Hi guys
I am contemplating a vignette set in wartime Italy; a damaged village street, probably with a burnt out tank, and a small mule train passing by. I had thought to make it heavily damaged (most of the houses lying in the street as rubble), but one of my houses is solid resin, so the damage will be rather lighter. Does anyone have any thoughts (or preferably pics) of the sort of damage inflicted by light mortars on a pantiled roof?

Chris

I would presume with them being tiled, they chip shatter quite easily.

But it depends if the mortar hit the roof direct.

Do a google search for Italian campaigns ww2 and then search for each individual one eg: Operation Husky - Sicily.

Paul.

Yes, there are so many great pics on the web, but the problem might well be that you are not told what specifically caused the damage you see!?!??

Interesting question anyway! I am in a comparable situation and badly informed about mortar damage on certain objects!.

Will thus watch this thread closely!!

Cheers

Romain

So, you all ask for the specialist, huh!!!???



Depending on the bore of the mortar grenade and the complete roofing structure, this mat vary.
Light mortars may smash through a single layer of tiles, if there is no (wooden) structure under them. Like in a simple barn.
Heavy mortars will be able to smash throuh even more solid roofings.
All is also very much influenced by the fuse, used. In case so called slow fuses are used, the mortar will smash through and explode. These fuses are used to create optimal effect against dug in positions. Normal fuses will explode on contact. Also time controlled fuses were used in WWII. These fuses were set in such a way that they would explode at about 50 m (or less) before hitting ground. Thus creating a wide curtain of metal parts, used against infantery in the open.
Now: as you may understand, you could go from damaged tiles, via a hole in the roof up to a complete damaged structure.

Hope to have given a bit more info.

On behalf of the artillery,

P.

That's an answer!Thanks Paul

Now you only have to buy my book and see how you can make a nice damaged roof! LOL

Greets
Claude (who could not resist)

You are a specialist Paul, so I would dare to ask a specific question (by separate mail) for my situation, that is if you agree!

Don't hesitate to refuse if this is asking too much!

Cheers

Romain

Thanks guys. On behalf of the infantry, I reckon we have more mortars than the artillery (though this may vary from nation to nation). I had not considered non-impact fuses so was expecting light damage. Yes the tile would shatter and maybe some neighbouring ones, but as the house is solid resin, I do not envisage being able to replicate serious penetration of the roof! But the master of Clervaux may have the best idea; I will have to study pics of the roofs of his ever expanding masterpiece.

Chris

Hi again
I have spent quite some time chasing pics of damaged buildings on the web. I am a little frustrated as there are lots of pics of houses seriously damaged by bombing or shellfire (and lots of pics of ruins and advice on how to make them). But I do not find many pics of lightly damaged houses, nor much advice on how to replicate them, nor, since most pics are taken from ground level, do I find very many pics of lightly damaged roofs! I have a book on how to create model buildings, but it has nothing between undamaged houses and totally wrecked ones. I have been through a lot of the IWM archive without much success. If anyone can direct me to a fruitful source of pics of lightly damaged roofs, I would be very grateful.

Chris

Good morning Chris

Something like this?


My approach to this is always to look around you and work with some logic and common sense.

When I started to build roofs I climbed up to my attic and looked how my own roof looks like. There is nothing mysterious in a roof construction. Everything has it's place and all changes to design still respect the same basic rules.

The rest is all up to your imagination. The problem is of course that the whole inside will be seen and should be build according to those rules. There is a lot to watch for a first time.

The thing to do for you is to start drawing, the complete roof, the a draw with the structures only, then you can start thinking what to destroy , then decide how to make it.
Think ahead! Far ahead!

The roof is more then joists and planks. What roofing material to use is important to!
What walls are benearth to support your uprights?

Just to say that for the roof above and the destruction beneath it took me a bit more then 3 months of work, daily work. Around 500 hours probably!
There is so much to say about doing a work like that , but considering that that chapter covers nearly 10 pages in my book, this is to much for a message board.

There are a couple of people follwing this thread who own my book already and they can probably tell you if the How to pages about the roof are any good. I am a bit biaised :-)

Greets
Claude

The damage can be from slight to heavy,yes. Depends on what hit the roof and how big it was. The ceramic tiles have a ridge molded onto the back that lets them hang from the wooden horizontal slats. This means a small caliber round will maybe only dislodge a few tiles. Even a large caliber round will make a small hole if it doesn't have the impact fuse.
Mortar rounds are meant to have their explosive force to radiate outward from the impact area and will leave a pretty small imprint on the ground where they hit. So the same would be true for the roof. Plus mortars go from @ 60mm up to 120mm and larger. Then there is the arty.
Complicated subject. Long story short,almost anything goes. As Claude said. Figure out how the structure is built and then deconstruct it!
J

Chris,

It sounds like you're trying to figure out how to damage the resin building slightly without having to resort to catastrophic destruction. Modifying the resin parts seems to be the major limitation on how much you want to do.

