1:100 Dutch Galleon from OcCre Buccaneer in a 1730s ocean diorama — on a $1,000 budget.

[Marky Torun]

THE INGREDIENTS

Three hundred readers, I'm honoured! Here is the last of my three equipment images.

Wouldn't I like to have a master shipwright's bits 'n' bobs drawer, such as from the genius Hubac’s Historian on this forum? I'm sure I could make a ship just from his leftovers. https://shipsofscale.com/sosforums/members/hubac’s-historian.8032/

My ship&diorama ingredients speak for themselves. Amati is a good, affordable supplier of gun ports, cannon, ladders and stairs, ornamented strips -- anything made of metal, really. Sometimes I get the scale wrong, but those I'll bury in the sea bed as treasures.

Mod Podge is decent for water sculpting and it comes in a generous jar. The Vallejo brand is superior in my experience: it gives me crystalline transparency, while AK provides the opposite: wild foam.

The mini-wreck, I put together plank for plank, but the hull of the captain's boat is one metal form; I'm not much of a masochist. In the board gamers scene, who have a shop and player's club in every city, I purchase tufts of grass, tiny gravel, and for the beach a sand imitator that basically resembles solidifying peanut butter. It is stunning how some of those players construct, paint, and ornament their pawn hobgoblins or witchland game maps.

I buy the cheapest Chinese boat set in the same 1:100 scale as my Ochre Galleon, which is an affordable way to get extra sails, deck grids, planks, and a few guns. I have decided to give my galleon an extra gun deck, plus two shooting out the stern, to go from the buccaneer's 12 cannon to 29 in my Dutch galleon.

Collapsible beading needles are astonishing to work with, so much better than regular needles. It, and nylon thread, comes from the tailor's shop. From the 1970s I have always kept a bag of water-esque globules that harden when boiled; let's see if that still works. The product is still on the market, I see.

Fine but hard gauze for use in air filters will be my fishing net. Then, a hundred architectural figures for building mockups arrive together in a box; I choose the best eight of them with suitable body positions to be my swimmers, crow's nest watchmen, and sleepers on the beach.

My megalodon lurking under the ship is a 3-D printed beaut. I find it on Etsy in landlocked Slovakia, of all places.

Finally, a visit to a model railway shop gets me water sheets, rock sheets, fake rocks, and 1:87 (H0 scale), tiny dogs, cats, and sea birds. I absolutely must have a beagle on deck, her nose in the evening breeze.

With a box cutter, I slice diagonal lines in the surface of the blue sculpting foam slabs. Then I deepen and soften those sharp slits by rubbing a small stone along them. The deeper crevices are painted dark and the outer surfaces lighter. Glueing bits of this foam together is best done with an upholsterer’s glue spray that spews out creepy silvery nets of goo that stick like hell. I take care to lock my cats out of the room first.

Phosphorescent paint is produced from phosphorescent powder, so I buy the powder directly, in different hues, mix with latex paint, and brush it onto my water plants (bought in an aquarium and fish pet shop) and onto a set of 3D printed jellyfish that I will glue to the bottom side of the water sheet, to be suspended in LED light.

Finally, four big fat plastic decorative pine branches used in fake floral arrangements from a Christmas decoration shop, each as big as my hand, are just right for coarse weedy underwater plants, also to hide the wiring under.

Almost a month flies by on watching diorama modelling video's; they are so addictive. Then I search online for the best beach & ocean pictures, bird's eye view, and my son and I start to sculpt with Vallejo, AK, and Mod Podge, and spread the chemical peanut butter on the beach, and try to make it all look like a convincing, miniature, frozen reality. You be the judge, dear reader.

 

[Magic Mike]

Thanks Mark for your report and welcome to the forums. Greetings from Texas! Magic Mike

 

[Marky Torun]

HISTORY: DUTCH EXPLORATION, NAVAL BATTLES, AND COLONIAL ACTION

(The pictures in this section are from De Rede van Texel, the world’s largest ship’s diorama on the Dutch island of Texel.)

Please skip this section if history bores you!

Why did the Portuguese start exploring? As usual with great endeavours, the reason was economical: after the Ottoman Turks seized Aleppo, they controlled all the end points of the Silk Route, and their supply monopoly saw prices shoot up. It became a risk worth taking to get the spices by ship, at the source. As soon as that had been achieved, the amount of chests a carrack could hold dwarfed any of the handcarts and saddle bags of the Silk Route merchants.


