FS Jean Bart (IRCWCC)

Discussion in 'Warship Builds' started by bsgkid117, Sep 18, 2018.

  1. bsgkid117

    bsgkid117 Vendor

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    First printed version of the drawing is here, have plywood waiting in garage. This hull will be traditional scroll saw cutout, hopefully anything I learn building the first one can be applied to the 3d model for ease of future boat assembly.

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  2. Beaver

    Beaver 2020 Rookie of the Year Admiral (Supporter)

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    Just the bow section looks about as big as my KE7!
     
  3. bsgkid117

    bsgkid117 Vendor

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    So I checked out a hardware store that was going out of business today and picked up a ton of hardware for my future ship builds. As part of that hardware, I grabbed male and female 4" PVC couplers for Jean Bart's barbettes. These things are massive. For comparison, the 37 ft 3 inch barbette of the USS Iowa would be about 3.1 inches at 1/144th scale. These guys will make completely self-contained turret setups super easy to accomplish.
     
  4. bsgkid117

    bsgkid117 Vendor

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    Update on the Jean Bart:

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    You can see in some of the pics the 1/8 x 1/4 basswood strips that are being used to define the bottom of the penetrable area and to help define the shape of the bulge. I've been told that I should've just rounded that area out, but I really wanted to show off the shape of the ship's hull with bulge, not just make the whole boat slightly fatter. Needed to give the front subdeck a number of kerf cuts on the bottom side to let it take the bend of the ship's atlantic bow, even more than I anticipated due to a slight warp in the wrong direction.

    Still have a few ribs to cut out, and still need to cut the rib alignment notches in the center and rear subdecks. Haven't even touched the 1/8" components yet (deck rim + hatches) Probably won't get to work on it at all tomorrow, but chances are I will have the complete hull dry-fit together by the weekend.

    I also started working on my own build guns with some help from @Beaver and Steve A from Maryland. Not quite ready to provide spy photos of them yet, I'd like to confirm they really function as desired first. But they have some pretty sweet tight-radius coil mags that BB's roll through perfectly and a very small footprint complete with solenoid mounted on the gun itself. So I really hope my concept works, it will make Jean Bart and my future builds extremely easy to tweak/work on gun wise.

    Anyhow, that's it for now.
     
  5. bsgkid117

    bsgkid117 Vendor

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    As of right now the hull is glued together. Need to cut out the deck rim and deck hatches out of the 1/8th plywood. Tomorrow going to give the whole hull a light sanding and then give it a first coat of epoxy to seal the wood against moisture.

    I'm thinking of skinning the impenetrable area of the ship with 1/32nd Basswood sheet and then glassing over that. The foam worked really well for Dunkerque, but I'm thinking of doing it this way so I can pour lead shot + epoxy into the lowest areas of the hull to get the Big Bart down to her appropriate weight. Dunkerque was almost 12lb light, so I can only imagine how light the JB is going to end up.
     
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  6. Commodore

    Commodore Well-Known Member

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    If she ends up light, you're doing it wrong. You need more batteries.
     
  7. bsgkid117

    bsgkid117 Vendor

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    Hobbyking had a big warehouse sale a few months ago so I decided to toss my collection of SLA batteries and stockpiled 11.1v 8AH LiPO packs. This boat running dual pumps should have plenty of juice using two of them a sortie, or load 4 for an entire battle. That's been my biggest issue with Dunkerque, she uses a pair of the 11.1v 8ah packs per battle and there just isn't the weight in battery that there used to be with the bricks. Using SLA's in my old NC or QE at 12v I was right on weight every time, minimal messing around required. I have to weigh the hull when it's waterproofed and skinned so I can start figuring out how much ballast will be required. I'm expecting to see about 12-15lb. Not kidding one bit. The step up in material thickness to 3/8th and generally beefing up of the hull design has added some weight which will help, but I will be surprised if this boat doesn't end up needing 10lb in lead.
     
