Riverine Aircraft Carrier, 1/700

[vladimir yakubov]

During the Russian Civil War a lot of combat happened along the major rivers, in particular Volga river. Since the area didn't have a lot of the infrastructure the river provided the best avenue for transporting supplies and troops so the combat along the river was pretty ferocious. Both sides used various converted warships, but the most interesting of them were riverine aircraft carriers which were basically oil barges converted to carry and support aircraft, usually hydroplanes but sometimes land aircraft as well (land aircraft of course couldn't operate from the barges themselves but where put ashore at a convenient field and operated from there).

I've decided to build a air barge used by the Reds which was called Kommuna, as it is the only one on which enough information is available.


as I did on my previous scratchbuild of monitor Udarnyj viewtopic.php?f=13&t=34939, I laminated the scaled down plan on a piece of plastic and then after impregnating it with superglue I lightly sanded it to get it smooth and laminated the necessary thickness of plastic on the bottom.

After that I started adding details, of which there weren't a lot:




Since the barge didn't have an engine I decided to scratchbuild a tugboat for it. There isn't a lot of the information available on the tugboats used on the Volga river at that time sot I decided to build a generic one basing my information on one for which the information is available - a gunboat Vanya-Kommunist which was a converted tugboat.


The tugboat was build using the same principles as the barge:





That's it for now, ahead is the fun of scratchbuilding four Grigorovich M-9 biplanes .

Vladimir

[Dave Wooley]

Hi Vladimir This is an really interesting subject and one that is almost unknown . I note that Jurg Meister in his book "Soviet Warships of WW2" makes mention of similar Volga paddle tugs converted to auxiliary gunboats during WW2 the "Gromov" and "Usyskin" .
Dave Wooley

[JIM BAUMANN]

Certainly a very different subject-- and a vessel that deserves to be modelled!!

JIM B

[MichelB]

Impressive, I saw this craft in Breyer's Soviet shipbuilding and was immidiatly intrigued by it! I toyed with the idea of scratching her myself, but others were more 'persuasive'.

Sharp build, and the paddlewheel tug too!

[JWintjes]

Very impressive! With me it's the same as with Michel, I saw it in the Breyer as well and have pondered building it every now and then. I'll definitely pay close attention to this one - and the idea with the paddlewheeler is most excellent!

Jorit

[vladimir yakubov]

Thanks.

Small update today. I'm on vacation right now but here is what I finished before leaving - a Grigirovich M-9 hydroplane (on a 5 cent coin):



I still need to build the hardest part the struts that hold the upper wing...

Vladimir