The Ship Model Forum

Well, there we go, another one of my colourful subjects.

I'll try to build a 1/700 (sub) sea diorama of the cable layer Living Stone. Normally I would post it in the scratch build board as most of my merchant ships, but this one is not intended to be equally detailed as the others.
The main aim of this diorama will be to test diorama skills for future projects.

The vessel itself was actually built as a fall pipe rock dumping vessel, but of a multi-purpose design.
For rock dumping she was equipped with a big rock hold with a centrally mounted excavator as well as a moonpool for segments of piping to accurately put the rocks in place at the seabed. This type of vessel is typically used to reinforce subsea structures as well as the base of drilling rigs. More recently they also found a new application in foundation works for offshore windmill farms.

As a secondary role, she was equipped with 2 huge turntables that can hold 10,000 tons of cable for cable laying in offshore windfarms.
Later on, the excavator was removed, as well as most of rock hold walls and she was equipped with a strong trencher (to bury cables beneath the seabed)

For both of these jobs she is equipped with a very strong Dynamic Positioning System (class DP2 - DP3) to accurately keep her in position. For this purpose she has two azimuth thrusters aft, two strong bow thrusters forward and two retractable azimuth thrusters in a shoulder position on both sides.

To top the whole thing off, they made it dual-fual with two LNG tanks and dual fuel engines for an eco-friendly operation.

The model itself will be built as a bottom and top half with a 1mm acrylic/plexi water surface in between. I'll depict the vessel while performing part of her cable laying job, connecting an inter array cable.
The surface will be supported by the base of the windmill (which I won't be building completely) and I'm sort of hoping the bottom and top half of the vessel will act as a backbone to the plexi sheet to avoid excessive warping.

Here you can see the start, with the big moonpool in the bottom. In the end this will be hardly visible, as it's not used for its current cable-lay purpose. She can be seen in a myriad of different configurations as parts and equipment is added and removed all the time, depending on the assignment at hand.

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The merchant shipyard

Nice subject. May I suggest using a metal core to keep the hull parts from warping? Otherwise it may just flex with the plexiglass.

Thats a nice looking ship looking forward to following the progress on it.

I’m looking forward to seeing more! I’m also a huge fan of color so kudos to you what are your thoughts on gaining the perspective from the ship down to the cable trench?

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In the shipyard - Trumpeter 1/350 USS Kitty Hawk

This will be very interesting! Modern offshore ships look really cool and have a lot of interesting details!

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Thanks for the encouragement.

Any nasty experience with the warping Pieter? I somehow doubt the hull would warp considering the longitudinal strength given by the keel frame. The keel will be fully glued to the plexi sheet. Metal would give quite some issues with thermal expansion in the model I guess.

Not entirely sure on the perspective for the cable trench yet. The idea is to make a complete "box" of plexi, with thicker sides and the water surface with the ship above and below as the top of that box. However that idea is not fixed yet. I'm also playing with the idea of putting a coat of acrylic gel for wave forming on top of the plexi, it dries transparent after all. Perhaps with some transparent blue paint mixed into it?
I guess I'll be doing some testing for all those things once I'm finished with the vessel itself.

It'll involve quite a few protrusions through the water surface as well. The vessel is operating with an ROV below the surface and it will have the gantry aft deployed as well. Additionally she has a survey pole near the stern with a lot of sensors and I might have the Taut Wire device deployed as well.
The Taut Wire is a basically what it says :p A weight is put at the bottom and a wire connected to it is kept at a constant tension. The angles in 2 dimensions and the wire length that is paid out is measured and used a position reference for the position keeping system (Dynamic Positioning).
The only problem I'm having with it, is that it's a rather tiny thing on the real ship and will definately be out of scale in this diorama. I'm somewhat in doubt whether to "deploy it" or not.

The real pic below is practically what I'll try to show, except with the white thing aft below the water level. You can see the red A-frame on the portside where the ROV is deployed and the survey pole right at the portside stern.

The idea is to have the yellow part made in 2 pieces in order to support the water surface from the bottom.

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The merchant shipyard

I do have some nasty experience with warping, mostly in resin kits though. Good progress BTW.

Wow, I'd have to skip all of that internal bracing if it wasn't absolutely needed if it was up to me. Im in awe that you've added all the internal structure to the ship.

Very interesting subject and diorama project!
I'll be looking forward to more updates!

For the water surface, acrylic gel should work. I've tried many of the art-store variety, but found all of them too thick (also the softest varieties). I was happy with AK's 'transparent water gel': it is softer and settles down nicely without 'spikes' in the surface.
Don't use their coloured varieties; I think the colours are way too saturated for most settings, and I don't even like the hue of blue they use (too purple-ish). It is much better to mix your own water colour and mix that with the gel. Only, it will be hard to avoid getting air bubbles in it...
Alternatively, you can paint the plexi surface with transparent paints and add the uncoloured water gel on top.

Or, you could stick coloured transparent foil to the surface and add the gel on that. The sides of this diorama were coloured with a transparent sticky film like that (but without gel): (I'm not sure how he did the top surface)


A plexi box would be a nice and sturdy way to present the underwater part. But there are of course different options. You could only support the rear side with a plexi sheet. Or if the elements linking the ship with the seabed are sufficiently solid, you could insert steel rods in them and have them support a 'hovering' sea surface and ship.
Choices...

Thanks for the comments.

