experiments to find a better way to mount aircraft for wargaming.
As a few of you already know, Britain's Airfix plastic model kit company is coming out with a seven-model, 1:1200 (100 feet per inch) set of ships involved in the Bismarck battles: Bismarck, Prinz Eugen, Ark Royal, Hood, Suffolk (heavy cruiser), and two Tribal (as in HMS Cossack, Maori, Sikh and Zulu) class destroyers. It has been advertized as coming out in April, but May is the 70th anniversary. (The classic film Sink the Bismarck should be on TV regularly, I would think, although Bismarck did not sink a destroyer the night before her final battle.)
Not included in the Airfix set (and never produced at this scale by Airfix) are battleships Rodney, King George V (and her sistership Prince of Wales), heavy cruisers (and sisterships... fortunately) Norfolk and Dorsetshire, the Polish J/K/N class Piorun, and other Tribals.
Well, I have been staying up to all hours - getting like four to five hours of sleep a night - working on those. I have completed the basic designs - the KGVs' bridge and quadruple gun turrets, let alone those twin 4.7" destroyer turrets!, are not as simple as they may appear. On their grey hull sides and sterns - the latter tricky, because the hullsides join at the stern as well as bow - I have in white the destroyers' Gnn pennant numbers: G03 for Cossack, G65 for Piorun, etc. I envision a set of 14 ships on four size A4 (European letter size) colored sheets. Rodney (and bonus sistership Nelson), KGV and PoW, Norfolk and Dorsetshire, and eight destroyers.
I have even designed a 1:1200 Walrus observation seaplane with camouflage coloring, and am thinking of doing some also-simple (and tiny) little Swordfish biplane torpedoplanes, which the Ark Royal doesn't have. Also, I'll provide seven extra twin 4" gun turrets, in case someone wants to replace the funny-looking ones in the Airfix Hood kit.
By the way, an old Renwal twelve-model 1:1200 set of 1950s-era U.S. Navy ships went for $483 USD on eBay recently. Well, some of the old 1:1200 Eagle(wall) plastic model kits were selling for $33 USD for destroyers and the carrier Victorious went for $65 USD yesterday! (And they aren't really that good...)
In the photo, you can see the Airfix models in the center and on the right, and the building hulls of the five classes of mine on the left: Cossack, Piorun, Dorsetshire, Rodney and KGV. The battleships are about seven inches (18 cms) long, and the destroyers a little over 3.5 inches (9 cms) long. The cruisers and destroyers I'm printing out at 400 pixels to the inch, and I have gone into the drawings pixel by pixel to correct distortions and inconsistencies. They should be able to be enlarged to 1:700, for example, easily. I re-testbuilt Norfolk's hull at 1:600 and test-built the destroyers at slightly under 1:300 scale.
On mostly unpainted PoW, when it sailed forth from Scapa Flow on that May 1941 day, the only verticals with gray lighter than the horizontals were the sides of the quadruple turrets. I had hoped Dorsetshire's Mountbatten Pink and the destroyer numerals would show up better in the photo, but.... The Airfix Tribals seem to have very high freeboards, and the lower stern suggests room for a full-hull shafts and rudder.
As usual, assembling the hulls was an ordeal, and at this scale the slightest mistake is glaring. I was literally sweating over KGV's... and I don't have to tell you what one drop of sweat would have done to hours of work. Somehow, they all come together... with the requisite sheer on the sides of the bow. These are not the far easier (albeit far less accurate) Micro Models. It takes a really good eye in very good light to build these, and there is no tolerance for imperfect scissoring and folds' groovemaking. Happily, my close vision is abnormally good for my age.
I'm hoping that, of necessity, plastic model ship builders and naval game players will try my set too, and become interested in the potential of ("pre-painted") cardstock paper models. and paper is greener.
I'll post more photos of my ships building on my CoatneyHistory webpage. They are keening to get the Bismarck, already.
So we'll see if I can get more people interested in cardstock model ship building, by coat-tailing on Airfix's set. (For decades, I and others have been urging the model companies to come out with 1:1200 task force sets, and Airfix is finally trying it. I think they'll indeed find out that the play and wargaming market at least equals the models-for-display market. We shall see. This is a strategy game in itself.)