The Ship Model Forum

We have had some really cold weather this week with a lot of ice and snow, so I stayed at home and worked on the CAD model.

Here are some pictures of the boat winch. It is pretty complex, so I have been putting it off for a year or two. I needed it to finish the midships superstructure.

I don't have plans, and the blueprints only show a rough outline. But I visited the USS Little Rock in Buffalo, NY, and took a lot of pictures. I placed rulers in the pictures so I could make measurements in the images. I also made rough sketches while on the ship, including key dimensions of things that can be seen in the photos. Consequently, I think the dimension are pretty accurate - within 1/4 to 1/2 inch at least.

The last picture is of the pump and valve block. It was pretty complex. It was designed either by a mad scientist or a sadist with precognition who knew that someday someone would try to make a CAD model of it!

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

Real dedication to accuracy and it pays off wonderfully. Beautifully detailed work!

This winch, however, looks like it could remove one's thumb in a split second.

Thumbs, feet, arms, hands ... they are expendable. That's what sailors are for. No occupational safety considerations in the military. It's sort of an oxymoron.

Don't get me wrong - we received plenty of safety training. But mostly it was intended to keep the ship safe.

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

Wondering why they used hydraulic rather than direct electric winch power. Michael

The small winches used direct electric power geared down to speed. The larger winches needed very high torque and had to be reversable. Direct electric motor drives were not practical for these winches.

David P is correct about hydraulic motors. Here is more information:

http://www.okieboat.com/Hydraulic%20pum ... otors.html

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

Many thanks, especially for the explanation of the tilt plate.

Stunning artwork Phil. You never cease to impress me with you attention to detail. Put me down for a set of plans when you finally finish.

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Rusty White
flagshipmodels.com
Home of the American Civil War warship kits

It's been a little slow here lately, so I thought I would post a few of the small projects that are a part of the whole ship project.

First, the dual 5"/38 mount Mk 32. These were pretty much the same on all ships in WWII, and continued in use in the US Navy long after the war. There were several Mods with a lot of small differences, but all were the same outside dimensions. Some ships had bloomers (bucklers) on the forward mounts during part of WWII but other ships did not.

When the OK City was rebuilt as a guided missile ship with command spaces up forward all but one of the 5"/38 mounts were eliminated, and the one, Mount 51, was moved forward to approximately the same position as the original Cleveland class turret #2. There were several changes to the 5"/38 mount over the history of CLG-5/CG-5, mostly having to do with the elimination of the Mount Captain's blast hood and the installation, moving and removal of various antennas from the mount top.

These weren't referred to as "turrets" but were "gun mounts." I am not sure why.

I don't have blueprints for the gun house (or the 5"/38 guns) - the dimensions were taken from Ordnance Phamplets. I still need to add a few details to the shell case ejection ports.

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

Next up is the triple 6"/47 turret. It is a bit more complex than the 5" mount.

The Cleveland class CLs had four of these, and the earlier Brooklyn class ships had five. There were a lot of variations from ship to ship, mainly in the presence or absence of ladders on the face of the turret and the size and configuration of the vent hoods on the back. Some ships had railings on top but the OK City had them on the sides. In port we tied off canvas awnings to these railings. Turrets on the main deck had hatches in the back plate as shown in the pictures below. Superelevated turrets had hatches in the bottom.

Near the end of WWII the Navy began removing the optical rangefinders from the #1 turrets on ships that went into shipyards. This was a weight saving measure. The #4 turrets on ALL Cleveland class ships never had these rangefinders, and this appears to be true of the #5 turrets on the Brooklyns also.

I have the blueprints for these turrets and this model is drawn to the dimensions in the blueprints. Some small details visible in photographs have been added. I do not have drawings for the 6"/47 gun - I have searched for years and haven't found them - so the barrel dimensions were guestimated from photos and ordnance flyers.

There were several modifications to the replenishment tripod on top of the turret. It could be rigged for operation from either port or starboard, but we normally replenished from the starboard side. The first two pictures show it lowered and the other pictures show it raised. The cable passed through the notch at the top of the tripod, then rubbed against the half-cylindrical bulges on the top sides of the turret before leading down and being fastened to the main deck on the side opposite the replenishment ship. We only took on ammunition at this forward replenishment station.

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

Here is my model of the AN/SPG-49 missile tracking radar antenna. It was a 22 ton behemoth 18 feet (5.6 meters) high and 17 feet (5.2 meters) wide. This thing was a project in itself that took months to finish, and the file size is about 50 Mbytes. I visited the USS Little Rock CLG-4 museum ship in Buffalo, NY, and made photos and took measurements so get the size correct. I haven't found any plans for this antenna, but since I have started on the model the Navy has declassified and released documents for the Talos missile system to the National Archives - about 15,000 pages! Maybe someday I will visit the archives and go through all of that stuff.

