It looks amazing(as always). She looks pretty deadly, too. I wonder, has a club ever done a night battle before?
Before this Pic Yamato had working port and starboard running lights along with the searchlights and a masthead light.
Bismarck original superstructure was equipped with 5 working searchlights and a aft masthead light. Roma has several searchlights as well. My old Vittorio Veneto had searchlights along with running lights a Jackstaff light and a Aft ensign light.
There should be pics of Bismarck 's searchlights in the Bismarck album and another pic in the Roma Album.
Roma was one of the most difficult. The hull was scratchbuilt by Ralph Coles which the Mold was sold stateside . I think Strike had used it but they have the Veneto hulls now. The deck hatches are made of Lexan made by the original owener Rob Clarke. The Superstrucutre command tower funnels, 01 superstructure, Main and secondary turrets, rangefinders were cast out of Dental Material and were made by Carl Camurati. Not sure if I spelled his last name correctly. The rest of the details I made and I rigged it up. The model actually belongs to Russell Pearston but I have had it in my care since 1999. Interesting detail missing from the model. The ship had 3 rudders 4 prop shafts. I elected to only install the inner drive shafts and I still need to upgrade the rudder to larger than the scale size to make it turn more effectively. The outboard shafts would have had a rudder each. These were designed as redundancies in case of a torpedoe hit. Because the model was to be combat I needed it to be as user friendly as possible and keep the maintenance as low as possible inside for the owner who had little to no experience maintaining or building a model. For me I would have probably gone with the 3 rudder setup. But that would require either 4 motors or the main inboard shafts on gears using one motor to operate the 2 inboard shafts and the wing motors on a separate system. Gets complicated . If the model was built just as a runner I would have used 4 smaller motors on direct drive and utilize all 3 rudders. Roma is the prettiest ship in the line up. Bismarck is Handsome, Yamato is Majestic, NorthCarolina is coolest looking. Missouri is well nothing at this time. I need to clean it up and finish up the superstructure.
The pre-SoDak US battleships are frequently thought ill-of due to their single rudder configuration. That said, I think experience, skill and a reliable ship matters more than which ship you pick. So get yourself to some battles, get some stick time and you'll quickly develop a solid idea of what will work well for you.
Sounds like you found your ship. Agree that some ships that are frowned upon can actually work well once your familiar with the pros and cons and learn how to turn the cons into pros from your model. After that stick time and battles are your learning center for improved knowledge. I learned how to operate near the shore and leaned how to fight a wide variety of ships .That said I learned a lot how to use large battleships. I think Battler's may have a Nevada hull or similiar. Check it out.
Unfortunately Battler's Connection doesn't have a Nevada hull. The only other time-period U.S. ship is the Maryland, which isn't that similar to the Nevada. Strike Models does offer a Pensy/Arizona hull, but I don't know if the Nevadas and the Pennsylvanias share the same hull.
@Scharnhorst56 They don't, they have very different hull shapes. The Pennsylvania is a very handsome ship though. I've thought about doing one in the future, but am still undecided.
Hardly sadly! Building a hull is great fun, and really not all that bad of a task to do, especially if you have time, and you seem to have that in spades.
Nick is right. I personally love building hulls, I just don't like finishing them. One of the great bonuses of building a wooden hull is when you're done building it, you can take a step back and say, " I made that".
Sounds like a good idea. Once you get a ship built for the first time the lessons you will learn from that will go towards your next build.
Cool! The reasons behind me liking the Nevada so much are probably her trying to make a run out of Pearl Harbor, and no matter which 'construction' she was in (the way she looked) she always looked pretty!
