The Ship Model Forum

Here, finally, is a picture of the two 7th Fleet boats in position on top of the missile house.

I found blueprints for all of the ship's boats (and a LOT more) in the Barbour Boat Works collection at the East Carolina University Joiner Library:

viewtopic.php?f=52&t=155093

Barbour Boat Works built a lot of different small craft for the Navy, and it is the Barbour collection that is in the library, but the basic hull design came from the Bureau of Ships. The drawings were prepared by W. R. Chance and Associates in Washington, D.C., and William Garden in Seattle. Some of the drawings were from Bryants Marina in Seattle.

So it is possible that the basic hull design was used for other boats and by other companies.

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

Things have been a bit slow lately on the Virtual Ship Modeling pages, so I thought I would post an update.

A detailed ship model has thousands of individual assemblies, each a modeling project in itself. Here are pictures of the ship's binnacle (compass stand). Binnacles evolved from wooden boxes to house a magnetic compass to the far more complex versions found on mid 20th century ships. The OK City's binnacle was basically a WWI vintage design with electromagnetic compensation coils added to the outside. It had a removable hood.

When steel hulls came into service in the mid 1800s they played havoc with the magnetic compasses. The large iron balls (the "navigator's balls") were added to allow some compensation for the magnetic field of the metal hulls. The balls were moved in-out to fudge the ship's magnetic field to reduce interference. Later the four electromagnetic coils were added to allow more precise adjustment of the ship's magnetic field.

Adjustment of the compensation devices was done while "swinging ship." The ship would be positioned in a harbor with known geographic reference points. The ship would be turned so the bow pointed at a known reference point - giving a known true heading. The compensation devices were adjusted until the compass indicated the true magnetic heading. Of course the local magnetic deviation had to be taken into account. Then the ship was swung to point to another target of known position and the process was repeated, until several points in a circle were used. This tended to average out any peculiarities from a single heading.

The ship also had gyro compasses - they too were aligned by swinging ship - and that is what we normally used for navigation. But in case the gyros failed there was still the old fashioned binnacle. I wonder if modern ships still have magnetic compasses?

The OK City's binnacle was originally (1960) on the after superstructure below the radar tower - just above After Steering. But by the 1970s that After Steering position had been eliminated. The binnacle was moved to the forward superstructure on the deck above the pilot house.

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

We called the compensating devices "Navigators Balls".

By the time you finish this in all the gory detail 3D Printing will be able to blast this out with the push of a button, in aluminum from a 2 micron plasma head...

Quite impressive. Tom

The way this thing is going (10 years +), by the time I finish it we'll have Star Trek replicators in our homes.

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

I have been pretty busy with other things lately and haven't had much time for CAD modeling, but I finally got around to figuring out the ship's accommodation ladders. I say finally, because it has taken me years to find photos of the ladders used on the USS Oklahoma City CLG-5 while I was aboard.

Part of the problem is that I have blueprints for the ladders used on the CLs and early CLGs. Five blueprints and no two are alike! Then I found some pretty good photos of the ladders in the early 70s - and they are different from the blueprints in many ways!!

What you see here looks like the early 70s photos, with dimensions taken from the blueprints where things were about the same. So this is a best guess.

Although I have modeled the ladder along the forward side (there was also an after ladder that was a bit different), my real reason for modeling it was to get the pieces. The various parts were stowed along the sides of the missile house, under the midships boat decks and on the side of the forward superstructure. They are very visible details. Now I can finish the missile house and the midships superstructure.

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

Here is a picture showing where some of the parts of the forward and after accommodation ladders were stowed on the missile house.

Now the missile house is done - I think. I have been working on it for four years. While studying photos showing the ladder parts positions I discovered I had left out one of the fuel tank vents. I also found another minor error. So maybe it's finished, and maybe I'll find another correction someday.

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

Here is another update.

I have finished the midships tower. The original work was done about 10 years ago. Since then I have found several high resolution photos showing much more detail. I just went over the entire model and updated it, adding details and refining the CAD drawing (I have learned some better techniques over the last 10 years).

The tower originally (1960) carried a AN/SPS-39 3D air search radar antenna. The ship was very top heavy so this antenna was removed in 1967. The AN/SPS-30 3D air search radar on the after tower made the SPS-39 redundant. Several other antennas were moved from platforms on the tower to other places lower on the ship.

