1/350 HMS Imperial D09

[Courageous]

Looking very nice Jamie. I think the seascape looks much better away from the bright sunlight 

 

Stuart

[robgizlu]

Grand job

Rob

[Bugle07]

Excellent stuff! Are you going to put crew on her?

 

Geoff 

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

It's too late and dark for taking photographs but Imperial is now rigged and close to being finished.

 

 

The plan is indeed to get some crew members on her. A basic watch at least - a few guys on the bridge and AA gunners.

[stevehnz]

That looks quite wonderful Jamie, your seascape is very convincing & Imperial looks superb under that scheme. Am I right in thinking 8 x .5 Vickers were all she had as short range AA, hell, their Lordships sure knew the meaning of parsimony.

Steve

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

13 minutes ago, stevehnz said:

That looks quite wonderful Jamie, your seascape is very convincing & Imperial looks superb under that scheme. Am I right in thinking 8 x .5 Vickers were all she had as short range AA, hell, their Lordships sure knew the meaning of parsimony.

Steve

 

Hi Steve,

 

That's right. Hardly adequate and this seems to have been learned relatively slowly by the RN. By 1942 more sensible AA fits are de rigour. They even had to cut down the aft funnels on many destroyer types as a wartime modification to allow them to actually use the existing AA weapons.

 

But, it's very much the case that the role of the navy and the pecking order of different ship classes in a war context evolved rapidly and indeed the role of thr destroyer changed drastically too.

 

The fact is that the old men at the Admiralty (and running other navies) were perpetually a quarter century out of date in their thinking and they didn't take aeroplanes seriously until after a few bloodied noses to prove it wasn't a fluke.

 

The destroyer was more fully a "Torpedo Boat Destroyer", itself a reaction to the emergence of the Torpedo Boat which was a late 19th century French idea to threaten British ironclad battleships in recognition that they could never match Britain's industrial might.

 

The Torpedo Boat Destroyer and all their tactical doctrine was designed around screening battleships from torpedo boats and then from mines and submarines. The whole concept of the small calibre Quick Firing (QF) guns on destroyers with their self container pre-loaded shell cartidges was about rapid fire against fast moving boats and indeed the Vickers 0.5in Quads were secondary weapons against same.

 

The dominant navies at the outset of WW2 seemed pretty slow on the uptake in realising that a major new thread to battleships came from the sky. Perhaps less so with the underdog / enemy navies as they weren't dominant and needed to press an advantage beyond maintaining a status quo.

[beefy66]

Well I hope i just get somewhere near the skill level displayed in this build great stuff  👍

 

Keith

[Ex-FAAWAFU]

Exceptional result.  Really nicely done, Jamie

[Bugle07]

That's some fine rigging there Jamie (tis late couldn't resist, I'll get me ) and a good summary on Destroyers, doctrine and armaments. 

 

Geoff

[Modelholic]

I've always assumed (yes, I know) that the camouflage pattern would extend to the railings. in other words would be the same colour as the structure behind it?

Tom

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

On 9/6/2018 at 12:47 AM, Modelholic said:

I've always assumed (yes, I know) that the camouflage pattern would extend to the railings. in other words would be the same colour as the structure behind it?

Tom

Hi Tom,

 

Strictly speaking they might be (but not always), and I might. The thing is that the railings are a compromise in that the real ones are narrow poles for stanchions and those are painted but the horizontals are wire/cable and not painted. As such the railings are always over scale. From some angles dark railings can look much too prominent and from other angles light ones do!

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

Linking RFI here so I can link externally to the WIP (I realise this is months old now):

https://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/235043199-1350-hms-imperial-d09/

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

Hi folks,

Firstly, Steve, I somehow missed this but the name plaque would be great. I have something else to run by you so shall get in touch separately...

Right. After a number of years on the lookout for photographs of HMS Imperial during wartime, when my great uncle was aboard, I found the single one earlier in the thread of Imperial damaged after striking a mine. My father recalls Alec telling him about that incident so with nothing more than a distant image, I did my best.

 

Not long after finishing the model @dickrd stumbled across a collection of high quality close-ups of the stern area in a damage report file in The National Archives. Needless to say, there are some differences and once seen, never unseen and all that. I always intended to fix the model but struggled with a mental block as far as actually damaging it in order to remodel it went!

I've finally made a start though.

 

First of all the rigging was cut.

 

The tripod mainmast I made has been unmade.

 

The stern end was subject to the photographs as the mine fractured both propeller shaft A-frame brackets and buckled the whole stern upwards damaging deck plating, the side plating and stoving in the keel plating right to the very stern. The photographs show the stern from a number of angles above and below and from these it's possible to see that there's no mainmast but also that the camouflage pattern was a bit more wavy here, terminating on the quarters to display the pendant number on a field of 507C right at the stern. There was also camouflage on Y position gun shield but apparently not X gun.

 

Atlantic Models pendant number decals

 

Some masking of the boot topping since I am not very precise with a brush and this is absolutely not the optimal order in which to build, paint, and embed a model ship in a sea base!

 

 

Lastly, there's a new stub mast fitted to the back of the searchlight platform as other I-class seem to have been modified to.

 

I still need to reattach the rigging to it.

Other I-class destroyers also had their aft funnel cut down (I went out of my way to extend this one ) but in the towing photograph the aft funnel still looks equal height to me?

 

Cutting it down will need re-rigging again and I hate funnel stays so I'll leave that for the time being.

 

Lastly other I-class destroyers had one of the pentad torpedo tube mounts removed and the remainder had its centre tube removed. I haven't touched this yet.