Russian Battleship Tsesarevich

All modelling in the War Room is in character.

Things have been a bit quiet on the modelling front of late.  I got married, which meant I had to have a honeymoon with almost no modelling.  While in Access Models the following week (Newark-on-Trent), I was overcome with another mad impulse to buy an expensive and complicated kit with a view to creating a diorama.

I've had a strange relationship with model kits.  It's how I got into wargaming originally, and I had an extensive collection of 1:35 tanks at one stage.  However, I lack the patience to do the really fine detail kits.  A few years back I bought a U-boat kit, and turned it into a pretty simple diorama of which I'm very proud, but that's about it.

This kit comes off the back of a long-standing interest with the Imperial Russian Navy, fed by my regular games on World of Warships and our recent Russo-Japanese War Supercampaign with Paul.  I'm only really interested in the pre-Dreadnought era, so the 1899 battleship Tsesarevich (Crown Prince) was a great find in 1:350 - usually quite an obscure ship.



This kit was hard.

I've some experience of these sorts of things, but this was something else entirely.  It was somewhat simplified by my decision, as with the U-boat, to cut round the hull at the waterline so it looks as if it's floating in water.  I feel very strongly that to see them hanging in the air on a stand, keel and all, is distinctly unnatural and somewhat rude.  Like accidentally catching a glimpse of a lady's legs if her skirt was caught in a gust of wind (an odd choice of metaphor, on reflection - I won't delve too deeply into that).

Most of the detail is in photo-etched parts, which have to be painstakingly removed and bent into shape manually.  The photos look okay at a glance, but if you were merciless enough to scrutinise them, you'll notice plenty of 'near enoughs' and bodge jobs.  I would estimate that I lost about a third of the photo-etched parts, mostly bent irretrievably in cutting them from the very tight sprue.

I would estimate that about ten or twelve hours went into this.  I plan to do a simple paint job, then create a small sea for it to float on and use some wire wool smoke (and possibly object source lighting) to create the effect of a broadside.

Anyway, enjoy the pictures!

Ed

Very pleased with the overall effect; it's a nice kit, with lots of detail.

Those bloody railings!

This is a decent picture - nothing too noticeable went wrong here.  The ladders look great - because they were smaller, that actually made them a bit more resilient, unlike the railings winch were thin and spaced out, so they bent easily.

You can see how difficult it was to get the brass railings into position - and also how hard it was to persuade the boats to sit still!  Eagle-eyed naval architects will spot a loadbearing cocktail stick in there somewhere...