Grayson has been on a tear lately wanting to build a R/C boat with massive internal compartmentalization. He initially thought about building the battleship Texas after seeing so much about the Arizona on our Hawaii trip. He wanted a ship with four turrets that also had torpedoes, and ran across that the British battlecruiser HMS Hood had both (as built Hood had torpedo tubes both above and below the waterline).
As luck would have it, I have four books on the Hood, including two sets of plans, and built a couple (including the old motorized Lindberg kit) when I was growing up, so I congratulated him on selected the most beautiful warship ever made, and we started planning building a model out of balsa. We picked 1/350 scale, which is half the size of the R/C combat ships, but big enough that we could get some experience building plank on frame construction.
I forced him - uh, I mean he decided - to start by laying out the frame locations on a pine board and then laying down a keel and a facsimile of the original ship's double bottom, thus approximating the first stages of the real ship's construction, as shown on the right.
Hilariously, it turned out I can't do the math to consistently accurately translate 1/200 1/400 scale drawings to 1/350, so it took a couple of tries before we got the all plans to the correct scale, but today we got the entire hull framed, using the 23 frames in the Polish reference book that was the simplest to copy from. The bottom and all framing was 1/8" inch balsa - we'll use 1/16" for the hull plating. I was particularly please with the compartments, we have a large central one in case we decide to add motors and batteries, and the forward and aft turrets have their own separate comparments, which I hope will make adding scratchbuilt barbettes easier.
W
