Its been a while but now that I am living in Toronto I have started thinking about the hobby more and more even though I haven't joined a club yet. The only club in my region is fast gun (IRCWCC) and I haven't seen the rules in a while so please forgive me if I am wrong. For a while in the summer I wanted to make the habakkuk, a giant aircraft carrier made out of ice. Heres a link to a info page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk (yes wikipedia is unreliable but for something that was never really made it isn't like there's an official website for it). Because IRCWCC doesn't allow ships that weren't made (or so I believe) the actual boat wouldn't be legal under club rules but they built a smaller unarmed version on patricia lake in jasper as a proof of concept. Could I make a convoy ship based off of the smaller prototype or would the lack of real plans make it illegal for battling?
Eb...why would you want to build an unarmed ship for warship combat to begin with? Convoy ships are only used during NATS or possibly some (very rare) agreed upon local battle. You'd be far better off building a heavy cruiser, battlecruiser, or even dreadnought battleship for your first boat
I think the better question would be why one would want to build a ship in 1/144 scale that is nearly 14 feet long, by 2 feet wide? Surely, there are some actual ships you would be interested in that are more reasonably sized?
I would build it more for experience than anything else and the prototype was 1/50 scale compared to the full sized one making it 60 feet long put that in 1/144 scale and it would be 12 cm which would give me some practice with building a boat, using tools and creating small parts. Even if it could be useless in battle (like the PT boats being capsized from the air blast of cannon fire) I would use it in my pond in Cornwall for practice with the controller because I suck at driving/flying rc vehicles.
There are plans for the Liberty Ship on the free plans (under the "Members") menu, something like that would be more appropriate for a first build if you don't want to do an armed ship. Just take to Staples to print out, glue to a piece of 1/4" plywood & cut. 12cm is too small.
The plan itself is 40" x 18", which is why I suggested taking the file to your local Staples and have them print it on one piece of paper.