One interesting feature is the rotating stub mast at the forward end of the top platform. Cramp Shipyard in Philadelphia was upstream from a bridge that was too low for the ships to pass under unless the top part of the mast was hinged down horizontal. Some pictures showing how this worked are posted here:

http://www.okieboat.com/CAD%20radar%20towers.html

At the base was the Radar V compartment where the SPS-39 equipment and other equipment was housed. This was an armored compartment and originally had an armored door. But somewhere along the line before 1971 the door was replaced with an ordinary water tight door.

I needed the tower to finish the midships superstructure. Well, it is almost finished. I still need to decide how the boom vangs will be rigged for the boat booms. No two photos show the same arrangement.

Next will be the forward superstructure. It is a lot simpler than the midships structure!

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

Phil
Looking at your pictures I wonder how accurate drawings you have... I'd really like to build also a postwar American guided missiles cruiser. But everything I have are just few simple drawings. And of course it is impossible to find on the web the good reference photos. That's why I "track" you thread with a great interest.

Cheers

Lothar,

Sometime I wonder about the accuracy also. In one sense my model may be more "accurate" than the real thing. I am working from the original blueprints to get accurate dimensions - and that is what I use in the CAD model. And it is a CAD model - based entirely upon dimensions accurate to a fraction of an inch that were used to build the original ship - and not a rendering program model that is just made to look something like the original.

But I have many hundreds of photos of the Oklahoma City CLG-5 and I know that some of it just wasn't built like the blueprints show. This is true of all the CLGs, and of the Cleveland class ships in general (and probably all other ships).

In one case (the navigation light mast above the bridge) it is impossible to build it as the blueprints show. I know, because I tried to build it in my CAD model, and I found it had diagonal support pipes running through horizontal foot support pipes. I looked at photos to see how the shipyard solved this problem by modifying the way the diagonals attached to the mast.

Shipyards had their ways of doing things and often changed the drawings to suit their whims. So ships of the same class that were built in different yards are often different in the small details, and sometimes in big ways. For example, the gusset plates in the "X" diagonals on the after radar tower are like the blueprints on the Galveston CLG-3 and Little Rock CLG-4, but very different on the Oklahoma City CLG-5. I have poured over hundreds of photos for the last 10 years looking at the small details trying to determine the exact configuration for July 1971, the period that I am modeling.

The Little Rock CG-4 museum ship in Buffalo, New York, is still almost the same as the blueprints from the late 1950s and early 60s. It changed very little during its service career. The Oklahoma City was constructed originally almost exactly as a duplicate of the Little Rock. But over the years the OK City was reworked almost continuously and had dozens of major and hundreds of minor changes. Some of these changes are so pronounced that I can just look at a photo and tell you when it was made within a year or two, and sometimes to within a few days. I have about a dozen pages of modifications that I have noted during its 19 year CLG/CG career, another list of differences among the CLGs, and a long list of differences in all of the original Cleveland class ships.

When you talk about accuracy in ship plans you have to specify a specific ship and the year, month and day that you are concerned with because no two ships were built exactly alike and ships change with time.

I have seen many of the drawings for the CLGs that are on the Internet and none are very accurate. Some are totally wrong. One of the line drawings being pedaled for the Oklahoma City has the USS Providence fore tower! They were very little alike. The boat booms are wrong on another.

The biggest problem with ship plans that I have seen is that they are based upon general "sketches" of the ships from the Booklet of General Plans or the ship's blueprint set. These show deck plan views and profile views that were drawn without dimensions. They are just general references to show approximate relationships between parts of the ships. The width of a line on these drawings may be several scale inches wide - you just can't get accurate measurements from these drawings. And they were usually created before the ships were built, so they don't incorporate any of the changes that were made during construction. Even the updated Booklets of General Plans (if they exist) show only the major changes that occurred. If you want accuracy you have to work from the blueprints or the real thing.

Some day, after the 3D CAD model is finished, I want to generate 2D drawings from the 3D model. They may not be perfect, but I can assure you that they will be FAR more accurate than any other drawings that have been produced!

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

Phil

I know exactly what you mean by these words:
Only during a time I served on one ship her appearance changed slightly 3 times


But working with original blueprints is very rare. We mostly use the plans prepared by somebody... Our sources of information are not shipyards' archives but the modelers' magazines. So that an ordinary 3D modeler will from the beginning relay on the inaccurate basis... But taking this limitation into account we still can create fascinating pictures of what we love the most - ships

Cheers

Lothar,

I agree that working from the original blueprints is not very common. Where do you get blueprints for the Santa Maria? And if the drawings once existed they may no longer be around. Look at the discussions about WWII Japanese ships. Only a few of those blueprints exist that I am aware of. I guess most were destroyed at the end of the war.

