The 1/96 Yamato Brainstorming thread

great idea, I've desided to go all out with this ship, camera system, all scale lighting, functioning plane launchers, all guns that can be armed acording to the rules, will be armed with rotation and depression. also desided to install 6 to 10 underwater torpedo tubes. the ability to have a "crewed" ship is also being looked into.

 

as for the TT's, it seems to be uncertain, somewhere between 6-10. the turrets I want to sit on/in the barbets by way of some kind of flange, possibly attatch a peice of pvc to the turret that has an OD = to the ID of the barbet (or a hair under) just to help with maintaining gun position (from the bottom of the hull to the underside of the deck is around 8") and keep water out durring rough seas. I still will attatch the turrets to the gun mag with connecting rods to limit the torsion on the barrles.
As for the radio, I'm getting a robbe F-14 navy, it can control up to 106 functins (122 if you install a MCD switch 16 on one of the chanels, which I'll be doing for use as my firing control), the great thing about this radio is that you can expand it as needed and the base price is around $300.00 . Matt (the one who's building the Iowa)is going to try computer control using a Lynox motion s-32 controler coupled with a wi-fi/broadband card for control. he keeps telling me that i should go the same way so i can utilise onboard sensors and cam systems. only problem is I don't have a laptop and the wife would flip if I bought one to use for a boat! No, I told him that if I'm so inclined to putting sensors on my ship later down the road Eagletree makes that kind of stuff for boats (little dasboard mounts to your radio and you can attatch all kinds of stuff like WASS enabled GPS, water speed, amps, all sorts of stuff). as far as the cams go with all the spy gear out there and e-bay its going to be cheaper for me. saw a cool cam site that had these goggles you wear and its like you're watching a 50" TV from 6' away or something like that, hooks up to the cams reciever.

 

If you want to arm all guns over 3" on the Yamato, you should seriously look into developing your own gun control system. This involves several things:
1) building all your guns with positional control, rather than velocity control. This allows you to tell the guns where they should point, and the guns will point in that direction. In contrast, a velocity control system tells the guns how fast they should rotate in a particular direction. An example of a positional control system would be turning the flaps dial on a 6-channel radio 90 degrees to the right, and the positional-control gun rotates 90 degrees to starboard.
2) designing and building a gun director system, which when given data on the bearing and range to the target, determines which guns can aim at the target, what angle each gun should be at, and then tells the guns where they should aim. This allows you to tell the ship where to aim its guns, and it takes care of all the headache-inducing micromanaging of secondaries, bow and stern turrets, and making sure they all point in the right direction.
3) Designing and building a system to tell the gun director the bearing and range to the target. This stage has the most variation, based on club regulations and personal preference. If allowed, you could have an onboard rangefinder set up to act like radar, display the data on a touchscreen in the gunner's hands, and the gunner simply touches the screen where he wants to aim the guns and pulls the trigger. Or you could have a 360 degree dial to indicate bearing and a slider to indicate range. Or you could put an imaginary "absolute gun" that all other guns try to match, which uses a velocity control input. Or you could combine the "radar" rangefinder with a color camera and program an IFF algorithm and have the ship take care of all the aiming for you (assuming your club permits this). Or you could use a system that nobody has yet to dream of, that would amaze everyone who sees it and possibly even attrack attention from the US Navy.

It's hard enough to sail a ship in combat conditions, with hostile and friendly ships changing the tactical situation very rapidly. Things get even harder when you throw on a set of guns and try to shoot a target (who's not interested in getting shot) and still sail your ship. Add several batteries of secondaries with very different arcs of fire, a collection of torpedoes, a floatplane catapult, and fulll light system, and you'll be so busy trying to remember which button does what that by the time you're ready to fire your mighty broadside, the target will have sailed a circle around you and gotten several volleys off in return. Personally I think Matt is going a bit overboard using a laptop for his radio, but using onboard computers will definitely simplify your operations.

As another note, having a second crewman to operate your secondary guns would also do the trick. But then you run into the problem of said crewman deciding he wants his own ship, and finding your secondaries unmanned again and one more target on the water.

One last thing: do not use CO2 in a ship that heavily armed. A few shots from your guns and you'll freeze your regulator. I would recommend High Pressure Air, or HPA, because it doesn't have to boil a liquefied gas (cooling everything else down rapidly) to provide pressure for firing. HPA is what most folks in paintball use nowadays, specifically because it doesn't freeze regulators.