I would suggest that you could try to confine the replicated damage in either one of two ways and still be realistic.

First, the most common sized mortar in use by both the Allies and the Germans was the 3" / 81-82 mm. Both sides used mortar bombs that could be fuzed according to the target - either super quick or delay.

Super quick would be used to achieve a near surface burst and maximum fragmentation against troops in the open. (This is why, as Jerry observes, mortars don't leave very large craters in the open.) A super quick explosion on your tiled roof would probably happen just under the tiles creating a rather large hole, say about 1-1/2 to 2 meters in diameter in the roof and dislodge tiles in an area about twice that size. You would have tiles and bits of tiles scattered over the entire roof with some falling, of course, to the ground. There would also be some of the underlying lattice boards fragmented and scattered around the hole as well. The total amount of material (tiles and wood) would not exceed the materials blown out of the hole.

Super quick result: A large hole in the roof with a fairly clear view into the attic space with most of the roofing materials scattered outward from the hole.

Most of the troops, if any, in the attic would likely only suffer injury from the blast coming through the roof and very little of the shrapnel would penetrate into the attic space. Secondary fragmentation from the roof tiles and wood laths would be a danger, though not nearly so fatal as the shrapnel from the bomb outside of the roof. This is why the firing mortar unit would probably not use super quick to attack a target in a built up area and also why troops seek cover.

In built-up areas, most mortar fire missions would employ delayed fuzed bombs. This is to achieve penetration of the structure (where the enemy troops are presumed to be under cover) with the resulting explosion confined within the building. A super-quick 3" / 81-82 mm mortar round would easily penetrate the tiles and lattice of the roof and, depending on where on the roof it landed, also penetrate the ceiling of the floor just under the attic. The explosion would either be inside the attic or inside a room under the attic.

If inside the attic, the explosion would likely blow a very large number of the roof tiles completely off of the structure, however, the penetration hole through the wood laths would be fairly small, only a few inches in diameter. The damage to the wooden lath structure that supports the tiles would be minimal. Depending on the volume of the attic space, much of the force would simply pass through the wood laths and blow the tiles off like leaves. Of course, for any enemy troops in the attic, the explosion and shrapnel would be catastrophic and quite deadly.

However, if your mortar round passed through the roof, attic space, AND the ceiling of the room below and exploded there (in the room below the attic), exterior visible damage would be very slight. The roof would have a small hole, perhaps a half meter in diameter where the tiles were broken and dislodge and a correspondingly small hole only a few inches in diameter through the supporting wood laths.

The glass in the windows of the room below this would be blow out completely (or nearly so) and quite likely, the curtains would also be blown outward with their ends hanging outside the structure (likely torn and ripped). Structural damage inside the room would be quite extensive, but mostly from shrapnel with some blast damage (assuming the round exploded in mid-air in the middle of the room). Depending on the size of the room and random things like furniture, the results of this explosion on any troops in the room would be almost uniformly fatal.

So, if modifying the resin parts of the building kit are indeed the main issue, then I think you could reasonably depict fairly slight damage to the roof with the windows on the side of the building nearest the roof damage telling the rest of the story.

High-angle Hell!

Thanks very much guys. You are really trying to help. However, one of my houses is solid resin and there is no way I can replicate the sort of damage that would reveal the attic (like an 81mm mortar would inflict). That one, using such pics as I have managed to unearth is just going to have a few broken tiles and bits of tile lying around on the roof which is fortunately not steeply pitched.

The other house is plastic which means it is amenable to more serious damage, but it is a Stone House (Italeri) which includes the roof which represents one made from roughly shaped and not very flat slabs of stone. I assume there must be more woodwork under a roof like that (more that the usual rafters and laths) in order to support the weight. What sort of damage am I likely to see here?

Oh and Claude, thanks for your pic, but I classify that as pretty severe damage - though obviously there are less heavily damaged bits of roofs in the picture as well. My roofing slabs look a bit rougher than the slates of Clervaux!

It is interesting too, that there is not very much on roof structure and coverings in the references I have seen.

Chris