  8. Commodore

    Commodore Well-Known Member

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    Nice on the battery deal. I'm a fan of the big 15AH cylinders. Got 8 of them in my Bismarck for 64 amp hours, because reasons. If the 8AH Lipos are getting things done for you, then more power to ya, so to speak.
     
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  9. bsgkid117

    bsgkid117 Vendor

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    [​IMG]

    Small update. Slowly skinning the bottom with 1/32 basswood sheet. The basswood strips really help the wood conform to the shape of the hull properly. Not the hardest part of the build, but I'm trying to pace myself and only work on it a bit at a time.
     
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  10. bsgkid117

    bsgkid117 Vendor

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    I haven't made as much progress over the last 2 months as I would've liked, but hey, life gets in the way sometimes. Tomorrow I'll be (hopefully) cleaning up the garage some to get back at the Jean Bart. I've decided to go with a geared drive system after talking it over with @Kevin P. and comparing JB with his Missouri. Going to be running 650KV 42mm can brushless motors with my standard 11.1v 8AH LiPO packs, hoping to use 2.25" Kort props but have been thinking of trying some Raboesch 5 bladed props in a 55mm diameter. Will probably need about 2.5:1 gear reduction to get close to speed, depending on prop, but whatever else I need to slow her down I can accomplish via the radio.

    Anyhoo, hope to actually post a legitimate update by Monday so stay tuned.
     
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  11. bsgkid117

    bsgkid117 Vendor

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    Here is my first real update in quite a while. After finishing covering the bottom impenetrable area of the hull with 1/32 basswood sheet sections, I gave the whole hull a light coat of filler to fill in the gaps between sections since I am not at all an expert at planking boat bottoms. This step honestly probably could've been skipped and gone straight to glassing the hull, but I wanted to try and make it come out as good as my skills will allow. Currently working on sanding the filler down and making the whole bottom of the hull as nice and smooth as possible. Once we've reached that step, I'll rough the whole thing back up with a 60 grit to give as much surface area for the epoxy and fiberglass to adhere to.

    Slight propulsion modification. After talking with the great @thegeek about his Yammer's prop and drive setup, and then consulting my father who worked with boats of all types at marina's all across NJ, I've decided to try a 3 blade 55mm prop. I currently have them on order for 3/16" shaft diameter, but apparently that specific prop is backordered for months so I may be switching to a 4mm metric prop shaft for Jean Bart and my Courbet build.

    When I designed JB in Fusion360, I put shaft mounting holes into some of the ribs to make it easy for me to locate the shafts and give me as much toe-in towards the rudder as possible. I thought I had accounted for the motors when I did that, but it looks like with my current Traxxas gearbox+650kv motor combo we are getting awfully close to the sides of the boat. Might need to mount the gearboxes sideways or something to step the motors in from the side, we'll figure that out. But she will have some aggressive toe-in.

    Anyway, here's some pictures of the Marine Nationale yards here in NJ. You can see Suffren in the background, slowly fitting out. Dunkerque prepping for a re-skinning and minor refit for 2019 battling. And Jean Bart still under construction. This picture really does show the massive size difference between the JB and Dunkerque. I knew it was a much larger boat, but holy cow if Dunkerque is a Kayak this thing is a Canoe.

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    Last edited: Jan 4, 2019
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  12. bsgkid117

    bsgkid117 Vendor

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    Small update:

    As the Courbet builders know, I've taken that project and offered to produce 3d printed superstructure for the french fleet. Now since the Courbet was going to be the first boat done, I had wanted to have someone with more skills and experience undertake that process. A good friend of mine is a 3d modeller by trade and I had originally comissioned him to do the work. However he just moved into his first place, his mother has been in and out of the hospital, he got a promotion at work...etc. Lots of life shit.

    So I did two things. First, I handed that task off to our one and only super amazingly capable @Beaver . The second thing was to start learning how to take video game 3d models and prepare them for printing. I didn't want to immediately jump to Courbet and have Caleb and I's work clash, so I started playing with smaller easier bits from Jean Bart.

    This is the product of about a month worth of learning and trial and error using 4 different pieces of software.

