Project Jutland - Grand Fleet Review

You will be glad to know that this will probably be the last Project Jutland post for a while :-) my updates gave been blocking up most of the Naval Wargaming forums for the best part of a year now, apologies.

The whole of the Grand Fleet, 151 ships.

It's been a journey and a half to say the least, I started the collection back in May 2015, with my first post on a new gaming adventure. The plan at that stage was to build up a couple of Battlecruiser and smaller fleets for smallish games on my home 12 x 6 table.

The Main Fleet

So with 50 or so ships in the collection by January this year I was fairly content to steadily build up the Fleets over time, the Anniversary of Jutland was of course looming but it was just financially impractical to think at that stage of refighting the battle in 2016.

The Armoured Cruisers screening the Fleet

Then step forward, friend and gaming chum Andrew Dickinson who offered to finance the British Dreadnoughts, so in late January 2016 Project Jutland began.

Here we are in late September, 8 months later and the painting stage of the Project is done, 200 ships in that time is pretty good going. I did a High Seas Fleet Review a few weeks ago and a quick post earlier in the week on the last few ships. It would be rude to not follow that up with a Grand Fleet Review.

Lots of Dreadnoughts

There's not much more to say regarding these ships that hasn't been said in previous post so here are some pics,

5th Battle Squadron  (the 15" Battleships)

1st Battlecruiser Squadron 

HMS Lion

HMS Tiger

2nd Battlecruiser Squadron

3rd Battlecruiser Squadron

Engadine and Escort 

Whilst the ships were out it would be amiss not to put the ships out in fighting formation and try out the set up we are going to use at FIASCO for the static display, which is basically the position of the ships at around 19.30 hours as the Fleets clashed. Note I have left all the ships in the fleet on the table for the photos as by 1930 some had been sunk.

HMS King George V leads the line

From the back of the line

The Battle Line for the British is just under 12ft with the ship bases touching and as can be seen the ships comfortably filled the table, the ends have been compressed to fit and will cover about 15ft in total.

It was at this point I sent a picture to Andrew who as a Draughtsman has an eye for distances, our initial plan was to use a 24 x 6 table for the game but it was clear width was going to be a serious issue, so with the British on the table I moved them as far to one edge as possible and then put the Germans on.

So there you have Jutland at 1 to 1 on a 12 x 6 table ! Plenty of manoeuvre room then. The German Battle line should be considerably more square on to the British line and extra table depth is needed. This little practice has certainly set the cat amongst the pigeons in terms of table size, the static display will take a bit of a rejig however the refights are going to need some serious thinking about and more table than originally thought.

So there you have it, thanks to everyone who has visited Project Jutland as it has been ongoing, you support and kind comments have helped to keep me going. Remember that the ships will be on display for the first time at FIASCO at the Royal Armouries in Leeds on 30th October 2016. I will be nearby and more than happy to chat about the project.

P.S. It's at this point that I should confess that during the layout of the ships I realised that I had 3 Destroyers called HMS Manners, cue some rapid searching to find which ships I had missed and repaint the names, then I found I was 2 Admiralty M Class Destroyers short (gasp) so I used two 4 funnel M Class as substitutes (spot them if you can !). Order in to Wargames Emporium in Sheffield for the missing ships, Oops.