chuck wrote:
I’ve never seen any official plating plans or plank expansion plans for the Iowa class in public circulation.
NARA has the plating in uFilm.
There are planking "plans" as well but it looks like such plans were guidelines and it was just done largely according to tradition. I learned yesterday that entire deck of the New Jersey was planked, except at the bow and helipad. The dark areas (that change over time) at the stern are rubber mats. To save money, the navy poured copious quantities of adhesive over the stern planking to fill in rotted areas then put mats over the top.
In regard to the plating, the plans are difficult to read and you have to look at a lot of them. I have been picking at it but am not finished. I have to decipher if a number is a 3 or a 5 or a 1 or a 7.
My still unfinished attempt (bow not shown here):
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I don't have this in any state where I can share it yet and someone else could make sense of my files.
One thing's fur shur: The kits doing plating get it wrong.
Strakes can be scarfed, overlapped, overlapped with double plates (so no overlap is visible) or butt joined with butt plates. I have not figured out any rational plan behind the overlaps. There are some weird ones where the bottom plate overlaps the top plate then suddenly it reverses.
The edges of the strakes do not follow knuckles in the molded lines. You can see the knuckles bent into the plates but the effect is much more subtle than what you see in the molded lines.
If you are doing a model, the only plate lines you should show are the ones where the plates overlap and those only occur at the bow and stern above the waterline.
There are some sections of the hull that are castings.