NAUMACHIA : PART VI : RAMS, RAVENS AND WRECKS CARD SHIPS

Now on to the project which got me into this blog. Making card ships.

Part inspired by Eric Hotz ships but made in a smaller size and less complicated to build, I gradually devised a series of ships in 10cm - about 1/450 scale or so.

They are printed -out flat and in one piece so not so much cutting and fitting as with Hotz ships.

However, discussing with others, people dont seem to like paper /card for ship models. Lead has the lead as one could say. However, weight and the elimination of painting argues well for them in my opinion.

First, various Greek triereis. Early, open style with crews visible toiling away.

A mix of different styles. With sidescreens or not.  More or less decorated.

Here come the barbarians!  Persians with their exotic triereis...and lots of deck fighters.

For figures it is simply a matter of print and fold - maybe stick them on a base.

Now for the Carthaginians - a mix of Hotz ships printed smaller plus my own.

And the Romans with their scary quinqueremes - again with deadly Roman deckfighters.

I am still a big fan of the elegance of design and satisfaction of creating a 3d model from a flat piece of card. They are colourful and cheap. Still not sure what will become of them.

NAUMACHIA : PART I

And here we have them . All lit up. Its wonderful. Like fairyland. All lit up.......

No, actually, here we have the ancient Carian city of Miletus. In 1/3600 scale.

The ships are Outpost Wargame Services' 1/3600 series.

A normal day at the merchant harbour with traffic coming and going.

Some odd wind patterns but no one notices.

And then ! here comes a Roman fleet. The landlubbers with their towered flagships, and a vanguard of corax-equipped quinqueremes.

Roman quinqueremes and hepteremes in centre with towers

Corax-equipped ships in front

The Milesian's launch their guard flotilla of triereis.

But because this is just a demonstration parade it all ends with a cup of tea.

Finally a peek at the walls of Hexapolis. A modular fortification system for this scale I made to go with the modualr city of Hexapolis.2mm figure strips work ok with it.

Obviously not meant to be placed in the sea!....

J 'syrACCUSE!

The saga continues. It is mainly because the Osprey NewVanguard225 has been screaming from my bookshelf for a year or so. It seems to take up more space than an encyclopedia. Partly becaue when I first saw the book I was simply glad the subject had been addressed. This I somewhat regret. I hope to lay the ghost by writing these blogposts.

 Last time plate D got it. The Quinquereme also illustrated in plate D is not error-free but for now I will jump to plate E- 'The Siege of Syracuse 212B.C.'.

What a dog's dinner. Apart from the dress of the sailors at the stern (see previous blogpost).

..warning for the faint-hearted

The most salient problem is the theme of the picture, which is the deployment of a sambuca against the walls of Syracuse.

If you are in doubt as to what a sambuca is look here.



The sambuca of the siege of Syracuse was an arrangement of ships and a ramp for mounting the walls and was so-named because it looked like the musical instrument. Note the soundbox - the ships - and the neck - the ramp - linked by ropes, the strings.

The caption to the plate is largely an excerpt from a translation of Polybius (Historia VIII,4).
By this means the caption author(s?) are hoist by their own petard. The contraption in the plate bears little resemblance to Polybius' description. The ship the thing is mounted-on is also odd.

OK let's go through Polybius' recipe and see how one should make a sambuca.

Nice try but no drinking while blogging!

 SAMBUCA DEL D'AMATO-RAVA
 1) Take ONE quinquereme.
2) A ladder four feet wide (1.2 metres ) with a side-railing.
3) The next bits need two ships. Here we have only one !? Skip over..
4) The affair is raised by men in the stern pulling lines which run through a block at the masthead. In the plate there are precisely four sailors in the stern. One is musing on the massive cable in front of him. The others are making themselves look busy to avoid having to pull on it. The end of the cable is indistinctly terminated in the deck. If you follow the cables to the masthead it is apparent that the sambuca itself is not connected to the stern. The cables illustrated are th emast-stays. The forward mast-stays terminate in thin air or off the ship on land? The sambuca hangs in the block suspended from the foremast and a single cable runs down therefrom to the deck. Unmanned. The size of the sambuca makes it unlikely it could have been the foremast that supported it. Polybius must mean the mainmast.In any casehe clearly says the sailors hauling it up are in the stern of the ships.
5) The platform at the end of the ladder was protected by wicker screens on three sides which were thrown off when the escalading troops rushed up to get onto the wall. The wicker screens are still in place in the plate.

SAMBUCA DEL POLYBIO
 1) On a pair of quinqueremes lashed together,
2)Mount over the junction a ladder 1.2metres wide and very long to project before the ships.The ladder is roofed-over and has side-railings.
3)Arrange functional tackle running from the ladder over the mainmasts to enable sailors in the sterns of the ships to raise the ladder with the aid of sailors in the bows who will use poles.
4)The ladder is equipped with a platform at the end occupied by four men protected by wicker screens on three sides.
5) When the platform is in place above the wall then the screens are thrown down and the main escalading party rushes up the ladder and onto the wall.


