The Ship Model Forum

I'm scratch-building an Immigrant ship of the mid to late 1800"s. The ship has considerable curvature to the shear. My question is this: does the slope of the structures above the deck follow the curve of the shear, the waterline or some other reference point? I'm currently in the process of designing the above deck structures and am on hold until I get this issue resolved.
Thanks,
Jim

Is this a sailing vessel, or steamship?

The ship is a 300ft steamship, with auxiliary sails.

Do you have any photo references, or have you Googled similar or generic ship types?

I have found images of the ship and of similar ships using google and bing but have not been able to answer my question. Almost all of the images of ships similar to the one I'm modeling are found on the Norwegian Heritage web site and are very poor, having been taken in late 19th century(can you say tintype). The type of ship I'm modeling probably doesn't have much interest among modelers. The only reason i"m building the ship is my wife's great-grandparents came to the U.S from Denmark on a ship named the S/S Thingvalla, which she found an image of while doing genealogy research, and let it be known she would like a model of it.
Jim

I would say (or guess) that the decks of cabin spaces and structures above the main deck are horizontal, or nearly so.

After further searching I have determined above-deck structures can be both ways, therefore I am going to build the two main single level above-deck houses with their decks parallel to the waterline.
Photographic evidence is not conclusive on this because the photos are so small and too much detail is lost when attempting to enlarge the images. What I realized I could do is measure the rake angle of the stack against the waterline then compare the angle taken from the top of the aft house. The base of the angle appeared to coincide with the top of the aft house, indicating parallelism with the waterline. When I tried this with the shear the angle didn't match. There's more than one way to skin a cat.
A small structure, about 8' x 8', located at the stern, is parallel to the shear, where the shear sweeps up very noticeably, this is confirmed by photographic evidence of the ship.

biggles2, thanks, I appreciate your help regarding this pesky design problem.

Jim

If any help, I've seen pics where the superstructure decks become gradually more horizontal the higher they go, with the bridge/wheelhouse having horizontal deck and roof.