Re: begining!

[hulldown]

Hi everyone, newbie here, straight off the slipway! Just starting off with scratchbuilding ships, I am after some guidance please.
I am very interested in building a 'cold war' period Soviet warship.Now, I need the finished resut to be no more than 3 foot in lengh for transportation purposes, a smal type ship would be ideal ( if they ever did small! ) so what scale would I be looking at? Also considering easy availability of plans and if pos a card model for reference. It would also be ideal if it were in a scale where items such as radar were commercially availabe as i'm not at that level of modelmaking.
I am capable and have built plank on frame and have actually built a hull using the plywood former system (pre divorse, it was scuttled by Her Majesty's navy!!) So can anyone help me plot the correct course as I don't want to end up on the rocks straight away.

Many thanks,

Mikw

[MarkieSparkie]

Hmm...well scale-wise would depend on the length of the ship but if you want the finished product to be under three feet you should probably look at a scale of 1:200 or smaller. Fittings are available at scales 1:200 and 1:350 but with enough looking you may be able to find fittings in the scale of 1:300 or maybe even 1:250.

I build mostly ocean liners in the scale of 1:300 and it is quite hard to find pre-made fittings. As for the size; my ships average between 500 and 900 feet in real life and 2 and 3 feet as models.

You may want to start with a simple vessel such as a coastal vessel of some sort.

Sorry I don't know much about cold war era ships.

Good luck with your build(s).

[ingura]

...

[hulldown]

Thank you both, markiSparki I was thinking aong the lines of 1/200 or thereabouts, so thanks for that.
Peter, many thanks to you, have to say that ship looks ideal as a start, size wise, kit wise and hopefully plan wise, There's nothing more i'd love to do than to build a huge ship, but I know I have to start somewhere, and i'm bound to have fun with this.
I'll be looking the kit up and also the plans, do you happen to know what company sells the plans?
Again, many thanks both.

Mike

[Neptune]

In 1/200 a lot of things are commercially available, you can also buy the Trumpeter Sovremenny from plastic that way.
For something like your project I'd rather go for some of their small ships, say a Nanuchka, Tarantul or Pauk class. They're all pretty small so you can pick a rather large scale like 1/72 or 1/96, in which some fittings are available too. These small boats are all but secret by now, so obtaining plans and reference pictures shouldn't be a problem at all.
In those classes there is a lot of difference in outfits too, so you can actually pick the outfit you like most. Which is one of the things that attracts me to Soviet/Russian warships too.

[hulldown]

Many thanks Neptune, I have been looking through the many photo's and quite fancy a Krivak, now next question is do you know where I might be able to get plans for it and also is there one of the card model books available that i've been reading about?
thanks again

[Neptune]

Hi, I have Krivak plans somewhere. Although I never built one, so perhaps you can ask someone else on the board for theirs first. Somebody was building a Krivak some time back, the topic can be seen in the scratchbuilding board.
Dry dock pictures etc. are available for the Krivak class as well. I can help with those if you want too. Don't have that many detail pictures of that particular class though, although I know plenty of these are available.
Also check www.navsource.narod.ru for the Krivak class. A lot of pictures are there too.
She is however quite big, so I guess you'd be looking at a 1/144 scale to keep her around 3 feet.

[hulldown]

Hi neptune, what scale are your plans in and what size would she be if you built her to the plans you have?