How long was the sambuca ?
To get maximum lift the ladder must have had a line fitted as near to its extremity as possible. Maybe 2metres behind the tip or immediately behind the platform. When elevated this point cannot have been raised higher than the top of the mast which was the fulcrum.

The mast top block of a quinquereme would be at about 12 metres over the waterline.
Solving the triangle for a hypothetical slope in action for the ramp of 45 degrees...

The sambuca was in the order of 17 metres long. Polybius says it projects a long way forward of the ships and so it does.

Putting all this together we get an arrangement somewhat like this...

Check this with Polybius

The sambuca in red projects forward as it lies ready to be raised.
The lines to raise it run from behind the landing platform over the mainmasts and to parties of seamen (B) in the sterns ready to haul it up.
In the bows (A) of each ship are parties of seamen with poles to help raise and position the ladder.
Troops wait on deck ready to swarm up the ladder when the landing platform is in place on the walls of Syracuse.

While plate E is down let us kick it some more.
The scale of the ship - a quinquereme - is gross. The timbers on the tower at the ship's stern are approximately 20cm or more thick which maybe they have to be because it is armoured with metal shingles and occupied by Chinamen and a bolt-thrower. The height of the deck above the waterline is well over 3 metres judging by the height of the men on the deck.

 It has a strange gangway built onto the side of the bow. There appear to be men marching up the bow ornament. The pedalion disappears through the oarbox which has two holes in it for some reason. In this situation the pedalion cannot be lifted out of the water by angling it back or outward to any great degree. There is no ventilation course of louvres or apertures for the oarsmen who would soon expire.

Plate E : Too-close-up

One should not look landward because the Syracusans are using one of those fairground crane toys to attack the Romans are are shining searchlights on them to set them on fire. The Romans fight back with geometrically impossible combinations of sambucæ.



On the back of this book - Osprey new Vanguard 225 is written ' With dazzling, meticulously researched artwork, it examines Republican Rome's warships...'
Maybe not.
Messrs Connolly and McBride must be gently rotating in their respective Eternities.

CORNFLAKE QUINQUEREME

53 Euro for something one could make from balsa or cornflake boxes is quite steep. I saw this model 'quinquereme' advertised from Battlefield Accessories..




This is a kit made of laser-cut MDF and is to 28mm scale. 28mm is really 30mm but no one dares say it. OK its fat, giant 25mm. Great for sculptors and easier to paint. I have seen some ugly ships for 25mm which are, as this is, really symbolic representations rather than true models.

The good thing about this kit is that it is modular and can represent a longer or shorter ship. With a nice paint job it will not get in the way of the figures used with it.

On the other hand, it has a corvus which is like a fireman's turn-table ladder, and the hull is not very ship-shaped. 'But your ships are like that !' I hear you cry. Somewhat, but mine are 10cm long. This monster is 50 plus centimetres long. Plenty of scope for modelling.

If you really want a basic ship for fighting across with your chubby giants then how could you build a worse one from balsa, polystyrene or cardboard ? Maybe I  should publish some simple plans here ?

You can also see YOUTUBE videos of building the model. It comes as a short $OZ45 version and the large $OZ80 quinquereme.


Thier diminutive trieres at 8cm for $OZ2.50 is, on the other hand, good value. It makes the best of this material and building technique and you could use 6mm figures on them, or card ones.

See it HERE.
Its scale is about 1/460 and similar to the scale I finally settled for with my card ships.

Capitan also have laser-cut ships HERE

SAW, BANG, HAMMER, SQUEAK

The workers put in some long days with their scissors and knives...
Latests prototype for the pentereis.

An aphract triereis in the foreground for scale, backed by various attempts with the latest and best at front.

Shipyards busy..Penteres in development

I have finally got round to a new model format for larger ships. A 5 is nearly ready and then larger 'polyremes' can use the same format.

5 points if you can name the book !

Here is what the inside should look like -- but maybe I skip that amount of detail for now..

Outpost Ships Painted

First batches of OWS 1/3600 reinforcements now painted.

Quinquereme

Hexereme

Quinquereme with courvus

One of each

These models are not as detailed as the trieres but more than detailed enough for this scale.

The quinquereme could be used as a trieres for those wanting to use something more manageable in the fingers.. By removing one or both towers one could also produce different polyremes e.g. no towers = 6 , 1 tower = 7,  2 towers = 8. Maybe.

FEAT OF CLAY ?

 The terracotta model that is in the Danish National Museum and known as the 'Erment Model' was fuel for a debate in the long-running saga af the ancient galley.

My reconstruction of the 'Erment Model'

Lucien Brasch argued in 1969(1)  that the model supported the idea that there was more than one type of trieres. His reasoning was that the Greeks had their own interpretation of an original idea by the Phoenicians. The model was found in Egypt and must represent a trieres tradition from the eastern Mediterranean which differed from the Hellenistic variety.

