Patrick O’Brian’s ‘Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr Maturin’ novels

I’m back into reading the last few books in the Patrick O’Brian series of nautical novels about Captain Jack Aubrey and his particular friend Dr Stephen Maturin during the Napoleonic Wars.   Beautifully, beautifully, beautifully written books.  They do take a little perseverence to get into initially, but once you’re hooked, they effortlessly take you back two hundred odd years.  I’ve been reading the whole series over the last year or two, and am now sadly drawing near the end.

Here’s the ending of the movie version of Master and Commander [note - contains spoiler].  At 1:20 Captain Aubrey (Russell Crowe) and Dr Maturin begin to play their instruments in  a marvellously evocative piece of music to match the scenes of drumming to quarters:

Mulling over commercially-cut bases

I’m seeking advice from those of you who use commercially-cut plywood bases for your wargames armies.

I normally cut my own bases from heavy cardboard. But for my 28mm Minden Miniatures “Barry Lyndon” project, I’m considering going commercial. This is mainly because (although my main bases will be 30mm by 40mm) all my supernumery figures are going to be on very small bases (15mm x 15mm) which will be hard to cut consistently myself. So I might as well do the whole project on commercial bases.

I’ve heard of Litko – are they the best to use from here in New Zealand (price, service, postage rates etc)?

What thickness works best? I see Litko do 3mm, 1.5 mm and 0.8mm plywood.

Rounded or square corners? I think the rounded Battlefront-style bases look good, but not sure how they would look for the horse and musket era.

Thought of the day

My wargames battalions only have a few dozen figures in them instead of around 600.

And so often our battalions usually have only one drummer instead of several, one sergeant instead of lots, and one officer instead of many.

Which leads me to think that if instead of wargaming, my hobby was making model cars, would I be satisfied with modelling a Chevy with one wheel instead of four?

Or for model ships, making the Titanic with one funnel instead of four?