What are you guys using for ballast? I have an I-boat I am working on but I need to add a lot of weight to it.
Lead ingots, as @darkapollo said. I bought about 40~lb worth of 1lb ingots. I make forms as necessary and melt them down to fit the boat. If at all possible I try to add the lead to the underside, either as sheet or as bilge keels, to offset the superstructure weight. Duck decoy weights work well for some in this role.
For my Rivadavia I have lead duck weights that are stuck to the bottom of the boat to keep weight low. It’s evenly distributed she has sunk level every time she has gone under. Justin “War Crimes” Ragucci
And now with a slightly more correct waterline: Man, I really need to buy a bigger toolbox and clean up the shop...
By duck weight do you mean something like these: View: https://www.amazon.com/RigEm-Right-Strap-Weights-Dozen/dp/B074KRR9TD/ref=sr_1_4?crid=2H8ROJNBV4LFE&keywords=duck%2Bweights%2Bfor%2Bdecoys&qid=1675542335&sprefix=duck%2Bweight%2Caps%2C188&sr=8-4&th=1&psc=1 Sorry to hijack the build thread.
Indiana, Dupleix, and Mogador are ready for war. (other than some patching and such on Mogador). We'll be seeing ya in Georgia!
So I didn't actually run the other boats that I brought with me because I was busy all weekend battling Indiana and trying to figure her out. Almost immediately upon putting the boat in the water and driving it around I decided that the more traditional looking propellers it had were not going to cut it. Reverse performance was awful the boat could not stop to save itself. Even swapping the props left for right did not seem to help too much. So I slapped on a set of five bladed printed kort props and ran them all weekend. Surprisingly didn't have any issues with the printed plastic prop, so much so that other veteran captains were taking note and I ended up handing out handfuls of printed propellers for people to try. My portside 3D printed drag disc got ripped off the first sortie by @Beaver in his Jean Bart. Was a good data point to write down, going to back the bolt hole in the drag disc front and back with washers. Or just use a metal drag disc. Hull construction wise I had no issues. This is a side mount 26 second capital ship its stringers and sub-deck are going to get shot to hell and they did with no deformations or cracks or splits. There are some dents, but then again you'll dent a wooden hull too (or take chips out of a glass one). My 5-in gun mounts kept getting either shot off or ripped off, so I'm going to retain them to the deck and other superstructure pieces using bolts or screws not just adhesive. I also May remake them out of foam to cut a little bit of top weight. Turning performance isn't great but also isn't terrible. I need to remind myself that this is a 57-in long deep draft single rudder ship, it is not a Bismarck. I am going to experiment with different prop and rudder configurations to try and improve turning performance. Guns worked great. No issues there at all. @Lou complimented me by saying he needed to remind himself that I don't have dual sidemounts every time we traded, because my guns would send up such a colossal wave of water when fired. Pumps? Here is where we start getting into the not all positives. The pumps themselves don't really have much of an issue it's the standard thing I've been putting in boats now for the last 3 years. The issue that I'm running into is the boat takes on a small list once it starts filling with water. Once that list begins if I turn away from the direction of the list and dig that side of the boat into the water I start taking so much water over the stern deck that despite a great deck seal that isn't letting much water into the boat the weight of the water on top of the deck just slowly starts to push the boat down until you are past the point of recovery. While all of this is happening, my pumps are barely pumping because there isn't enough water in the boat to fully prime the black BC pump bases. The solution to the damage control issue is multifaceted: I'm going to tactically eliminate topside weight and add bottom ballast to try and gain a more favorable center of gravity. I'm going to replace the BC pump bases with CamuratiTech pumps now that I actually have the ingredients to put them together. These other pumps have proven to be much easier priming, and will quite literally suck themselves to the boats bottom. That will be step one in reducing the amount of water in the boat required for full pump stream. The next step is going to be pouring minimal amounts of featherlite to better step/ramp the water channeling that's already present in the hull to eliminate large flat areas where water could collect and/or slosh to exacerbate any list. The final step that I'm considering is cutting out the pre-existing pump basins and then putting a piece of sheet aluminum on the bottom of the boat to create a new false bottom thereby sinking the pumps down another 3/16 of an inch. This is the nuclear option. But I would like this boat to be as competitive as possible so the nuclear option may be on the table. Anyway, enough of me walking around my kitchen like a madman dissertating to my phone. Here's a couple of pictures taken by the always talented @Beaver from before I trimmed out the boat with small weights. I got to say she looks pretty good out there.
Looking spiffy cool! I'd definitely do the sump thing with the pumps, 3/16" matters in these cases. Oh, and instead of aluminum, maybe stick a piece of 1/16 lexan or plexi over it for the clear effect, because it's kewlio.
