Well, It has begun. I have adaquate information for a mackensen, not sure how long it will take as I will work on it when I don't feel like working on the Littorio, but the cad has begun
I must give a big shout out to the fellow who runs the 3d warships site with the 3dmaxx model of the mackensen. he sent me a great starting point built from the german archive plans, which saves me the 500$ it would take to the copies of the german archive plans
Wow, That's awesome that you got an excellent 3d reference to start with! I can't wait to see this, if Littoro is any indication, this will be another McFadden Masterpiece in accuracy and innovation.
yep. He sent me the hull and the main deck. I will have to work up the rest of teh super myself, although most of teh work will be in rib layout. I will probably plan on a single motor, gearbox, and chain/gear rudder on this one. beyond that I will be using lessons learned in the littorio to reduce the rib size, and cut down on complexity
As I have been remodeling the hull from the 3ds max export, I've figured out a couple of things: No stringer required, the armor belt is almost a smooth at our scale and has no real transition in the hull, so no stringer. Hull sheeting should be easy on this ship.
THe very beginnings are below. I have to take the triangular mesh and convert it to something usable first (and remove a lot of the fine detail that is lost in the skinning
No rib detailed layout yet, I decided that superstructure and more detail on casemates and shafts was needed first, although rib locations are fixed. Floating waterline is appropriate, low end is on the light end of the spectrum , high end is heavy, and it weighs right after figuring out the units.
So after getting the hull form tweaked properly, rudders and shafts properly situated, and the bulk of the large superstructure parts done (still needs some detailing on forward tower and stack) it is finally time for some rib layout. I am not sure exactly how I will tackle the rudders as the scale rudders are about 10 degrees off of verticle and that is something I would like to maintain if I can figure out a decent way to drive them . Superstructure is typical WW1 german, meaning spartain, which is great. This looks to be one nasty ship in the formats that allow her. Not much of a billboard, relatively fast, spectacular scale rudder and screw placement (almost exactly where the cfd studies from years ago wanted them) reasonably heavy but not absurdly so, good fields of fire from the turrets and very little below the waterline area to the stern of the shaft exit points between the waterline and the 45degree angle. 12in armor in conways so 1/8" in big gun, 28knots, 35cm main battery so 7/32 bearings. Rib Time.
Looks great Greg. I have never modeled a ship in 3d yet, but I'm assuming that once you have the Hull created, you can create a "slice" or section anywhere you want to place a rib which should give you your outer hull outline, then offset from there to allow for sheeting thickness and such? Another question: when you create the 3d, do you generate an outline for each Hull line shown on the plans, place them the appropriate distance apart, then loft a surface between them?
I take a pair of slices at either side of the rib, then choose the larger as the rib profile (more important in areas of high curvature). I generate an outline for each line I know about but I do not necessarily use all of the section lines, as a loft is better with the minimum number of sections and guide curves. Another aside is that most plans have errors in the modeling that only show up in 3d easily both in the section lines and others. (the littorio plans had some errors like that in the original related to superstructure components, and the morskie sections of the littorio had some gross errors). I offset for sheeting thickness in big gun cases, I tend to ignore the 1/32" sheeting in fast gun
Ahhh. Good point on selecting the larger portions of the ribs, I would have overlooked that detail and taken the center and wondered why I didn't have much material to shape the rib edges to the Hull contours. Doing it like you mentioned will ensure after sanding that you have full contact between the sheeting and the rib to glue to. I want to model the next boat I do in Solidworks, so I'm trying to wrap my head around the best way to model it to get the best result for the intended purpose.