The Dutch soon followed. They had built (small) ships in their watery country for centuries. In the 1590s, Cornelis Corneliszoon invented both the saw mill and its crankshaft. Building a ship now cost 100,000 guilders. A ship full of spices and tea would bring in a million guilders. That was a no-brainer. They invented the investment company for this project in 1600: investors bought a share in a fleet and were awarded a share of the profits. The VOC was the first state-run multinational company.

The Dutch had 2,000 ships in no time, against the English’ 500. They needed money to fight the Spaniards, who owned the Low Lands — a war that would last 80 years -- and the Dutch won it.



The Dutch were also responsible for about 5% of the Atlantic slave trade, and for some of the worst atrocities. As his galleon was sinking, a Dutch captain in the mouth of a Surinam river hammered the deck grids shut to prevent a possible slave attack, and 700 drowned, with the crew rowing away to safety. The Dutch East India Company in its report only expressed regrets at the financial cost of the mass murder.

Unlike the Iberians, the Dutch controlled no goldmines, so they had to put in thousands more miles per expedition to sell finished products and spices to Japan and the Philippines, then take their gold to pay for tea in China. (The Chinese were fully uninterested in Europe’s products. They only wanted precious metals).



The Dutch would leave their warships at the coast and sail up the Yangtze to China’s capital, Nanjing, on an unarmed flagship, with a Dutch brass band playing Chinese tunes to humour the Emperor’s representatives. The Dutch were equally effective as brutal slave traffickers as arse-licking purchasers. I lived in Nanjing during Covid for a few years. Unfortunately, Japanese destruction and Maoist renewal has meant that almost nothing is left of the old capital of China.



But I did learn a great story there of an admiral, centuries ago, who noticed lots of wood splinters floating in the river at Nanjing. He realised: “They’re building a fleet upstream”. And when it sailed, Nanjing’s defences were ready.

The profits the Dutch made in Asia allowed them to continue, and then win their war of independence. During this time, as many Spanish ships were robbed and sunk as possible. The David and Goliath struggle had ‘Our Trafalgar’ as a highlight: in the Battle of the Downs in 1639, 95 Dutch warships under Tromp destroyed the total Spanish fleet, and total victory and Dutch independence lay just nine years away.





In this Dutch Golden Age, over half of all ships rounding Africa were Dutch. They had in effect replaced the Portuguese as the leading trading power in Asia.

Later in the century, three wars with the English (one won, one lost, one draw) ended the Dutch need to take on larger adversaries at sea for a long time, though the Dutch navy has remained strong to this day, and the NATO fleet in the Baltic is headed this year by the Dutch Zr.Ms. Tromp.



The Dutch East Indiamen were called Spiegelretourschip, after the baroque finishes on the stern resembling a hand-held mirror (a spiegel), and after them, hopefully, returning from the East- or West Indies. In these years, the Dutch solidified power over all of present-day Indonesia.

Each colonial power had its own standard chests, barrels and crates. Some, like the Swedes, had chests with curved lids: pretty but not very stackable. The Spanish chests were small. The Dutch chests, for sale online for about $4,000 these days, measure 170 x 70 x 70cm, large enough to fit a man’s costume, or a gun, or lots of spices/tea. Since height and depth are the same, they are stackable even if they’ve toppled over on a rough sea. Here's an image of the one's I scratch-built:




The Dutch went from an agrarian Spanish colony to the richest and most liberal independent nation in Europe in just three generations. What made that possible? The jumpstart was actually a Spanish victory: hell-bent on subjugating their rebellious northern possession, Phillip II sent an army that sacked Antwerp. Belgium had long been a hinge of trade between the Hansa and Italy, and had its own huge textile industry. Half of the Antwerp’s traders and professionals fled to Amsterdam, taking their expertise and business ties with them.

After the Spaniards took Antwerp with the greatest massacre in the history of the Low Countries, Dutch resistance was united. The Spaniards fought on for seventy years but had no second great victory anymore despite brutal battles and sieges that are remembered in Holland each year.



A Dutch ship brought Europe’s first tea to London. The Hollanders always sensed such opportunities well. When, later, they realised that the South African climate might just be perfectly suited for wine, they invited the Amsterdam Huguenots over to start vineyards there. Some Huguenots, who had been welcomed in Amsterdam after being driven out of their native France, gladly obliged, and South African wines today are the result of this idea.