 

I take it this ship is not going to actually battle?

 

you better believe its going to battle. hey Carl when you say HPA, do you mean like scuba tanks? I'm an avid diver (ex-commercial diver, divemaster, instructor, and currently on the local dive search and rescue team)and know the costs of those tanks (would need a pony bottle or bigger, ie. 15 to 30 cft). the upside is the local dive shop only charges $3.00 for a fill.

 

Tug, here's those web sites I told you about in the e-mail:
http://www.sputnikk.com/homeport
this is the web site for that non-combat 1/96 scale club,
http://www.rangevideo.com
onboard video site with lots of goodies,
http://www.eagletreesystems.com
expensive add-on sensors,
http://www.lynxmotion.com
other control options + sensors,
http://www.shipsnthings.com
supplier of radio gear, running gear and fittings,
http://hrfsbo.com/sub
gave me the idea of using clippard mouse valves on a manifold for my firing control (check this out in his pneumatics section)

 

Actually, I have seen paintball shops carry HPA tanks a bit bigger than 20 oz CO2 bottles, that carry approximately equivalent OOMPH to a 20 oz CO2. I only know what I learned by talking to the people in the paintball store, you might want to do some more research if you're interested.

 

I'll check it out later, need to find a paintball store. ?? would I still have to worry about the CO2 freezing if I used 4 20oz bottles connected to a manifold?? the reason I ask is that I'm going to need to balast the boat anyway so was planning on putting 2 tanks forward and two aft, all would be hooked to the same HP manifold where the gas would be distributed to the various systems so that they would all "empty" at the same rate. I have room for the wieght, but not the space for the larger HPA tanks I think. what your take??

 

Tug,
had a thought, the material you make the turrets out of is strong enough to stand up to battle conditions but is it light enough to be used as a superstructure material? The boat dosen't really have much to speak of and I want something that will be durrable, yet detailed for the ship (don't want to have to repair the superstructure after every battle). It would need to be hollow to allow installment of video camera in the aft and forward tower and radio gear, all other empty space would be filled with "great stuff" foam for floatation(I'm building the ship so that when it "sinks" the top part of its superstucture will be above water).

 

also it would allow you to match up the 3rd turrets on their mounts wich happen to be on the superstructure along with the non-firering triple AA guns (saw the pics of the super parts @ basin shipyard page)

 

I see, so if I make the frame for the SS cover it with balsa you can make the armor panels to go over it? I should be getting the main cannons in soon so I will be able to give you the measurements of the barrle spacing that way evn if BDE's scaling is off from yours a little bit the guns and turrets will matck up. I'll do this for all the gun turrets.

 

reguarding your e-mail about the web page, any luck with that yet? I can e-mail you some of the changes to the rules if you want, and also, do you have a formula for figuring scale speed for ships in 1/96 scale and do you know of any "drop test" tables we can use for the balsa hulls or do you think we should just ommit that part and just make sure people use the right kind of paint, silkspan, balsa thikness and so on??

 

finally, just finished planking the hull with the 1/2"x1/8" bass wood 1" below the waterline, what a pain in the ..... that was. my west systems epoxy will be in Sat. and I'll start in on that. after the inside is all gooed up and the water chanel is installed I'll post some new pics.

 

I, cant believe I didn't pick up on this before, stupid stupid stupid, the range finder on the main tower (15m) and the one on the aft tower rotate. Carl, you mentioned in one of your postings about an "absolute" gun that you would aim at a target and all guns that could take baring on said target would. Has anyone gotten anywhere with this yet? These two points on the towers make great positions for this type of system.

 

The "absolute" gun idea was something that I considered when the Big Gun forum first started discussing directed-gunfire systems. The idea was to draw an invisible line from the center of the ship and indicate range along that line. The guns would try to converge to the point indicated by that bearing/range. It would be just as easy to draw that invisible line starting at B turret, or C turret, or A turret, or any of the rangefinders. If you make the 15m rangefinders rotate, then you should have them do something useful other than just rotate, such as actually having an ultrasonic rangefinder built in to tell you if you've estimated range to target accurately or not. (maybe ring a buzzer if the target is within 6" of the estimated range) Otherwise, there isn't much point in rotating the rangefinders except for cool scale-like appearance.

I should note that there are no examples of a functioning directed-gunfire system installed in a combat model warship. There are, however, several people actively developing systems and have successfully demonstrated test setups. It's just a matter of time before one is actually installed in an armed warship.