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Old 10-29-2013, 07:01 PM
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USS Wichita CA 45

The Wichita was a breakthrough design of heavy cruisers. She shared a similar hull design with the Brooklyn class of lt cruisers. The Wichita carried 9 8" main guns that were prototypes for the Baltimore class that was the penultimate US heavy cruiser class of the war. This is the 1930s as built version carrying 9 8" main guns, 8 5 " secondary guns and 8 50 cal water-cooled mgs for air defense. I started with the hull, and as usual is a waterline kit. My design process is 2d CAD on paint shop pro 10. I scanned in a line drawing of the ship, traced over the main longitudinal came up with a best guess base plate and sort of simplified the hull shape. The actual ship has a slight tumblehome amidships but in 1/400 scale this was barely noticeable so I kept it vertical. The deck is left natural wood and deck gray metal until the 40s when the decks would be a shade of blue. here is the prelim hull shapes with deck dry fitted...
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Old 10-29-2013, 07:06 PM
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The hull is @ 1/700 scale and will have to be enlarged. Next to the hull is the uppermost bridge deck structure the main gun and 5" gun directors and the range finder. These parts are 1/400 scale. Also in the set are a repaint of the old JSC Indianapolis in 1/400 for comparison.
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Old 11-07-2013, 04:13 PM
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trudging along

there are a quite a few factors to papermodel designing. factors such as scaling, build ability vs rivet count accurate. color is always a pain in the behind. I've been experimenting with the old canon pixma 400, and deck colors. as this is prewar, before paint "measures" the Wichita will be navy gray. in most of the black and white photos this shows up as white. the actual rgb values on my printer render the model a pale blue, almost the hue I would want for early sea blue for say the midway colored enterprise. I took a different approach and color sampled finished plastic kits at steel navy and kinda averaged them out. still has a little blue in it but better.
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Old 11-07-2013, 06:16 PM
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the color of wood

the next hurdle is the decking. us ships before the war had natural teak wood decks. originally I tried to make close to scale planking but the result was too small to see and everything blurred sort of. this is one of the scale modelers problems of the right number of rivets or planks or what can be seen and looks good. the human eye brain connection is pretty cool at times. it fills in blanks and smooth things out. this is why impressionism works. so anyhows I spread out the planks and tried a variety of colors...
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Old 11-07-2013, 06:20 PM
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and the winner is...

the top left won out. faded not too busy and looks right...
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Old 11-07-2013, 06:42 PM
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basic structure

here are the prelim full sized formers. the test hull is in the background...
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Old 11-07-2013, 07:02 PM
RAFleischman RAFleischman is offline
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Great stuff CMDRTED! I'm really enjoying this thread.

russ...
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Old 11-07-2013, 08:38 PM
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Looks like your project is coming right along there CMDRTED, nice work. I am looking forward to more as you get it built up.
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Old 11-07-2013, 09:27 PM
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Nice work, Ted.

Don
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Old 11-07-2013, 10:48 PM
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Looks good. Looking forward to the build.
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