Just how one could make an alternative trireme is a  bit of a puzzle but not beyond ingenuity. We have today the advantage of having seen a working trieres in the form of Olympias  (2) and must admit that this colours our vision. Notwithstanding this, there are still critics such as Alec Tilley(3) who have alternative suggestions for how a trieres could be constructed on other lines.

The '3' is here three men sitting side-by-side

Tilley would have the oarsmen on the same level - ergo Erment cannot be a trieres

 Tilley thinks the Erment model could therefore be a hexeres !(x) With two men on each oar because only with such a large number of men and oars would  tiers be necessary.

After Brasch the Erment model is seen as supporting a version of the trieres which is first seen on the Sennacherib stela from Nineveh and that show the flight of Luli from Sidon.

Nineveh stela c.701.bc.

 It is narrow and high, with no apparent outrigger - the parexereisea. Even 'The Athenian Trireme' supported the idea that there is a an unused tier of oarplaces in these reliefs. Odd. If one is fleeing why not use full speed? A rather unbelievable illustration of these ships was given in the Osprey New Vanguard 196 'Warships of the Ancient  World' book.

 In 1975 Alan Lloyd(4)  pretty much knocked the 'Phoenician trieres' theory into touch with his thorough-going rebuttal of Brasch's paper. It includes a quote from R.C. Anderson's 1962 paper(5) which is rather damning. viz.

'It may be made for a trireme, but there is nothing whatever to be learnt from it.'

Subsequently, an expert on specifically Egyptian Hellenistic terracottas  remarked (6)

'Technically Græco-Egyptian terracottas are clumsy work, made with few moulds and the minimum of effort.'

Lloyd's conclusion/broadside...

'M.Brasch may well be right in claiming that the craftsman had in mind a Phoenician trireme but it seems hazardous in the extreme to use such an object to prove that the ship did not possess a parexeiresia, was not equipped with wales - neither of which occur  on Egyptian ships and may well have fallen outside the potter's experience - and had a hull whose proportions differed fundamentally from its Greek counterpart.'

Erment/Phoenicia to the left,: Olympias/Greece to the right

The model has also been used as a possible blueprint for an eastern Mediterranean penteres (7) which is supposed to differ from the Syracusan version by, again, having no outrigger and with double-manned upper oar-tiers.

Straight.sided penteres(removing hanging oarbox

Making the model gave me a little insight into the potter's task. Forgetting any high ideas about an accurate scale model - the concept of which was probably some way ahead in history from when the clay ship was produced.

As any clay structure is built up it tends to sag under its own weight. One can avoid this by a) avoiding overhangs and b) ensuring all points are supported from beneath c) making the structure lighter in the top.

I think the Erment model has its final shape because of these factors. The original profile of a trieres is almost impossible to make in a model of this size if one is not going to take time-consuming steps to support it and let it dry progressively as one builds.

Looks Ementish but WRONG. From Napoleon III's reconstruction of 1882 by Admiral Serre. A classic failure.

Still wrong profile - perfectly round is BAD (puking imminent)

Profile of Olympias by John Coates. Too broad for a clay model.

This is no problem for some smaller, more primitive ship models. Pottery has alway sbeen a lowly trade and pot items very cheap. The idea of taking an inordinate amount of time on a cheap votive item is unlikely.

I also  think the Erment model does have an outrigger but it is misunderstood by the maker. AND transformed so that it fits with the clay's characteristics.

Instead of the oar tiers being set further outboard as in the real thing, the model has them set over each other for the sake of constructing something easily from clay.

The strips supporting the upper two tiers are there because they look like they should be there when one looks at a real trieres but they are also necessary to support the oars in the model. They cannot be set out from the hull or the thing will sag and break so they are set over each other. They show a gunwale and an outrigger but they cannot be set out from the hull or the whole lot will collapse.

The parexeiresia is beneath the upper oars but squished inboard

The epibatai (which could aequally have been the hyperesia) must be set on last. When the decks have dried a little and gained some strength the figures and shields can be glued -on with slip without fear of collapse.

The ship's profile is explained by these factors also. It is flat-bottomed because it must stand solidly as it is built. It is high and stright-sided because an open, low form will collapse unless a time-consuming process is adopted for construction.

I would say the modeller wanted to give a good impression of a trieres and he does. It is a slim, sleek ship with many oars. It has a fierce prominent ram and efficient prominent pedalia which look like they can really affect the ship's progress.

Version 2 may be painted to look a little less like Sonic the Hedgehog!

 Along with the many odd-shaped clay ships i think the Erment model has to be considered just that. In the broadest sense of the word. It is not a scaled-down copy of any ship, penteres, hexeres nor trieres but it is a representation interpreted by the non-sea-going potter and made within the limits of the chosen material. This trieres really does have feet of clay.
It's awful, but I like it.....
(Ref.list to follow)