Patria e Onore

Motherland and honour!

The first squadrons for the Regia Marina are ready to sortie from Taranto.

Putting to sea

Two Zara class heavy cruisers.

Two Condotierri class light cruisers.

These are technically Capitan Romani class cruisers. But when looking up names for that family of ships I learned that only three of them were commissioned and only months before Italy surrenderd to the Allies. So instead, I've given them names from a group of the large and varied Condotierri class.

That's what I get for buying ships without doing my research or paying attention to the lists in the back of the rules. But having ships named the Pompeo Magno and Scipione Africano seemed too cool not to do.

Next are the first (of many!) destroyer flotillas.

Six destroyers. Five Soldati and one Navigatori class, because someone got into the wrong bag, and I didn't notice until the initial dry brushing. 

Soldati class DDs

Navigatori

With the Italian ships, picking names was less of an issue. Some classes only have two units anyway. I asked Don to "print me 6 of every destroyer", and then it turns out that the Orsa class of torpedo boat/escort destroyer only had four ships. Fortunately they were very similar to a preceding class of torpedo boat, so I borrowed some names from that family of ships.

While waiting to get the lables printed, and fighting with the printer to get it to recognize the juicy new ink cartridges, I also got the convoy of merchant ships painted up. There are two different .stls; the Liberty ship and a German Auxiliary ship. Both were free! The small ship is also a Liberty ship printed at 1:2400 scale by Mike Peterson a few years back when I first started on this nautical adventure. It's lost some derricks, but I'm not sure it matters?

They have generic labels so they can be an Allied convoy one game, Italian the next, and once I get German units, they can be a German convoy in the North Sea as well.

For the merchant ships, I used spare plastic bases from  Warlord Napoleonic infantry sets. 20mm x 100mm and 20mm x 60mm. I've also found the 100mm bases very useful for strings of pack horses.