First Naval Flags released

The three first sets of our new 1:600 Age of Sail range are already available. Each consists of a DIN A7 sized paper sheet with several maritime flags and pennant, conceived for a particular ship type and nation. The first three ones just launched are devoted to Spanish and Portuguese trans-atlantic galleons as well as a generic French Indiaman, and will be shortly followed by other sets; for it's our purpose to have a consistently large collection of flags at disposal of users at the time of releasing the first ship models.

Flags have been designed as a first instance to serve as ensign the largest, as complementary or alternative mast flags the medium sized ones, and a likely jack if needed the smallest one. I think it's also worth to advance that medium sized flags will be designed so that some can be used as ensign for smaller ships. Others will be interchangable from one set to another, so as to serve as (likely if not purely historical) rank flags or other purposes; I'm thinking of English Squadron mast flags, for instance. You will see what I mean as collection grows.

It's probable that many users aren't going to hoist all these flags on a single ship, or aren't going to use them as conceived at start --but we thought it good to give the maximum number of choices in such a small sheet. And last but not least, despite conceived to complement our upcoming range of ships (scaled to 1:600, as said), our flags will perfectly fit onto models from other makes --even those nominally larger such as Peter Pig's 1:450 scale ships, as my own experience as a gamer can attest.

New sets can be acquired from our website at the price of €2.00 each. As already commented, they'll be shortly followed by some flag sheets else, accordingly to the current schedule shown in this page of Minairons Blog --and several more awaiting a chance in Minairons' Wishlist page.

Naval Flags Poll Results

The poll we placed some weeks ago, with the aim to know our readers opinion on a future Naval Flags range priorities, is over now. Let's analize its results and make a few first decisions:

Poll consisted of two linked questions; the first one asked what period would users like better we started with. As it can be seen by the image attached at left, results here are straightforward: we are required to start with 17^th century (17 votes, against 10 for 18^th century). However, the number of votes requesting a development of both periods is significant enough to make us think that, despite giving higher priority to the period having won, the second one shouldn't be put aside. Somehow, we'd better to start developing this latter shortly after having started the first period.

As for the second poll, this one asked for users priorities among diverse seafaring nations --where several responses were allowed. Results here are fairly clear, with English men-of-war flags an absolute winner with 20 votes! Other options can be grouped into three groups: those closely following the winner (14 to 12 votes), those not prioritary but inspiring some curiosity (8 to 5 votes) and the not so favoured queue (4 votes or less).

SO WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO WITH THIS?

First of all, results have been inserted into Minairons Wishlist, so as to allow you to still influence scores and priorities (no matter if you already voted in the poll; what I'd like to foresee now is amount requests). Thanks to this, everyone can also request another projects not listed in the poll --just as I've done myself by adding Emanuel Wynn pirate, Jerusalem trucial trader, Russian man-of-war or Papacy ships!

As already explained in a previous post, we already projected another 10 flag designs besides of those in the poll. All them were inserted in pipeline prior to the poll, and even a few have already been printed. These 10 designs fall into two categories: flag sheets belonging to Iberian Peninsula nations (that aren't going to be affected by the poll results), and French and Ottoman sheets (whose releasing will be alternated with those best scoring in the poll; so in the next few days, pipeline will be modified with the insertion of English man-of-war flags and will start their production too).

Q - And what about 18^th century naval flags?
A - Soon, news about them coming soon too; I'm not going to forget these.