The internal bracing is unfortunately necessary to use the technique I'm using. The milliput 2-component epoxy filler that I'm using as a final coating is quite stiff and requires some pushing around to fill the hull. To reduce the use of this filler and reduce weight on the hull I fill up the spaces between the frames with pieces of scrap styrene. Some bracing is required.
In actual shape with open top and bottom half, you can counter the pushing force with your fingers, if you put a bottom and top plate, this isn't possible and more bracing is required, I also use 1.5mm frames in such cases (now it's just 1mm framing).

I've seen that diorama as well Marijn, while searcing for subsea dio's as examples. The foil looks ok, but I'm afraid at 1/700 with a "waterdepth" of only around 5cm, this could become too dark and obscure the details a bit. The top layer might be in acrylic gel, but that does shrink a lot and might actually cause a bending force on the plexi… As for thickness, you can mix it with water and/or paint up to a level where you can even pour it.

Some testing will be required.

In the meantime I continue with the ship itself. Never did a ship with such an integrated superstructure, so I'm forced to put pieces in place that I would normally wait with.

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The merchant shipyard

Pretty amazing everytime I see a new pic.

Decided to make the waterline area as well. It'll serve to complete the outline of both upper and lower part during milliput application as well as a template for the plexi, to determine the position of the vessel as well as to cut out the holes for the locator pieces between upper and lower hull. I'll recycle the part later in this build or a future build.

The waterline will be packed in plastic foil during application of milliput, so I can remove it from the lower hull and use it again on the upper hull.

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The merchant shipyard

Good idea to include the waterline area too!

Looking forward to the next steps...

And here is the first coat of Milliput. Over the years I've learned you never succeed in doing this the first time right. As you push to spread the rather thick milliput, you always have places where you just pushed too hard. So even if you try a very thick coat, it'll only result in a lot of sanding, to eventually still find small places where you didn't put enough.
Therefore I go for a rather lighter coat, less sanding, and fill any blemishes or bad parts in a second or even third attempt.

The aft part of the lower hull looks somewhat fat, not exactly a smooth flow towards the upper part.

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The merchant shipyard

Very nice progress!

Good idea to use the white Milliput. It sands very easily.
I used Magic Sculp so far. It is very hard, which is great when finished but much more work to sand. I will try the white Milliput next time I think...

On my first scratchbuilt model I used the green version, can't quite say how the result was when it came to sanding. Didn't have a clue what I was doing, so the result was a rather wobly hull. The Milliput hadn't cured too well and I decided to switch to the Super Fine at that point. It's quite possible that the rougher green version is sufficient for sanding a model if it's cured well...

The white one is pretty good, sanding goes fast. I do still get some improperly cured spots from time to time. For a model of this size, you only need a very tiny amount of filler, so mixing it at proper proportions isn't too easy. As you can see in the last pic below, one part of the starboard bow hadn't cured well. I cut those out to a hard edge and refill them afterwards.

The starboard side of the accomodation is in place in the pictures, but I'm building at break-neck speed (to my standards anyway ), so I'm building before thinking . I forgot to integrate the side of the funnel which is located adjacent to the accomodation, so I'll be doing this part again. It does give a good template to match the bulwark. The initial template was made of paper of course.

The bulwark is a bit strange, it arches in a wee bit forward and slowly coming to full vertical on the side to join with the rest of the accomodation block.
The whole forward mooring deck is covered, but to give daylight (Maritime Labour Convention requirement) to the forward cabins, there is a gap in that cover. That's the main reason for painting the deck green and detailing the forward bulkhead of the accomodation.


Stern section, I need to have the first fill in place and paint the inside of the aft gallery before I could place the transom. I currently plan to keep the hull as one piece during the next layer of filler to make the stern match nicely. Then I'll need to cut out the 1mm waterline somehow.

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The merchant shipyard

And another small update,

After the second filling and sanding the hull looks like this:



It will still need a third layer of milliput in some areas, mainly to integrate the superstructure and the hull with each other.
First I need to continue with the forward part and get the "roof" of the forecastle in place, so I can smooth it out with the rest of the ship. Then I'll apply the (hopefully) last layer of milliput.

The forecastle needed some detail, as the roof has a rather large hole. I've considered adding winches after all, but eventually decided not to do so. The helicopter deck will block most of the visibility in the hole after all.

I've also found some remaining Raboesch Clear Polyester sheeting on the shelf, does anybody have any ideas on how to glue that stuff? Normal UHU plast isn't holding well... I've seen something called Ruderer L530 in the shop, but no idea if it will work with this and what kind of finish it would give on the seams...

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The merchant shipyard

Looks good! I assume that the shape of the bow was not easy to replicate, especially the bulbous bow?

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For bulbous bows in this scale I often use the side of a file, with a finer sandpaper over of it. This gives a strong and sharp edge to manipulate around that bulb, often I'm crossing from one side, over the bulb to the other side to get the right angles.
For sanding I also use several thicknesses and sizes of styrene strips as sanding blocks, they bend along the hull, but not extremely so, and therefore help in giving a natural curve without "cutting" and scratching the surface where I'm sanding. They spread the pressure of my fingers that way. All depends on which kind of curve I need.
The bulb also has frames inside, so this also helps in getting the correct shape.

Here is a document about the vessel, with some of her different configurations.
http://www.longyingl.com/cdwe/downData/BrochureLivingStone.pdf

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The merchant shipyard

Thank you for the explanation!

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