I finished up a small fleet of GZG Neu Swabian League old sculpt ships this past week. For the NSL I prefer the old sculpts. They just scream ‘flying brick’, tough ships winning battles through brute force. I got my hands on a couple of small fleets through Ebay and Facebook groups an assembled a couple of the SDN carriers and an escort cruiser. I grabbed a couple of smaller escort ships and started a test paint job.
These casts were of mixed quality. Jon at GZG mentioned the molds wearing out on the larger NSL ships which prompted him to retire them and make the new sculpts. The two Der Theuerdank dreadnought/carrier models I got my hands on first definitely showed signs of miscasting. It didn’t help that the previous owner assembled them poorly and roughed them up pretty bad. If I had noticed the damage I probably wouldn’t have bought them. I got a third cast, a Von Teggetthoff Dreadnought identical to the carrier minus one added piece, and the cast is crisp and the pieces fit pretty well together. The smaller ships were well cast with the exception of some minor damage on the escort cruiser’s bridge section that made me use some putty to help it attach to the hull.
Once the carrier was assembled again and painted up the damage is far less noticeable, and I’m going to add some greebles to the second one to hide some of it.
I wanted a pretty simple paint job reminiscent of WWII German vehicles, both real and Hollywood. I decided to go with a ‘German Grey’ base coat with darker grey and Field Grau accents. I picked out some details in a very light grey to show them off against the darker mini.
