The Ship Model Forum

And so it begins, the saga of frankenship. Not really scratch building, more like kit bashing. I was poking around in my LHS. In one of their junk boxes I came upon the hull halves and the main deck of a capital ship, 1/350ish. In fact, a 1/400 Heller Jean Bart/Richelieu hull. I had become interested in the unbuilt Lexington class of battlecruisers and thought to myself, “self, you could do something with this.” Unfortunately, the model’s superstructure architecture is just wrong. So, the project morphed into the never imagined second class of battlecruisers, the Gettysburg class. I bought a cheap Hobbyboss Arizona for the superstructure bits and hull fittings, six 5” twin mounts and a bunch of 40mm quad mounts. I’m waiting for Model Monkey to reopen to acquire four USS Colorado turrets.

A feature of the "Battlecruisers" of the WWI and post era, was the long length required for the machinery, pushing the armament towards the ends. Not till WWII when USN had hight temp and pressure machinery, better than anyone else, was the machinery able to become more compact. The ultimate example of this was the 35,000 ton SODAK's. Lexington and Saratoga served outstandingly well in their new roles, as did the Japanese equivalents. It would however have been interesting to have seen them in an evolved WWII guise. The Japanese Kongo's were certainly well used as fast escorts for the Kido Butai. Perhaps the Lexingtons would have also been quite useful as escorts to the carriers they finally became.

Have fun!

The scratch build is a fairly small and obscure area of the board, there is a WIP section on what if's, the picture post area gets a lot more views.

Cheers: Tom

I love this kind of project ....... I have hull 'X' ... what can I turn it into? It's nice to periodically take a 'blank slate' approach and go wherever you feel like with it

That's an interesting use of that ship! I look forward to watching your build.

Short update on the frankenship. I added the two aft barbettes for the main armament (1” pvc coupler slices). The turrets are Model Monkey USS Colorado. The superstructure is primarily HobbyBoss USS Arizona with som bits and pieces from somewhere?

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like it'd look better (to my eyes at least) if you were to go ahead and delete the foremost turret ring on the donator deck and replace it with another PVC circle, so you can have the forward turrets spaced the same as the aft turrets. Either that, or yeet the second turret area and bring the whole superstructure forward.

It's an issue of balance, really—you're already mocking up a fantasy design, so you might as well go full ham.

_________________
Sean Nash, ACG (aircraft camo gestapo)

On the ways:
1/200 Trumpeter HMS Nelson
1/700 Tamiya USS Yorktown CV-5

In the stash:
1/35 Italiari PT-109
1/35 Tamiya "Pibber" Patrol Boat
1/350 Trumpeter USS Yorktown CV-10