrels let alone large ship masts. I'm going to resist starting another nation so probably won't add any more in the immediate future....