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    That's a dual 3.9" tertiary battery gun turret. The Jean Bart has a total of twelve of them. This boat is literally covered in guns and gun turrets. It's like the French saw a late war US battleship, covered in 20mm and 40mm gun tubs, and said "Hold my beer"

    This is exactly 1 Jean Bart worth of small guns and gun aiming accessories.

    14x dual 2.2" antiaircraft turrets directed by 5x TELE57 battery directors with DRBC-30B radars.

    12x dual 3.9" dual-purpose turrets directed by 4x OPL4 battery directors with ACAE radars

    3x triple 6" dual purpose turrets directed by 2x OPL8 battery directors with 2x ACAE radars

    And in the back on the side is the OPL14 battery director for the main guns, fitted with ABM radar.


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    Last edited: Jan 9, 2019
  13. bsgkid117

    bsgkid117 Vendor

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    So, an update:

    Superstructure in this hobby is, in my opinion, essentially useless. It exists to let everyone know that the boat they're looking at is, in fact, the boat they think they're looking at. If all of the boats on the pond had no superstructure and instead had their names printed in large letters on their decks, the battles would still go the same way. Superstructure doesn't win battles, it just makes our boats look like something instead of a small surfboard.

    Over the last few days I've applied what I've learned in a trial and error and more trial and oh shit that didn't save and oh wow this is going to take 4 hours to compile and shit that isn't right gotta compile again to come up with some test superstructure files for Jean Bart.

    Here are some pics:

    JB Game File.PNG

    This file is how the boat comes out of the game. Its extremely complex, with lots of details that even at 1/144th scale are impossible to 3d print. Here is another shot, this time in Fusion360:

    JB raw.PNG

    The first thing I had to do was try and remove as much of this unprintable detail as possible. Thankfully, Fusion360 helped me with that. The .obj file I have for Jean Bart from the videogame stored (almost) every component as a separate mesh. So all we had to do was go down the list and delete. We ended up with something like this:

    JB Trimmed.PNG

    This is a lot better than the first one, right? The problem here is that some of the unprintable "junk" has been incorporated into other meshes. For example, the main superstructure and all of the little greebles all over it are the same mesh. So those tiny stairs, the phones, the ship's wheel, all part of the superstructure that we want. So now it's time to switch to another program, Meshmixer. Over the course of about 3 days I had to manually select and delete every feature present that I didn't want to try and print. Every staircase, every hatch, every small locker, the rigging, the boat davits, all sorts of junk that looks great on a game model but otherwise can't be printed.

    Unfortunately I don't have a good pic of this step.

    Once that was finished, I ran into the next major problem. The geometry in the video game doesn't need to make sense. Decks can be just a few pixels thick, what looks like a solid block can really be only 3 flat sides because the bottom and the side that touches something else dont need faces. So for the *next* 3~ days (and sleepless nights) I worked on thickening up those areas that were too thin to print and making the superstructure solid.

    Here is a pic of the "thickened" superstructure:

    JB SS Snip.PNG

    Now we were rapidly approaching the realm of something that is actually printable, but these are all still just "faces". There is no "solid" defined area here. If you tried to print that file, it would print with no infill at all and just walls everywhere. That could be desirable, but not in this application. So I used Meshmixer's make solid tool and had to play with the accuracy and thickness settings, letting it compile for sometimes an hour per iteration, until I got to this:

    JB SS print.PNG

    There was a little undesirable "reduction", where the program removed triangles and softened edges to make the file a bit easier to manage. In Cura the model looks much less playdoh-esque and more sharp.

    From there it was time to slice it up into chunks that would fit on the build plate and start some test prints, which are currently running and about 50% finished. If the output quality isn't quite what I want, I can go back in and recompile again without the reduction and try to preserve the sharp edges.

    I am not a 3d modeller. This is my first attempt at ever doing something like this and it was a ton of work and I'm sure it could be done better. But it's printing, and I've never been good at scratchbuilt superstructure. If anyone has any advice, please feel free to reply so I can continue learning. I've already planned on this initial superstructure run being a "Mark 1" setup, with (hopefully) improved quality in the future.
     
