Okay, here’s the start of my USS Sims conversion set for the Dragon 1/350th Benson.
A little background... This is really meant to represent either USS Sims or USS Hughes in 1941-42. There are some wonderful photos of both ships care of a photo CD that Devin Poore sent me awhile back (thank you!), but especially Hughes, that supply a great deal of detail, and since I’m partial to early war vessels, the choice was obvious. I’m using the Floating Drydock’s Sims plans, as well as those from Profile Morskie, but the photos are the final word as I’ve found that while the plans aren’t wrong, they are sometimes lacking in details.
The basic parts are CADded up in 1/96th scale in Alibre/Geomagic Design and then scaled to 1/350th. Moment of Inspiration, a great NURBs based program, is used for some of the organic shapes like the gussets on the funnel’s base. Don’t worry, they’ll be placed as soon as the rest of the part is done. Geomagic just can’t handle the loft, while MOI can. Geomagic is super for 2D drawing and I love what it can do when it isn't crashing (Grrrr....), while MOI is rather intuitive and easy to learn, and again, is super at handling organics.
Anyway, I’m at the design freeze point for both the midships deckhouse and the funnel. I’ll need to scale them and then do the remaining small details in 1/350th to ensure that the walls aren’t too thin for printing. A lot of the small details like bolts and rivets are probably unprintable in 1/350th, but maybe someday soon they will be as the technology improves, so I've included them. So, what did I do wrong? Where can I improve the parts? The after deckhouse is yet to come and maybe a few other items, but I want to finish what’s already been done before moving on to it.
The midships deckhouse and its small details are specific to Hughes, but as she and Sims were built in the same yard, I’m assuming (yeah, I know that can be dangerous) that they would have been pretty much identical early on in their careers. I’ve not placed rain gutters over the hatches and portholes as I can’t see any. Can anyone confirm them on Hughes or Sims in 1942?
The funnel is another matter. There are a lot of subtle shapes in there and the various ships of the class had slightly different funnels, mainly with the piping and the whistle platform arrangements. I’m doing the piping as Sims/Hughes-specific as possible, but am then falling back on pictures of Russell to fill in the blanks. There is a large mushroom vent at the main deck level that pokes up in between the forward uptake legs, so no worries, I haven’t forgotten that. As an aside, I do believe that the various building yards handled the funnels differently, as photos often show very subtly different shapes to the base, legs and gussets. There's nothing I can definitively point to, but different funnels from different ships built in different yards often have ever so slightly different appearances to my eye, however subtle.
Thoughts? Stuff I’ve totally botched and screwed up? I'd like to fix things now before the drawings are scaled and finalized. I've already uploaded a test file to Shapeways and they claim that the deckhouse is printable in 1/350th, but we'll see - I've heard that from them before only to have parts rejected during printing.
Thank you for any pointers or ideas.
Bob
PS. Here's the Photobucket album with a few more pics in larger size/DPI:
http://s231.photobucket.com/user/aptiva ... t=4&page=1