[3DP] Svetlana, the Red Menace!

Had to do it. So many hulls in the shop, and none of them printed, all are wood or fiberglass. Admittedly, this will go easier with the Rostock once its built (since it could print 2 cruisers in one massive print job), but it won't be up till January! Why wait a month (late January) when I could print one NOW! in smaller pieces? So, I got my plans into a jpg form, properly scaled. Deciding on a ship was tough. I want it to be relatively short, but something that could be armed and run in battle. And then I had to figure out how to get the hull form in Sketchup. Not being as gifted as Daniel is in this arena (see his Bismarck build!), I have kludged it and while it's not fast, it's reasonably quick, and the ship WILL be well within scale tolerances and look like it's supposed to. I imported the plan view into Sketchup, then lifted it up to where the main deck is supposed to be (vertically speaking) I drew one side of the main deck, then mirrored it on the port side. Then I raised the deck forward of the step. Crude and it will need some subtle refinements, no doubt, but it looks cool and it made me feel happy. I then added the first rib, which was tricky, but I've got the hang of it now. First pic:

And so on... I added more ribs moving forward towards the bow from the step. But wait! As drawn, these ribs are not bevelled! That would be inconvenient to have to sand them. Why sand them when I can spend a couple extra hours in the design phase and save the plastic that would otherwise be sanded off. So we save time and plastic! And bevelling that 0.5mm off the front edges could save at least 5 or 10 minutes of print time in a 10-hour print! So below, you can see most of the rib bevelled down to the hard area, with a little left to be done. Note: The hard area inside is not done at all yet. It still needs water channeling and mounts for things. Those will be added later. But soon, we will have enough done to print the two bow sections and mate them up!

I got the idea to do this from Bob Pottle, who laid out some possibilities in another thread. She's being built for IRCWCC combat, probably with a half-unit pump and four 1/2-unit guns. At speed 23, with pairs of 15-degree-off-centerline cannons in the casements, she'll be worthy of notice in battle by anyone who's not fond of double belows. Battleships can't outrun her, and convoys will hate her. Heck, the cruiser battle will be carnage For MWC use, she'll arm half the guns as 1-unit guns, and take the speed boost to 22 sec.

 

Daniel is correct, Beaver. I thought exactly what you did up till about a week ago when Bob P. gently schooled me

 

Exactly what I said when Bob told me about that section

 

6 of one, half-dozen of the other...

 

I did look at how I was doing things in Sketchup, as Daniel said, there are more ways than one to do things. Then I discovered the obvious... I can do just the stbd side, and then mirror the who dang thing, saving a BUNCH of time over doing one rib at a time, etc. Expect printed boat parts to be seen shortly.

 

Making headway on the forward end. The stringer is coming along nicely, and I'm almost done with the ribs up there. I'll post a pic soon.

 

Slowly. doing the ribs is the easy part. Making the curved parts of the hull look good takes time! I didn't fully appreciate that earlier, but I want it to look good, otherwise there's no point in doing it. Currently evaluating the priority development work-wise, and leaning towards delaying Svetlana until the Rostock is printing and working more intensely on the printed Big Gun cannon. More people would benefit.

 

1) Totally awesome, I can't wait to see your work!
2) The bent deck problem is an issue. The ships that have mostly-flat decks almost all have a step amidships. All the ones lacking a step amidships, have a slop to the line of the deck.

My goal is to have the deck and ribs print as one part (albeit several printed sections will be necessary, since my print volume is 8" absolute max (7" is better to allow for finagling in the software of the printer). This is important because it lets me print parts like the gearboxes, gas bottle holder, pump mount, etc, as part of the hull, making it easy for a new captain who doesn't know where to put these to get into the hobby

 

I've been running my RepRapPro Mendel for about 6 months now, it's quite good. I'm about 2/3 done building a Rostock from scratch. The Rostock has a print volume about 203mmx203mmx700mm and it's 2 to 3 times faster (print speed) than the cartesian coordinate printers due to the much lower moving mass of the printhead and attachments compared to the various cartesian bots' having to move the whole X-axis assembly. It's also self-levelling. I got the E3D hot end for Christmas, which will do most any thermoplastic you throw at it; I'm looking forward to printing in nylon.