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  14. Kevin P.

    Kevin P. Well-Known Member

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    So, how’s the drivetrain and control coming? I would recommend making a fully operational barge prior to spending sleepless nights on SS, but I prefer to have control of my ship during battles, others might have different priorities ;)

    cool work though, has anyone considered going after the hull forms?
     
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  15. Beaver

    Beaver 2020 Rookie of the Year Admiral (Supporter)

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    Why does Kevin always have to be that voice of reason that takes all the fun out of building? Lol ;)
     
  16. bsgkid117

    bsgkid117 Vendor

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    I did say that superstructure was the single most useless bit of the boat. The hull isn't ready for drivetrain yet, I'm waiting on Loyalhanna to get back to me on if they are substituting the props I ordered (55mm 3 blade 3/16 shaft) for metric 4mm shaft since the 3/16 guys are sold out for "a good while" according to them. Can't make shafts or stuffing tubes until I know what thread the props are going to take. I have shopping carts at McMaster and BC just waiting for that decision to be made. Already have all the electrical components, the rudder drive sprockets and chain, etc ready to rock and roll but drilling shafts is a relatively major ish step that's holding me up right now.
     
  17. bsgkid117

    bsgkid117 Vendor

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    Small update:

    On this hull I went for an "All-wood" approach and can't say that it was any better than my previous wood and foam approach. Lots of time spent sheeting the bottom of the boat in basswood and shaping the bow and stern impenetrable areas. But all of that is done now, and the first layer of glass is drying on the hull. Going to do a double layer of glass on this boat due to its size and weight for strength. Bow will probably get 3 layers because of ram risk.

    Will upload pics when i'm totally done the glassing steps.

    Till next time.
     
  18. bsgkid117

    bsgkid117 Vendor

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    Update for today:

    Finished glassing the hull about 2 or 3 days ago now. Here are some pics of that whole process. I did the center section of the ship in one large piece, as large of an area I could cover with 1 piece of glass mat without it fighting back too much. Then the bow and stern areas were done with their own sections, relief cut to try and conform to the ship's shape. When those 3 sections were almost dry, I added a 2nd center layer that was larger than the existing center layer to overlap the seam created by the front and rear sections meeting the center.

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    When that all finally dried, I cut away the excess glass mat and sanded down the rough raised sections to see what I was working with. Then I went over the bow and stern with 1" wide strips to really reinforce those areas and make sure the whole thing was covered with mat.

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    The superstructure printing is almost finished. Have to do some cleanup to get rid of support remnants under the overhangs and increase overall visual quality, but it's coming along.

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    Spent the day in the garage watching Netflix's World War 2 in Colour documentary series and working on Jean Bart's hull. I need to spend some time cleaning up my workspace...have been under the weather the last 2~ weeks with a real nasty chest/respiratory bug. Feels like I'm trying to breathe in a sauna constantly. Saps my energy, so I'm lucky I even got out to work on the boat at all.

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    Attached the deck rim and drilled 1/4 diameter x slightly more than 1/8" holes along the perimeter for the magnets that will hold down the deck. Then installed the magnets and glued them in place with E6000.

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    My goal is to go back over the entire boat with west systems to give it another coat of waterproofing. Need to get some 1/16 or even 1/32 thickness 1/4" diameter magnets for the decks. Prop shaft material is on the way and come Monday I'll be working on rough interior layout and then shafts, hopefully.
     
    Last edited: Jan 17, 2019
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  19. Kevin P.

    Kevin P. Well-Known Member

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    Have you started taking reservations for ad space yet? Asking for a friend
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  20. bsgkid117

    bsgkid117 Vendor

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    I thought about it. It would really help with the cost of constructing such a large target practice system. But then I saw this boat:

    IMG_20170122_123759669.jpg

    Then I realized that he had the monopoly on allied billboard space and decided to stay out of the rental market.
     
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