Hmmm... not much going on in this thread. I had an interesting thought for arming these ships. I would appreciate some feedback on it. Here's the idea. Picture your basic Fast Gun cannon. It's got a 90-degree elbow, a T fitting, and some pipes in between. The only practical way to rotate this cannon is to rotate the whole thing, right? Not entirely true. Replace that 90-degree elbow with a street, and bend the barrel 90 degrees like Big Gun cannons. Then put a rotation bearing immediately after the street fitting. Voila, rotating single-barrel Fast Gun cannon. Fast Gun guys, is this a practical idea? I will try to draw up a diagram tomorrow, if my description is confusing.
The 1/72 scale guys used to have some good photo's of such a design up. I believe that there's a liberty in MABG that has such a setup also. Mike
I got in about an hour worth of work on fixing the Gearing model...only to have my computer crash and me forget to save my progress during that time. (D'oh!) Although it's a smaller ship, I believe that I am going to refocus my effort in the near-future toward working on the Orfey-class destroyer design as a possible [some] rookie ship candidate (provided the availability of spring-fired torpedoes). The plans should scale well to a usable 1/96 design and I plan on uploading a set of appropriate plans in the near future, perhaps fitted to 11x17 sheets.
I had a chance to reopen the Gearing CAD data and begin the process of starting-over with fixing the model earlier this evening. However, since I have a n Orfey class frame completed and on the verge of skinning, the smaller ship will be taking precedence over the larger Gearing class in the near future.
Being a newbie looking for a ship to build, this project sounds exciting! I just finished reading the original thread and this one and I can say that I am definitely looking forward to seeing the Emile Bertin and the Gearing. I probably won't start building a ship for quite a while, so time is not a matter to me.
I would love to see more Emile Bertin's being built. The drafting, cutting, building, and testing work the crew in this thread put in is amazing. The result is a nice ship (and another one in the works) that most any rookie should be able to build into a competetive ship in pretty much any format. Well done! Lets see more!
However, I was wondering what was your rational for choosing the Emile Bertin over the La Galissonniere class cruiser? The Galissoniere is slightly bigger, has similar armament and speed, has commercially available hulls (from strikemodels.com) and can be either allied or axis.
I think the idea was NOT to copy something else that is already commercially available, i.e. trying to compete with already established hull producers.
You hit the nail on the head. Although the hull had gone out of production by that time, there was already tooling for a fiberglass hull in existence. Additionally, creating yet another "source" for a prototypically identical design wouldn't do anything ot promote increased diversity among the ships on the pond. If one looks through the original Rookie Ship Design Project thread, there was a significant discussion of viable options and the criteria by which many prospects were eliminated from the list. Back to the topic of ship design progress, a couple of development iterations have since passed on the Orfey class design as I've been assembling a prototype myself. Some issues with the flat center keel surfaced which have led to a revision in the approach I've taken to sizing the individual parts. Most notably, the keel below the forecastle in the earlier iterations (through 0.5.14) does not lend itself to being smoothly blended from the bow to the flat center keel without the use of more manual dexterity than I possess. A key area that I have yet to fully iron-out is a practical means of mounting the rudder and linking it to its coresponding servo. The nearest to the rudder at which sufficient space for a servo exists is approximately 3 inches; even there, only a sub-micro servo has any hopes of being mounted. With the ribs currently specified for 1/8" thickness, once I have the design working in 1/144, I'll probably begin verifying its workability when scaled into 1/96 and 1/72.
