Hi all,
congrats to the fine work and enormous dedication depicted in this thread!
I am in the process of building the Airfix Warspite, a favorite kit of my youth, but this time as beached in Prussia Cove on her abortive last journey.
I have the Raven/Roberts volume, the new shipcraft book (with input from many of you, a very nicely done book in book, so to speak), I have several other images and I am waiting for the AOTS book which is somewhere in the mail between the UK and here.
One question I havent solved yet (and from what I heard from an owner of the AOTS book, it doesn´t either) is how the former catapult deck was used after the aircraft installations were removed. The Raven/Roberts book has six single Oerlikons placed there, but I so far found no more info.
In other ships, the space was used for boat storage so that more prominent areas were available for more AA - so this might be true, but I haven´t found info yet.
Furthermore, when the aircraft installations were removed, the starboard hangar was converted to a cinema. Has anyone an idea whether the hangar doors were retained or replaced? I have seen one photo taken during scrapping that looks as if the original hangar door might still be in place, but am not sure.
My take is that weapons, boats and radars had been removed at Portsmouth already, but that boat cradles and differently colored areas of deck would remain where baots and weapons had been - would you consider that approach correct?
Online references re her last voyage I have found are:
http://freepages.family.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~treevecwll/visitorshw.htmhttp://www.naval-history.net/xGM-Chrono-01BB-Warspite.htmLooking forward to your input and to building the model
Frank