Often a best guess is all that is possible.

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

Lothar,

I have been thinking about your "accuracy" question. In my model I am using the blueprints as much as possible, but there are a lot of items that were added after the prints were made, and I don't have drawings for everything.

I use "photoguesstimation" for a lot of things, working from photographs. I pick objects in the photos of known dimensions (from blueprints or actual measurements) and use these as references for determining the dimensions of other nearby objects. I use separate horizontal and vertical references to compensate for photo angle and perspective distortions in the pictures.

I initially did this for dimensions of the AN/SPG-49 tracking radar antenna, for which I gave been unable to find drawings. Then I visited the USS Little Rock museum ship in Buffalo, NY, and actually measured parts of the antennas. I was pleasantly surprised to find that some of my earlier photoguesstimations were within 1% of the actual dimensions, and all were within 5%! That was better than I expected.

When I take photos of objects I place paper rulers on the objects so I have a size reference in the photo.

You can make pretty accurate models working just from photos of you have a few known dimensions for reference. For example, on many ships the US Navy used a standard life railing spacing of 12"-15"-15" (bottom to top) between horizontal pipes, so you can use the 15" vertical spacing between the top two pipes as a size reference. But not all life rails used these dimensions, so it is good to have another reference to double check.

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

I have started on the forward superstructure - the last major part of the ship. But first I wanted to finish the forward radar tower. This is the very first part of the ship that I drew in CAD, so I could determine the lengths of all the tubes (the tower sides are angled, so you can't determine the actual lengths from the 2D blueprints).

Since I first drew it in 2008 I have become better at using the program and I have changed the way I draw things. So I have redrawn almost all of it.

The image shows only part of the tower. It is a maze of tubes, pipes, cables, spars, platforms, etc. There are 49 different antennas on the tower! Right now I am adding the wave guides for all of the radars, ECM antennas, etc. After that there will be a bazillion cables connecting all of those antennas and lights to the ship below.

To be continued ...

Phil

_________________
A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

Phil!

Once more - chapeau bas

Zdzislaw

Well, I have finally finished the forward radar tower. At least it is almost finished - I am always discovering something new as I look at photos so who knows what will come up next?

The original 2008 drawing was done from blueprints and some fuzzy photos. Since then I have discovered high resolution images that show a lot more detail. Some things, like the water washdown system, weren't constructed the way the blueprints showed them. This was obvious from the high res photos. The rats nest of wiring was done almost entirely from the new pictures. Each antenna had from one to four cables, and there are a lot of antennas! I have data sheets for most of the antennas and they tell the cable sizes and numbers.

There are 46 antennas on the tower and the ECM shack. I found drawings and photos of most of the antennas, tuners and antenna couplers, and even things like insulators and antenna switches, so most of these models are pretty accurate - down to the pressure gauge on the TN-229/SRT tuner! However, while looking at the new photos I discovered yet another antenna, and I haven't figured out what it is yet - so there is a bit more work to do.

The OK City had the most extensive electronics intelligence and countermeasures of the CLGs - equal to or better than most other ships. The antennas on the "cloverleaf" half way up the tower were mostly ECM, and the framework hanging off the sides of the O6 level ECM shack (the wide compartment at the base of the tower) carried more antennas. The "spooks" recorded and cataloged every radio and radar transmission they detected as we passed down the coasts of Korea, China and Viet Nam, and could identify each by their unique "fingerprints." This gave a good estimate of the capabilities of their weapons and surveillance systems. It also helped us track North Vietnamese radars so we could fire TALOS ARM (anti-radiation) missiles at them.

They could also detect whenever a jet engine started up on North Vietnamese airfields using the then top secret jet engine modulation of RF signals. We often knew a MiG was taking off before it's wheels left the ground. Some of the ECM gear was able to take control of enemy anti-ship missiles and make them fly over us. Some of it detected Soviet IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) signals and allowed us to interrogate North Vietnamese aircraft and have them tell us where they were. It was pretty advanced technology for the 1970s.

Here are some images showing a lot of this detail. The forward tower is the single most complex part of the model, and I am glad to finally have it (almost) done. The file is 51 megabytes with 177,506 objects and 1,299,808 points. I need to redo the AN/SPS-43 air search radar - I have much better data and photos to work from now. And then I'll finish the forward superstructure - a fairly simple task. Then all that is left is to add life lines and the wooden deck to the hull, and put all of the pieces together for a family portrait! Maybe sometime before the end of this decade!

