Thursday, January 26, 2012

WIP: The heavy cruisers of the Italian Navy

Just a few more sculpts left for the Regia Marina. Below are WIP pics of the 4 Zara-, 2 Trento- and Bolzano- class heavy cruisers as they appear in/around 1941.
Please note the pack will also include 16 of the scout plane IMAM Ro.43
*will be available some time over the weekend (February 11-12, 2012)

Pola

Fiume

Gorizia

Zara

Trento


Trieste

Bolzano (Current WIP)



Extra: Boeing P-26A 
(Note: Render shown for 1/900 scale)

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Break glass in case of emergency...

Of the prints I received, I'm  bothered by the fact that at least one of the ships has a glassy-smooth half, running lengthwise of the ship. Below are some examples of what I'm talking about:

Dunkerque(left) has her starboard side very smooth, while the other half has that rough texture. Strasbourg to the right, has her deck with the roughish texture (click on the pic to show a larger image; though even at that size it's a bit blurry)

Below is a Littorio-class BB, with a relatively heavy oil wash. Notice the aft area where the wash clung onto the rough areas, leaving the smooth areas clear as-is.

*other/smaller ships are harder to take picture of :/ *


As a test, I'll be using the French light cruiser Emile Bertin, in her pre- and post-US refit appearance. I "sandwiched" them between two plates whose silhouette is like something out of an ONI booklet. The edges extend 0.2mm further to make sure all surfaces of the ships are "evenly rough" once cleaned of support wax.

I removed the longitudinal sprue, the two plates functioning in its' stead. This setup costs us an additional USD0.31 worth of material (correspondingly, the additional cost would be higher or smaller depending on ship size)

Assumed print orientation: from ground-up (or from port side to starboard side)

Émile Bertin (1942, pre-US refit)

Émile Bertin (1943, post-US refit)