This is actually the second model I made. The first was done entirely by photoguestimation from pictures. After I visited the Little Rock I started over with an entirely new model. It should be accurate to half an inch (10mm) or better.

Unlike most radars that have the electronics below decks with wave guides connecting to the antenna, the 49s had all the transmitting and receiving electronics inside the antenna - along with four axis training motors, hydraulics and cooling systems. It was actually two separate C-band radars in one assembly, a 3 megawatt monopulse tracking radar and a 5 kilowatt continuous wave target illumination radar, with horizontal and vertical scanning and polarization mechanisms for the beams. It was an adaptation of the FPS-16 land based radar that was used to track satellites and spacecraft. It's scan range was deliberately limited to 150 miles, although it could easily have tracked the moon.

When Apollo spacecraft were on the way to the moon we received orders to not radiate (we could have tracked them easily while they were in orbit). The Apollos used C-band communications and the 49s would have interfered with communications at the least, and they might have damaged the spacecraft's sensitive high gain receivers.

This model includes everything down to 3/16" (4.7 mm) diameter rivets.

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

The AN/SPG-49 had four major components.

The base supported the antenna and mounted it to the ship's structure. It was positioned to +/- 0.015 inch (0.4 mm) accuracy during ship construction. The base contained a drive motor to rotate the yoke.

The yoke rode on the base and rotated around the vertical axis (azimuth). It supported the gimbal. The yoke carried dual drive motors to rotate the gimbal.

The gimbal rotated around the horizontal axis (elevation). It supported and antenna housing and carried four motors to rotate the antenna. The large "C" shaped feature is a gear that was driven by the motors on the yoke.

The antenna housing also rotated around the vertical axis (azimuth). The yoke rotated relatively slowly to aim the antenna in the desired direction. The antenna could slew back and forth quickly (traverse) to correct for ship motion in high seas. The front surface of the antenna was a Luneberg lens that focused the C band RF energy into the receiving horns at the back of the housing.

The back of the housing had two "clamshell" doors that opened to allow access to the guts. One of the fellows who worked on the 49 said there was enough room inside the antenna for a couple of fellows to have a tea party. The transmitting klystron was 4-5 feet tall and water cooled. A lot of the pumps, plumbing and fans on the outside of the antenna were for klystron coolant. There were two feed horns on the right side. One was a CW "spoiler" that scattered some energy in a different pattern from the main lens to fill in low power lobes in the antenna pattern. The other was a side lobe suppressor to prevent jamming.

The base, yoke and gimbal were pretty much the same for both Talos and Terrier systems, but the antenna housings were different.

When I build the physical model I intend to construct it with these four subassemblies so it can rotate through all axes. At 1:96 scale the antenna will be 2.25 inches (57 mm) tall.

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

Here are some detail pictures. I am posting these in case someone else wants to build one of these. It has taken me years to accumulate detailed photos of intact assemblies.

The first two are of the gimbal drive mechanisms on the yoke. The side plates, motors and tachometers/servo mechanisms are missing from the units on the Little Rock. They were stripped for use on other Talos ships when the Little Rock was decommissioned. I finally accumulated enough close-up photos to be able to reconstruct the missing pieces.

The top detail image shows the two antenna traverse drive motors on the gimbal, and the "C" shaped gear on the antenna housing that the motors drove. It also shows the TV camera on the antenna.

The bottom detail shows the second pair of traverse motors on the bottom of the gimbal, a hand crank gear to manually position the antenna, cooling fan on the antenna housing and the coolant pump on the yoke.

This thing was easily the most complex single part of the whole ship model.

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

Finally, here are some images of the TV camera that rode on top of the antenna housing. The camera is the rectangular box on the back. The cylindrical part was a newtonian reflector telescope "lens." The camera showed an image of the targets that were being tracked - at least out to a range of a few tens of miles (I don't know the actual limits). The camera could also be used to coarse aim the antenna for calibration.

I post these pictures just to illustrate how serendipity plays a part in researching a model. I was browsing through the collection at the Oregon State University library looking for a training manual for the 5"/38 gun (which I found). I also looked at the other pubs in the general area, and found one called "NAVWEPS OP 3226 Closed Circuit Television System." Up to this point I had only a few fuzzy images of the TV camera. I didn't really think this pub could be for the Talos system, but I opened it anyway. To my surprise it was the Talos TV system! It had detailed photos, drawings, dimensions and far more information than I needed. So this part of the model is very accurate.

It pays to take the time to look in unlikely places.

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

Phil, have you considered publishing a wide format coffee table book on the USS Oklahoma City? I think you should be getting royalties, (bigtime -- every Christmas) in view of the technical depth, relentless research, CAD artistry and first person authority you are bringing to this incredible project. Michael

Michael,

The thought has crossed my mind. If they are still printing books when I get through with this thing I might look into it.