I ended up just printing a 1/8" thick flat plate that went on the bottom of the boat. I will post pictures. Luckily most of the bottom area in the pump section of the boat was solid perimeters, no infill, so the modification should go fine with minimal complications.
Don't have any pictures but here's the text AAR for the April Regionals in MD: Indiana was out in full form this weekend. Had no real issues, boat didn't sink, everything worked, regularly tangled with the assembled captains. Two major gripes, one is easy to fix the other not so much. The easy fix is that my pump ESCs can't seem to figure out if my battery is a 3s or 4s lipo. And it's neither, it's a 4s Lifepo4. So even though I'm not even scratching the surface of my total capacity my pump ESCs are engaging low voltage protection and throttling down. Even with that, Indiana had no trouble staying afloat with a solid below water ram and 35~ belows on just the half unit pump. The fix here is to set the ESCs to Nimh mode which will allow max power down to 6v...at which point the BFB will have long since expanded to Goodyear blimp size. The not so easy to fix is the maneuverability. I've tried 3~ different sets of props and 3 different rudders for about 9~ configurations so far and none have been amazing. No sit and spin here. I will continue to experiment but considering @Kevin P. 's 1920SD was roughly equivalent I'm not overly upset. It may just be the way this hull is, I don't know. I am going to try and reallocate weight and rebuild chunks of superstructure out of foam to improve balance, all while playing with more prop and rudder combos as we lead up to NATs. It may end up taking a day at the lake spinning in circles with a camera on a tripod to compare.
2023 NATS AAR (pictures pending, I didn't take any but will happily accept any that others upload of my boat): Indiana did great all week @ 2023 NATs. I won best of Class 6 tied with Andy (who is an extremely competent + competitive battler) and he was gracious enough to let me take the plaque as it's my first ever class trophy. I periodically had some weird issues with random things. Twice I had the same section of soft, flexible urethane hose explode. This is the only post-regulator pre-solenoid section of "soft" hose in the boat, so it makes sense that if something was going to blow, it was going to blow there. Each time I was mostly spent on ammo and just called my 5. Tuesday AM I had some weird issues that caused me to periodically lose one shaft, but these issues never came back and I am attributing it to battery voltage issues. Due to the tuesday voltage issues for Thursday + Friday I switched from the BFB to an array of 8 5200mah 3s Lipos. BFB works fine, but the electronics in the boat don't know what to do with the LiFE voltage cutoff. I didn't want to have any issues, so I just reverted to Lipo so I could battle and not worry about it. I knew that Indiana's billboard stature was a tasty target for certain skilled captains on the enemy fleet. I knew that with dual brushless pumps I could easily take enough points in damage to doom my fleet. I consciously made an effort to avoid doing this. Instead, I grouped up with the rest of the "slow fleet" captains on Orange Team and we created what we referred to as the Duck Pack. The Quack Attack. Duck Duck Goose & Schnitzel. Various modifications of name. Basically, we were a concentrated ball of 26 and 28s "low and slow" ships that did their best to remain cohesive and functional as a single unit. In our roster we had: Indiana Queen Elizabeth (@bkoehler ) Iron Duke (Kevin S, @Ksun381) Iron Duke (@Panzer ) Ostfriesland (Tom T) Being the largest ship in the pack and possessing the most sidemounts, I would periodically sortie out from the ball and engage targets of opportunity, but when the enemy Yamato (Captained by Tyler H) started to notice me, senpai, I would hurry back to the relative safety of the duck pack. Our cohesive ball also gave our 24s ships a convenient smokescreen forth which to disengage and displace through, often times using us to break off through our safety bubble and then re-engage in a better position. We also had the job of protecting ships on 5, out of control, etc, and we babysat them to the best of our abilities. Friday AM a grand total of 4 ships on our fleet went 5 out of control and we managed to shepherd almost all of them to safety. Sadly, @warspite 's kongo attracted the full attention of the enemy Yamato and Bismarck and despite my efforts was beached and sunk. Indiana was a member of the "guns always empty, shorts always dry" club this NATs. As far as I am aware, she is the first ever 3d printed battleship to participate at IRCWCC Nationals and in her debut year, was queen of Class 6. A number of veteran captains, some of the hardest to please in the hobby, were very impressed with her construction and at least one communicated to me that he felt "Fiberglass and wooden hulls became obsolete the second I looked inside". At this point Indiana is a tried and true veteran battleship. I don't think I'm going to do much to her past this point other than maintain. At some point in the future the original plastic hull may be decommissioned so Indiana can be rebuilt with all of the upgrades I have incorporated into the design, learned from having built and battled this hull. But due to her experimental, dare I say groundbreaking nature, I will keep this hull for posterity's sake. -WT
