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Mchale, the approach I'm going to take is to make each leg of the tripod as a continuous cylinder extending from the command level deck up to the bottom of the fire control structures. In the late-war version of the Texas (which your picture illustrates), all three of the tripod legs penetrate through the signal bridge, enclosed navagation level, and flag decks. In earlier configurations (late 1920s), there was no flag deck and the navagation deck wasn't enclosed, just had railings around it. The version I intend to try modelling is how it appeared at the end of WWII. Only the forward leg of the tripod penetrate the enclosed structures of the signal bridge, navigation level, and flag bridge; the two after legs of the tripod only penetrate through the decks at those levels. At this point, my thoughts for making the structure are to butt the forward tripod leg to the deck of the command level and to the lower deck of the fire control structures, with holes appropriately located in the overheads and decks of the signal bridge, navigation level, and flag bridge for the tripod legs. I intend building the tower structure around the forward tripod leg, starting with the signal bridge and working upward. When that is done, I will thread the after legs through the holes in the decks of the various levels and glue them in place, then glue the entire structure to the command level deck. I am thinking of making the aft legs long enough to penetrate through holes in the fire control deck and command level decks rather than butting against them...that way, I won't have to worry about sculpting the ends of those legs to accommodate the compound angle they make with those decks....that will also allow me to fine tune the alignment of the structure before gluing it in place. If it is specifically the Texas you want to model, I suggest you run to Amazon.com and purchase a copy of "Warship Pictorial No. 4, USS Texas BB-35." When I bought my used copy from them last week, they still had several copies available at reasonable (around $5) price....and the booklet includes some very good scale drawings of the various deck levels, clearly showing the tripod locations, which should make the design process considerably easier. Hope this helps.
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It's not good to have too much order. Without some chaos, there is no room for new things to grow.
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05-31-2010, 10:54 AM
Linear Mode
