I've seen in some rules that ballast tanks must be free flooding. Agree on that front. Has anyone tried using water ballast in non-tank form before? I'm thinking of making removable "ballast tubes" for my Saratoga. Basically it would be a PVC pipe I could fill with water/sand and then clip into place. After the battle I could drain/empty the tube and reduce the dry travel weight. They would behave just the same as lead bars or other ballast, but be easier to transport since I could empty them post battle. Would these be considered ballast tanks or just dead weight?
On re-reading the question, I do think that most clubs prohibit non-scale drag-producing devices being attached to the ship. If you build the ballast tanks into the hull where they would add no drag, that would be legal. A cylinder being hung from the underside would not be.
I could see using them in a large convoy ship but they'd take up a lot of space in a combat model. Lead is 5x as dense as water and compact. It wouldn' be hard to design a system that would allow lead ballast weights to be added or removed once the position of the weights for correct trim were determined. The model of HMS Hood I just sold to Larry Dingle has ballast made from 2 lb divers weights. Although permanently installed now it wouldn't have been hard to make the weights removeable.
