|
Well, there's a couple ways you can do this: If you're really serious, you can build the whole area to scale... problem is, your ships are way larger than your groundscale, which kinda defeats the entire purpose of making a true scale model. At the very least, you'll probably want to dramatically increase the vertical scale, just to show the terrain better.
I'd start by trying to chase down nautical charts and some topographical maps of the area... nautical charts shouldn't be too hard, and they'll have important navigational references that really help to "place" a location. The charts may or may not (depending on the original source) have both bottom contours and topographical contours. The other thing to remember is that nautical charts are almost always showing water depth in Fathoms, and elevations in feet or meters.
personally, I'd make the entire area to ship-scale (but that means you need lots of space for the battle), and either cut the basic contours out of foamcore or MDFboard. Then, you can cover the hills with paper-mache to make the slopes.
You certainly could build the area at your normal groundscale (there's a good chance that you could actually play the game on a chart, if you could find one in the right scale), and do the same thing. I recall charts that were 1"=1000yds, which is the scale I play WW2 naval in, but those were actual USNavy charts, not necessarily the same ones made available to civilians.
For general terrain building, I usually refer people to the model railroad books of how to do scenery.
_________________
"For the Lion and the Emperor!"
|
