I am starting my second entry for the Free Model Contest #5. This time, given there is a three month extension to the contest, I am going entirely out of my comfort zone and am taking on the fantastic railgun model available at
Homepage. My first thought was to make rescale it to 1:87 so it would fit with the Russian railgun I made as my first entry into the contest; however, upon looking at the amount of detail the kit contains, I promptly chickened out and decided it would be enough of a challenge to complete as designed in 1:35 scale. To conserve our bandwidth, I am not going to include an image of the kit cover here. Please visit e63papermodel if you are interested in seeing what it will (hopefully) look like.
To keep Charlie content, the 381/40 cannon was ordered by the Italian government in 1913 to be used on the Francesco Caracciolo class of dreadnoughts. The start of WWI caused cancellation of the battlewagons. The guns were repurposed as seven railguns, some coastal defense batteries, and to arm at least one coastal monitor. The railguns saw service in both WWI and WWII.
The kit has about two dozen pages of construction drawings, and about three dozen parts pages. The parts are black and white, untextured drawings on A4 size paper. The designer (whose name eludes me...senior moment, but he is a member of our forum) left enough margin that most of the parts pages should print out on letter size without problem. The only obvious exception is the curved section of railbed. The straight section of railbed can be fitted onto letter size without having to do much more than changing the paper size in Photoshop. I will be printing the parts pages on gray colored cardstock, so maybe I won't have to do much in the way of painting to finish the model....assuming a successful build.