I need to do the CAD model of the 1945 version too (I'm already collecting plans for that project).

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

This keeps getting better and better.

I love the idea that you could, if you so desired, reach out and scan something travelling to the Moon. That's just amazing.

The coffee table book (might need to be work table book if you keep adding detail at this rate ) sounds like a good idea.

One thing, how are you going to render that monster in one go? Can you use render layers or is there some kind of funky distribution system?

Amazing work. The detail is simply stunning.

Owen

Owen,

I have no idea how I am going to render the entire ship again. The last time (2009) I rendered the whole ship there were very few small details and the whole ship was about 275 Mbytes. It took 90 minutes to produce an image. At that time I had only a gigabyte of RAM in the machine (P4 XP) and the program would choke if I tried to render a 300 Mbyte file.

Today just the after deck house is about 250 Mbytes. I'm not sure what the whole model is now, but I think it is about 750 Mbytes, and I expect it to be a gigabyte when I am done. My current machine (i7-3930 Win 7 with 32 Gbytes RAM) is 12 times faster than the XP machine. However, DesignCAD apparently still has a 1 Gbyte working memory limit (a lot of 32 bit code). I am a beta tester and I keep urging them to recompile it to 64 bits, but there still is some old code that has to be replaced before it can handle a gigabyte file.

Basically I am hoping technology continues to improve performance and eventually the program will be rewritten entirely. If not, after the model is finished I will export it to a program that can render the file. Another option is to rework all of the individual files to eliminate small details and then put together a whole ship from the strip down files. I have tested this idea with the AN/SPG-49 file. With all the small details it is about 50 Mbytes, and with all the nuts, bolts and rivets removed it is 35 Mbytes. I might also render each section individually using the same lighting and then piece together the images in Photoshop.

Note: The purpose of this project is not to produce pretty pictures. I think of it as a digital archaeology project. The former USS Oklahoma City CG-5 was used as a target and now rests under 6000 feet of water 230 miles southwest of Guam. My purpose is to recreate it in digital form. Then anyone can examine the files to learn details of the ship. Someday perhaps someone can produce a digital walkthrough from my files so those who are interested can walk her virtual decks again. And I will use the files to create a real physical 1:96 model just because I like to build models.

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

Awesome bit of work on the SPG-49 mate!!

I know I have probably asked this before but what would you need to do to use this file to create a 3d printed version of the radar in 1/96 (or 1/72....It would be cheapest to get 1 printed (in either scale)to make a master and resin cast the parts)

I came across a shapeways seller doing 1/96 and 1/72 20mm CIWS Phalanx's but very expensive (approx $84US ea)

Keep up the excellent images mate.....begs the question how much more to render on the modernized version??

Cheers Bruce

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building:
1/72 RC USS LONG BEACH CGN9
1/72 RC USS CALIFORNIA CGN36
1/72 RC USS SAIPAN LHA2
1/72 RC USS JOHN PAUL JONES DDG53
1/72 RC USS SHARK SSN591
1/72 RC USS SEAWOLF SSN21
1/72 RC USS ALBANY CG10

Bruce,

I have generated STL files from some of my DesignCAD files - for small boats and such. It can be tricky because I didn't always ensure that there were not "leaks" where complex surface grids come together (not necessary for rendering images or generating 2D plans). If there are gaps they are very small, but 3D printers don't want any gaps at all. It took quite a bit of cleanup.

However, none of the four subassemblies of the SPG-49 are especially complicated. Lots of fiddly bits but I suspect they would print OK. I would need to go back and add pins and sockets for the parts to rotate and figure out how to assemble the parts.

The hull and after deckhouse are done. I have just about finished the midships deckhouse. After that I need to finish the forward superstructure and add the lifelines around the main deck. I also need to add the boards for the wooden deck. I may be done in another year. Meanwhile, I am gathering plans for the 1945 configuration of the USS Oklahoma City CL-91.

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

I would not bother adding pins and sockets, I'd just drill out a socket and use some brass rod for pins.

I am looking at getting a 1/72 Oregon City class hull (to do CG10 USS Albany) off my club mate Tim (Southern Cross Models). He should have the hull plug ready later in year. So I would be very interested in getting a 1/72 SPG49! I would use the 3D printed one's parts to mold up the 4 for the model, they are so big it should be possible to animate them in sync with the Talo's launcher (I would not mind one of those 3D printed too!!) The detail 3D printing gives is worth the cost.

Cheers Bruce

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building:
1/72 RC USS LONG BEACH CGN9
1/72 RC USS CALIFORNIA CGN36
1/72 RC USS SAIPAN LHA2
1/72 RC USS JOHN PAUL JONES DDG53
1/72 RC USS SHARK SSN591
1/72 RC USS SEAWOLF SSN21
1/72 RC USS ALBANY CG10