Tassafarango

Regular listeners of All About Miniatures will remember that Dan mentioned the Battle of Tassafarango in his Battles of the Month segment. Wanting to do some naval wargaming in the WWII period, I picked this battle as one for which I would collect ships. When deciding to start a new period like this, a certain amount of reasearch is involved. For anyone interested, here is the process I went through when working the project. First, we need to learn about the battle itself. There is a good account of the battle itself at Wikipedia. The article also includes a link to the order of battle. We need this order of battle to determine what to buy!

I spent some time debating if I would do the ships in 1/2400 scale or 1/6000 scale. I really like the GHQ models and would have bought the larger ships in a heartbeat except the GHQ ships had two issues: the biggest one is that the range is incomplete and they didn't have any ship models for the Kagero Class destroyers. The second issue is that I really don't have a big enough table to play games using 1/2400 scale models. The table size issue is really secondary, however, because a complete GHQ range would have had me selecting their ships instead of the 1/6000 scale ships

Battle of Tassafarango
Japanese Order of Battle
Strike Force	Class	GHQ	Figurehead
Desdiv 31
Naganami	Yugumo	IJN-5	2J74
Takanami	Yugumo	IJN-5	2J74
Transport Force
Desdiv 15
Kuroshio	Kagero	?	2J74
Oyashio	Kagero	?	2J74
Kagero	Kagero	?	2J74
Desdiv 24
Suzukaze	Shiratsuyu	IJN-13	2J73
Kawakaze	Shiratsuyu	IJN-13	2J73
Desdiv 31
Makinami	Yugumo	IJN-5	2J74

Once I had the models selected, it was time to decide on a color. Next time, I will discuss how I chose the colors I used to paint the models.