Having built a few larger vessels and looking to try out a couple of different ideas I chose to build one myself. It will belong to whatever navy I choose to oppose my current fleet of Ironclad warships and it's name will be Nemesis.
the hull was made like the previous boats, blue board with card cladding,
for details on this see the "Adventures in Blueboard and Foamcore" page above
an old Revell PT-109 kit that I picked up at a garage sale for fifty cents
gave up it's torpedo tubes for the cause
a bit of the control panel was used as well, this is one of the things I wanted to try,
construction with heavy card for thin section walls and such
the "bits box" provided some light guns and a smokestack
then I started looking for a satisfactory arrangment of the weapons on the deck
the torpedo tubes kept rolling around
so I glued them onto bases made of craft sticks
a nice flat bottom, and a good gluing surface to boot!
the deck planking was inscribed into the foam,
notice that this time I remembered to not use a marker
a heavy layer of Mod-Podge was applied,
this substance has a little more "give" than the hardened wood glue that
I have used in the past and I was interested in how it would work out
then I started to play with positioning the the deck structures
cool, but a little Dystopian Wars
swapping the light gun to the front didn't change much
then there was the "shoot and scoot" set-up,
this allowed the superstructure to be well forward
alternately the 4" gun and smokestack could be up front
there is always the classic PT boat style
or, skip the light gun, and put four tubes abreast on the foredeck
I rather like the way that this looks
even better with gun moved back near the funnel
the superstructure froward/tubes aft again
this got monotonous
so I went to bed without gluing anything in place
I have always been partial to the very aggressive look of quad tubes amidships on a central trainable mount with a deck gun at the bow or bow and stern. Some of the early British destroyers only had a single tube, often trainable. In terms of economy that would give you four boats out of the PT kit. Another option would be internal fixed bow or stern tubes. It should be relatively straight forward to make up a tube cap. One internal tube would be historical, four in the bow would give you the Dystopian Wars look on a budget.
ReplyDeleteVery nice mock pictures. Wanna see the finished fleet!
ReplyDeletePat G,
ReplyDeleteI was thinking the same thing; too big, too modern. I was being lazy and didn't want to scratchbuild them as I did on the Torpedo-boat destroyer shown under Adventures in Blueboard....OK, OK, I got lazy.
Now I am trending toward assembling it as one of the smaller colonial gunboats with perhaps a single forward tube while using the launchers on a much larger model built on a hull that I have sitting around. Decisions, decisions.........
I am going to be using the PT hull for a luxury yacht/rum-runner model soon.
Try a smaller smoke stack. That one just looks too tall. Also try it with just 2 torpedo tubes and one deck gun. Can you find a Gatling to replace the other deck gun? Maxim MG?
ReplyDeleteShould give you enough tubes for a second boat. A DD would be at least twice as long with 1 or 2 central torpedo tubes that could fire to either side and a single 3-5" deck gun forward and rear, with a MG mounted on the bridge wings. Current gun boat looks like a DD on a PT boat hull?
Mike R
I wanted to thank you for this great article. I really liked it and I will be waiting for the new updates on nemesis mod
ReplyDelete.
Check the "Adventures in Blue Board and Foamcore " page at the top of the blog for the full breakdown of my naval arms race.
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