Victorian Science Fiction

A couple of years ago we were playing Franck Chadwick's Space 1889 game. The basis of the game is that space travel has been invented and that Mars is populated, covered in canals and great use is made of flying ships. The European colonists build ships which are much like contemporary ironclad naval ships while the Martians make use of flying galleons. We decided it would be nice to make some 28mm (approx 1/64 scale) versions. This makes ths ships fourten inches plus long. We ended up making eleven ships in total and running participation games at Salute 2005, SELWG 2005 and Salute 2007. The pcitures show some of the ships I built. More details of the game and the ships built by the rest of the group can be found at:

http://www.salute.co.uk/saluteframe.htm

and looking under previous Salute games - Cloudships of Mars

All photographs here are courtesy of John Treadaway

The first ship I built was a French ironclad, the Napoleon, an ironclad airship

When you've built one, you just have to build some opposition:

By then the bug has bitten and you're on to building another Martian ship