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

Does anyone know what this antenna is? It was common on cruisers, DLGs and other ships in the 70s. It was on the top platform of the forward radar tower on the OK City. I only discovered it recently while looking ay some photos. Most pictures are from a distance and it is obscured by the AN/SPS-43 radar base in most photos. I think it was added about the same time the AN/SPS-30 was installed on the after radar tower in 1963.

I would like to know the antenna name/designation, dimensions (it is about 5 feet tall), frequencies and what it was used for.

Thanks.

Phil

_________________
A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

This is beautiful. Not to mention worth a pretty penny of work.

I did have a couple of questions:

What program are you working in?

Is this solid-modeling? Or Polygonal?

I have been wondering, I have done some Solid-Modeling, although until recently lacked a program to use to do any work. I have done a lot of polygonal modeling though (for animation - organic, human characters mostly, but also props and set-pieces. I plan to do some ships, soon, hopefully), and it is very different in scope from Solid Modeling (For game or animation, having only quads is important, and the use of n-gons or triads that will often turn up in structural models is "frowned upon"), what sort of topology you get in modeling structures like these.

I typically use things like Maya, or Silo for Polygonal Modeling.

I used to have a copy of AutoCAD, but lost the use of it with the job I had which required it. I have since found a program called ViaCAD that is pretty effective (I plan to do some WWII 1/700 ships to get 3D printed).

MB

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OMG LOOK! A signature

Working on:


1/700 (All Fall 1942):
HIJMS Nagara
HIJMS Aoba & Kinugasa
USS San Francisco
USS Helena
USS St. Louis
USS Laffey & Farenholt
HIJMS Sub-Chasers No. 4 - 7
HIJMS Sub-Chasers No. 13 - 16

Matthew,

I use the program DesignCAD 3D Max (not to be confused with the program 3D Max).

http://www.imsidesign.com/Products/DesignCAD

It costs $99, with new version updates for about half that. It has the hands-down best user interface I have seen. You can create your own custom menus and tool boxes, and it has a Basic-like macro programming language to let you create your own custom commands. One of the best features of the program is almost complete backward compatibility with earlier versions. I can still open and edit files I created more than 25 years ago. So you don't need to get every update. You can get a free complete full-featured trial version that will run for one month.

For the money you can't beat it! As you can see from my work it is a complete 3D CAD package. It is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get program. Drawings are made up of individual static elements (lines, planes, solids, etc.). It is not a parametric program where the displayed objects are dynamic temporary virtual objects created by mathematically combining guide surfaces. In other words, it works pretty much like AutoCRUD, SketchUP, and most other CAD programs. You can create true solids (completely closed entities), polygonal surfaces, or a combination of both - and it is also a complete 2D drafting program.

The user forum is free (you don't have to own the program) and is one of the best. The program is used world wide and there are some very experienced users who check in daily to answer questions from new users. You have direct access to the programming team.

http://forum.designcadcommunity.com/

A new version comes out at least every year, with several minor free upgrades yearly ( I am a beta tester for new versions). New versions include user suggested changes and additions, bug fixes, and new features. Version 25.0 has just been released. It includes major improvements: a 64 bit version (faster, allows you to create larger files), OBJ import/export, STL import/export, SketchUp export and a few other enhancements. It is an excellent low cost program to generate objects for a 3D printer.

The program is undergoing some major improvements with the addition of the RedSDK display package. When this change over is complete we should have photorealistic rendering.

I have been using the program since 1987. We replaced AutoCRUD with it at work back then, and we have been using it ever since.

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

I have finished the AN/SPS-43 air search radar antenna. My first attempt was back in 2005, working from a few fuzzy low resolution photos. It wasn't very accurate. Since then I have obtained several high resolution pictures and a basic data sheet with dimensions. This version is pretty accurate.

The waveguide plumbing was tricky. I had to examine several photos taken from different angles to figure out all of the angles and sections. By using different lengths and diameters of waveguide the same amount of energy went to all ten sets of radiating elements. The received signals from all elements were combined in the waveguides to produce a single return pulse.

This completes the forward radar tower. Now I can continue with the forward superstructure - it is much simpler than the midships and after superstructures.

Phil

_________________
A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

Here are some pictures of the fore top with the new AN/SPS-43 antenna in place.

Phil

_________________
A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle