Chewbacca

No, the seaboat would usually be left uncovered regardless (and at this point I am sure that someone will find a photo to disprove that!). To be honest, if the weather is that bad, there's a significant risk of losing the covers anyway.

Some simply superb work going on here David. I've seen less detail in injection moulded 1/72 aircraft that you are including in these. I remember having a similar conversation with my Captain in HMS BRAVE once who by his own admission hated WAFUs and thought he could fight the ship without us. I got slightly irritated by that, as one might expect, asked him what weapon system he had that could go over 100 nm and then described Exocet as point defence! Good luck with the house sale/move.

Warships don't carry lifeboats, Their boats are working boats and each will have its own functions. The only boat used for lifesaving is known as the seaboat which in WW2 would usually be a 27 ft Montagu whaler in anything Destroyer sized or above. Later during the Cold War that was phased out and replaced with a 27 ft motor whaler and more recently a 7 or 8 m RIB. The seaboat is always left uncovered at sea and available for immediate use; all other boats would usually be covered at sea. The other thing to note about the seaboat is that when rigged for use, there will be a long rope known as the boatrope that is rigged from its bow to a position well forward on the mother ship. Its purpose is to hold the bow close in to the ship to prevent broaching until the crew have released the falls and are ready to pull away. It's always the last connection to be released and the first to be made when the boat returns. Some seriously good conversion/detailing work going on here. Love the way that you've done the seascape. I do not know how you managed to make the anchor cable and only lose 1 or 2 of the 8mm shackles. I would have had them pinging all over the place and I don't think I would even have tried with the 6mm!

I know a lot of maritime modellers do so it this way and put everything together - including PE - and then mask/spray. Personally I've never managed to get on with that technique and just spray the hull/main superstructure then paint everything else off the model and add them ready painted. The downside of that is that you do get areas where the CA discolours the base coat but I've always found a coupled of coast of varnish at the end brings it all back together. Interesting model though. I've always been fascinated by the concept of the monitors.

Note to self. Halfords acrylic primer and polystyrene foam don't mix! I've finished all of the ancillary 3D printing and got them ready for priming so I thought I would prime the base at the same time. Despite the fact that it's acrylic, there's obviously some solvent in the Halford rattle can primer that reacts with the foam because it started dissolving before my very eyes. Back to the drawing board...

John, I'm both a former naval aviator and Head of Operations at Naval Recruiting so I've seen it from both sides of the fence. I fully accept that I left the Navy nearly 10 years ago and things have moved on but I am surprised to hear them say there are no vacancies in the Pilot Flying Training Pipeline for the foreseeable future. I know that since F35 came in, the number of people applying to become Pilots has gone up but I'd be surprised if they have several years waiting. Please remember that you don't join the Navy to fly jets. You join the Navy to fly; what you are streamed depends upon the student pilot's ability as he/she progresses through training and how the gains to the trained strength are at the time. By way of example, when I was at Naval Recruiting, we had two strong Pilot candidates fail quite early on Basic Flying Training, so we could see that there would be a hole moving forward. At the time, we had two Observers who had just completed 750 Squadron and were outstanding in mental capacity - the single biggest discriminator in those days between Harrier or rotary wing streaming. And so we asked them if they'd like to restream FJ Pilot. The proviso was that if they made it through to graduation on Harrier that was fine but if they failed at any point they would not be restreamed rotary but would return to Observer training. I would strongly counsel to not join the RAF if your son wants to join the Fleet Air Arm. My experience is that they make life as difficult as possible and will put up as many barriers as possible to stop that. If all he wants to do is fly, then the RAF can obviously offer more opportunities than the FAA because they have more aircraft and more aircraft types, but only a small percentage stream fast jets. One option that he could discuss with his ACLO is whether the route that I took is still open to him. I joined as a Warfare Officer and spent the first four years of my career driving warships around before specialising in aviation. I have a feeling, however, that that option has recently been closed. The other thing I would suggest is to get him to consider Observer. It doesn't have the "Maverick" cachet to it but without the Observer, a Merlin or Wildcat is just a few tons of metal that can fly from A to B and not do anything en-route. It's the Observer who turns the platform into a world-class fighting machine.

Those shapes are clearly not being displayed forward; equally she's not at anchor in any of these photos. But under the current rules, NUC doesn't include when being towed. Rule 24 states: (e) A vessel or object being towed, other that those mentioned in paragraph (g) of this Rule, shall exhibit: (i) sidelights; (ii) a sternlight; (iii) when the length of the tow exceeds 200 m, a diamond shape where it can best be seen. Para (g) refers to "inconspicuous, partly submerged vessel or object". I don't think anyone could refer to WARSPITE as inconspicuous or partly submerged (at least not until she got to Prussia Cove!). I do concede that the 1937 rules may have required NUC shapes when being towed where the 972 rules do not. Clearly there are some differences between the shapes in the 1937 and 1972 regs because otherwise why is she showing the inverted cones in the second block of photos which under the current rules indicate a fishing vessel?

You might not want to wait that long if you need anything that is not available in UK. My experience of trying to order wooden decks from China was that delivery time were being quoted as 4-6 months. Now I'm sure that that was a couple of isolated cases, but it's worth researching first to make sure that you can get what you need. And there speaks the person who hasn't even decided what to do for the SSD GB!

Just curious, which particular Gulf deployment was that? I was in BRAVE which deployed with BRILLIANT in 91.

I still have plans to convert the Airfix Lusty to ARK V as she was when she initially came out of build on contractors sea trials when I was OOW1 and when our air group consisted of a Swordfish!

Thanks everyone for your replies and my apologies for not responding sooner. In the end I did pay a visit to Harrogate Models and while they had some interesting offerings there was nothing - other than 3 pots of Tamiya acrylics - that was a strong enough pull to help relieve me of my hard earned!

Good book. The scary thing to me though when reading these WW2 autobiographies, as someone who went through naval flying training in more recent years, is how many students were killed in training. Back in the 80s and 90s, we might have lost 1 or 2 per annum across the whole of the Fleet Air Arm, Army Air Corps and RAF flying training pipelines. In the 1940s it was often 2-3 per course.

And so the answer to "how much of this will print in 1/600" is not that much! So all of the CAD is now complete, including 3 tugs, 3 PAS boats, the dockside buildings and a few vehicles and the prints have been, well, shall we say mixed. Some like the tug hulls seen below aren't too bad, but others like the larger PAS boat, one of the buildings and some of the smaller deck fittings for the tugs have been challenging. I'm now on the 4th (I think) print run though in fairness the print bed wasn't big enough to print them all in one go anyway so even if everything had printed successfully on the first run, it would have taken a minimum of two. Assuming that this does finally give me the remaining bits I need, next job after everything has fully cured is to clean off most of the supports and get some primer on them to see if any filler or adjustment is needed (the bulwark on one of the Dog class at least needs modifying as it has slightly warped as you can see in the photo above). I have set myself a challenge that this must be compete by 6 Jan in time to start the Salty Sea Dog Group Build on 7 Jan. Anyone else joining me in that? No idea yet what I plan to do. The original plan was to make the "F.B.I." (the "Flippin' Big Indian", my Lynx from HMS BRAVE using either the Airfix 1/48 kit or the Revell 1/32 as a base but now that there's a FAA GB later in the year, I'm going to hold that back and do something that was planned to float for SSD. I'm thinking possibly an Atlantic Models 1/350 Type 42 as HMS GLASGOW but knowing how long it took to do PUMA, I am concerned that 4 months won't be long enough. Thanks for watching.

The definitive list that I generally use for RN WW2 radars is here: https://www.rnradioandradar.co.uk/radars/radarmatrix.htm and this also makes no reference to a Type 265

The other thing to remember is that of course the paint on the lugless joining shackles and individual marker shackles either side of them very quickly wore off when you dropped/weighed anchor so it was the job of some poor soul in the cable party to repaint each as it was being weighed with the cable still moving. It was very rough and ready! Shackles, as terms of length of cable in the Royal Navy changed. Prior to 1949 (according to my 1967 Admiralty Manual of Seamanship), a shackle was 12.5 fathoms. Post 1949 it is 15 fathoms.

Current regulations date from 1972. The regulations in force in 1947 would have been the 1929 SOLAS convention which I cannot find anywhere on line. I do have a copy of my father's Sea Cadet handbook dating from about 1937/38 and the limited subset of rules given in there are broadly similar to the 1972 regulations but there's nothing in that book about anchor shapes or lights. Maybe it is just me, but whilst I find those photos historically very interesting, at the same time I think they're really rather sad.

I've only just caught up with this build after a few months and your work is exquisite as always. It is an inspiration to us all. And I therefore hate to say this four months down the line, but whilst you are absolutely right in that the hawsepipe is too high in the kit, as far as I can tell, it is not fully open thwartships but has cutouts either side for the anchor flukes which the kit portrays but your modified versions appears not to do. It may be that with the anchor in place you can't see it because I fear it may be too late to rectify.

Ah, understood. ASW helicopter aircrew are known as pingers today for that reason. Sonar operators are known as "TAS Apes"; I've never heard anyone simply called a "ping" but it mkes sense - language changes. Interestingly, I'd never even considered that cruisers would have been fitted with sonar/ASDIC and there are very few references to it but Watton (HMS BELFAST - Anatomy of a Ship) and Wingate (HMS BELFAST 1939-72) both refer to BELFAST having Type 132 ASDIC in 1939 so I guess it was also fitted to other Town class.

Thanks. You must forgive my ignorance but I assume "ping" has auto-corrected from something but for the life of me I cannot work out what it is!

As we used to say in my flying days, they're all just targets! Seriously, the Churchill class had a very pronounced humpback shaped hull whereas the later Swiftsure and Trafalgar classes had/have a much flatter casing top.

From my recollection when I was working on the Merlin HM1-2 and HC3/3A update s 10 years ago, the Airfix kit portrays the RAF HC3. When they were transferred to the RN in around 2013 to replace the HC4 Sea Kings, they just repainted them and carried on operating them as they were, so that would be the simplest conversion just needing a new set of decals. Over the next 5 or so years, they redesigned them with folding rotor heads and tail pylons to create the Mk 4/4A (the A variants were originally ordered by Denmark and had a different sensor fit but the UK MOD acquired them at the height of Op Herrick to fill a need for more battlefield helicopters). The HM1 and 2 are the ASW variants and have a very different fuselage rear end without the ramp which I suspect would be a challenging conversion. Externally there are few differences between an HM1 and 2; the major differences were internal (glass cockpit, completely new Observer/Aircrewman console etc). I seem to recall that Italeri did a 1/72 HM1 As far as I know, there is no kit of a Wildcat yet. I know that some have converted the Lynx to a Wildcat and although on paper it looks fairly simple, as the Deputy Chief Test Pilot at Westlands once told me, there are only about 6 panels that are common to both aircraft! The Airfix Lynx HMA 8 in 1/48 is a pretty good kit I understand and is now readily available having been recently re-released. The Revell 1/32 HAS 3 is also supposed to be reasonable and you can pick them up quite cheap at shows or on the internet. However, be aware that there were multiple different mod states for the Lynx (HAS 2, HAS 3, HAS 3GM, HAS 3S, HAS 3SGM, HAS 3 ICE) and it is important to do your research as there was almost nothing like a "standard" Lynx. If you've got the Sea King HAR 3 the easiest FAA conversion is probably the HAS 2 from the 1970s. The HAS 5/6 needs the larger Sea Searcher radome. Airfix also do a 1/72 HC4 and AEW Mk 7 which are relatively new tools and I'm told are pretty good. According to Scalemates, Hasegawa do a HAR5 and AEW Mk 2 in 1/48 but I've never seen either of them. Italeri do all 3 variants of the FAA Wessex in 1/48, HAS 1, HAS 3 and HU5. If you can get it, there is the very aged Fujimi Wasp in allegedly 1/48 but I believe its closer to 1/50. Do not underestimate the amount of work needed to turn this into anything vaguely half decent! It took me over a year and I suggest it would be challenging to do in the timescale of a GB. I reckon I kept the (modified) fuselage, the canopy transparency, the wheels and the tail/main rotor blades though the latter were heavily thinned down and probably needed a lot more thinning. My WIP is here: There are lots of WIPs on BM by people who have converted the Airfix 1/72 Scout to a Wasp and again, it's not a straightforward conversion. I'm afraid I don't enough about the Whirlwind or Dragonfly to comment. Hope that helps

I'm so glad this doesn't clash with the Salty Sea Dog. I'm thinking possibly the Lynx in my avatar, XZ733 BRAVE Flight, Feb 1991 Either in 1/32 from the Revell kit or converting the 1/48 Lynx HMA 8. Anyone know if you can still get the HMA 8 to HAS 3 resin conversion kit? I remember seeing it at a show a few years back and wishing that I'd bought it.

Glad this has made it but a later start might have suited me better. Have to make sure I finish the HMS LONDONDERRY alongside in Gibraltar diorama over Christmas then. Currently 3D drawing the associated tugs. No idea what I will do but since almost everything in my stash is RN/FAA, there's a lot of choice. Given that the FAA GB is also over the line, I think I might hang back on the 1/48 or 1/32 Lynx HAS 3 that I originally considered to represent one of the flight aircraft that I flew. So I think this will end up being one of His or Her Majesty's war canoes. If I'm sensible and don't try to redesign the whole thing, an Atlantic Models 1/350 HMS ALACRITY or GLASGOW might be do-able in 4 months. At least it's the time of the year when SWMBO won't expect me to tend the garden every weekend!

No work at the bench for the past few days but I have been getting on with the 3D CAD for Agile and that's just about ready now for me to break apart and send the component pieces to the printer. How much of this will actually print given the scale i don;t know. 3D printing in 1/350 is pushing the limits of my printer so 1/600 is going to be a whole new experience! Thanks for watching

Thanks. Vote cast.