Amsterdam had almost complete press freedom, and its cartography was the best in the world, with their makers, such as Willem Janszoon Blaeu and Hessel Gerritsz, always walking around the port areas to quiz captains about faraway coastlines and rivers. Large, original, amazingly detailed maps, cut out of 17th century atlases, are today sold online for as little as $1,000, and I have several on my walls. Some of the loveliest are the ones with sea monsters. These were not true to proven sightings, but drawn in corners where there was little else to draw but open ocean, making these maps artistic as well as informative.

 

[GIG1810]

Hey Marky,
How wonderful. That's amazing. Thank you very much for the information. I'm totally thrilled. The model landscapes are also incredibly well built. I really must go there sometime.

 

[Marky Torun]

LED LIGHTS CALCULATION



The ocean box is now done, and around the whole thing comes a glass display case.

The candle-lit lanterns with their distinctive, timeless shape, still seen in a thousand parks and town centres today, are available for train sets in two sizes, with bright tungsten LED lights inside. I apply a thin layer of ochre with Warhammer paint on the white plastic to get warm and gentle light.

Then I proceed to blow up all the lights in the hull with one stupid voltage overdose. But what an impressive flash it was! No, I do need to work on Ohm’s law and calculate. But how do I get back inside the hull for new lights and new wires?

I drill a 5mm shaft horizontally through the ship, just under the deck, through which I lead a straw with the lights inside. Plastic straws are possibly still available through Tor on the dark web for hefty crypto, or at Russian dealers across the misty bridge from where I live. I cut little holes in the side of the straws where the light needs to peep through below deck.

The wires are led out of the bow of the galleon, painted black, where they weave into the fishing-nets. The nets reach the ocean floor, where the wires continue, fusing into the electricity mainline. It’s all obscured by plastic aquarium plants.

The effect in the map room (above) is quite pleasing.

I order 50 lights in different hues as options to play around with, with 15 of them already inside tiny plastic lanterns. They're super cheap.


One adapter provides 12 Volts DC at 30W. The 3mm and 5mm LEDS take around 2.8V (depending on colour and temperature). Those LEDs must run in series of four, meaning the currency is led in a circle through them all, the way Christmas tree lights work. I solder a 16 Ohm resistor into each loop to prevent further blowouts (doesn't matter if it's on the + or -. I make sure the solder melts onto the stripped wires gently after I’ve coiled them together.

Four such series connected to the 12V adapted don’t even need more than 1W. Twelve lights overall should be enough for blue ‘under water’, yellow and green inside the hull, warm white on the deck as candled lanterns, and a red one on the beach as the dying embers of a bonfire.

I make a panel with four good-looking switches which will be on the outside of the diorama; each one controlling four LEDs. The fourth will power the LED light snake under the top plank above the ship, with a milky perspex pane underneath, controlled by a remote (which even allows for reacting to sound input).


I still manage to blow up one series when the cables connect inside a straw where they shouldn’t. The red LED wire leads to the + side, and the blue to the -. In the lanterns, it’s black that is + and yellow -. However, if I put the plus and the minus the wrong way round on a series of four, no harm is don: they just don’t work but can be rewired and shine fine.


In the end there's four times a 50-50 chance, and Murphy means I get it wrong each time. You'll never see me in a casino.

The most important one is the rear deck lantern. Some galleons have three of them, but mine is less sophisticated. I drill through the solid metal lantern that came in the OcCre set from underneath and scrape out the ‘panes’ from the outside. Then I shove an LED up it for a yellow light that bathes the poop deck.

With the remote to the light strip in the lid of the aquarium, I can simulate anything from a dim pale moon to a bright tropical noon, or a ghostly night scene. In green and blue light, the decks take on a graphic, contrast-rich appearance.



The box must look interesting from all sides so I can turn the thing around from time to time. One side shows the battle damage, the repair raft, the captain's boat and laundry lines, and on the other side fishing nets and a megalodon.




The main job is now done, after nine months, the time it took to build a real galleon once the Dutch had invented the mechanical saw mill. Sure, mine is tiny and won't reach Indonesia, but I did it all by myself, starting with the Ochre buccaneer set, and only this great forum for reference. Reactions welcome!

 

[Namabiiru]

Looks fantastic! Well done! I can appreciate all the challenges you faced with the lighting, as I am fumbling through the lighting for my own build. I can see from yours that is worth the time and effort involved.