Ships Ahoy!

Five years or so ago when we where playing LOTHS I started collecting toy ships to use in those games. I rather quickly amassed a sizable fleet of 5 ships and 2 boats for pirate gaming. I did this through that vile money pit ebay. Now I never actually got around to converting any of these toys for wargaming so I have finally begun to do so. I have two playmobil ships I bought used off of ebay they are very large but I like that their decks are wide and allow for many miniatures at a time. The down side of playmobil ships is that they need a lot of work to make them look the right scale, they are very large.

This is the first of my playmobil ships, playmobil calls it a schooner but with a keel length of  14 1/2" it will have to be a 3 master to look in scale. Here is a playmobil advert photo of this ship with the masts on 14 1/2" is much to big for a 28mm schooner. I stripped it of masts and clipped off various knobs and protrusions. I also remove the screws because they weren't flush with the deck.

The playmobil ships have wheels on the bottom of the hulls for the kiddies so the first order of business was to cut off the bottom of the hull off so it would have a proper waterline. This was done with a double toothed hand saw for cutting wood.

I think the gunwale height in comparison to this 8" long 28mm brig looks correct now. The 8'' long 2 mast plastic ship is one of two that came in a board game called Weapons & Warriors Pirate Battle Game where you use cannons that shot little rubber balls to knock down your enemy's figures.

I learned about this OOP game through the LOTSH yahoo group back in the days when yahoo groups where the thing for wargamers on the internet. As you can see from the picture above a complete game nets you 2 ships, 2 boats, a round tower, 12 cannon, treasure chests, some nice palm trees and a bunch of 28mm plastic pirates. The round bases of the pirate figures are 25mm in diameter which makes these ships the perfect size.