La Renommèe by Landlubber Mike - Euromodel - Scale 1:70

[piratepete007]

JMartti,

 

You are correct - this is indeed a beautiful ship and the drawings are very detailed. The drawings are sufficient in many details for a scratch build but this whole thing is presented as a 'kit' build and that can cause a few problems and you have highlighted one such area - the stem post. Euromodel supplies a blank that represents the total outline that includes essential components such as the knee of the head (7) and the gammoning knee (5 ?) and it is here that differences in thickness historically did occur. These three detailed drawings are aimed at the scratch builder, not the kit builder.

 

I can see the correlation between the main head drawing and the one on the right and have added some lines (slightly off-set) to show that. The drawing on the right is viewed as from the bow aftwards. It shows an appropriate definite taper downwards and I agree that a taper forwards is also required as many ships did. In this case, as you point out, the figurehead dictates a tapering.

 

The bottom drawing (a top view of the head) may be somewhat historically correct in that it shows a variation in thickness but I suspect that it contains sufficient errors to be ignored, especially for this kit build.

 

Hope that helps.

 

Pete

[JMartti]

Thank you Pete for the detailed explanation. I'm not experienced enough to comment on historical or even the structural correctness of the plans, I just wanted to give my two cents on reading technical drawings. And now that I look at them again, I admit I might have been wrong, the plans might not follow the convention I'm used to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiview_projection under the headlines "Multiviews" and "First-angle projections" illustrate what I was trying to say, but I guess they're drawn using third-angle projection.

 

 

[Landlubber Mike]

My confusion mostly related to the bottom drawing - it seems to have a sharp drop in taper, but maybe that's because where the bottom of the "U" hits (in the middle top portion of piece 7), that area is much thinner than, let's say, the top of part 5.  When I did my stem, I created a gradual taper from the hull to the tend of piece 7.  My guess is that it looked fairly close to the bottom drawing in the end.

[Henke]

First I am sorry for coming late on this post. Anyhow I feel it is of importance for me to post it.

With interest I have read Landlubber Mike's hypothesis that Euromodel’s La Renommée is not depicting the 1744 La Renommée but a much later ship possibly the Swedish frigate Venus designed by the Swedish naval architect Fredrik Henrik Chapman. Venus was launched 1783. La Renommée is on my wish list and if the model is the Swedish frigate Venus it is even more interesting for me since I am a sixth-generation descendant of Venus’ last Swedish commander in 1789. I come back to the fate of Venus in end.

I have concluded that the Euromodel La Renommée is not Venus but probably something close in shape and design which perhaps could be modified into Venus, but more about that later.

I first want to say that my post is not intended as any criticism of Euromodel.  Euromodel has produced a fantastic model. I am just questioning a couple of details in the background history of the model. If we start with what Euromodel says about La Renommée. I quote from their website:

“Launched in 1744 at either Byrone or Brest, La Renommee was a one-off 40-gun ship designed by Antoine Groignard with 30 12-pounders and 10 8-pounder guns. She was captured by the British Navy (HMS Dover) 27 September, 1747 and converted into a 30-gun fifth-rate frigate as the HMS Renown and served until she was broken up in 1771.

However, this type of frigate is very important in the evolution of ships of the British Navy because it inspired the development of a series of fifth-rate frigates equipped with only thirty guns of large “caliper”, all placed on the second deck.

Details for this ship have relied on Chapman’s book, ‘Architectura Navalis Mercatoria’ Plan XXXI.”

 

In these few sentences are a couple of statements which can be checked:

1.       The 1744 La Renommée had 30 guns and was a Sirène-class frigate. It was a shorter ship. I think Landlubber Mike has commented on this already.

2.       The naval architect is probably wrong. Antoine Groignard was born in 1727 and was only 17 years old in 1744. Unless he was the Mozart of naval design 😊 he is not the right designer. According to https://threedecks.org/index.php?display_type=show_crewman&id=23698 the Sirène-class was designed by Jacques-Luc Coulomb who was born in 1713. I have found sources saying that Antoine Groignard was the designer of a La Renommée launched in 1767 which was a one-off 40-gun design with 30 12-pounders on gun deck and 10 8-pounders on quarterdeck and forecastle.

3.       Plate XXXI in Architectura Navalis Mercatoria depicts a 40 gun privateer frigate (28 18-pounders and 12 6-pounders. “Length between the per p:rs of Stem and Sternpost 156 1/3 feet". Assuming Chapman refers to a Swedish foot 156 1/3 feet is equivalent of 46.4 meter. A Swedish foot was slightly shorter than an Imperial foot.

My conclusion is that Euromodel has produced an excellent model but the facts around its archetype is completely mixed up. I do not want to speculate what reasons Euromodel has had for their claims. The appearance seems to point towards a later design. Why not the 1767 La Renommée which in time matches well with Chapmans Architectura Navalis Mercatoria from 1768?

What about the Swedish frigate Venus then? Venus was launched in 1783 and was the third frigate in a series of ten of the Bellona-class. The ships of the Bellona-class were 46.3 m length overall. The armament was 40 guns of which 26 was 26-pounders on gun deck. Frigates of the eighteenth century normally carried 30-40 guns of lower “caliber” than the Bellona-class. They were used for scouting and escort duties and was often equipped with slightly bigger guns than privateers which usually was their primary adversaries.

During the last decades of the eighteenth century several navies started building heavy frigates equipped with 24-pound guns on gun deck. The idea with the frigates of the Bellona-class such as Venus, was to create a stable and fast sailor which could  take fights with ships of the line (64 guns or more) which in hard weather sometimes had difficulties using the heaviest guns on the lower gun deck if the ship was heeling. The Bellona-class proved to be quite successful and several of them served in the Swedish navy for decades.

There are models depicting Bellona and other ships of the Bellona -class at the Maritime Museum in Stockholm. Here are some pictures of a water line model of Bellona from 1782. The water line model is believed to depict the original engineering design of the any generic Bellona-class frigate. For  instance, the stern has no ornamentation nor name plate. All pictures are from the Maritime Museum website.

 

Stern and quarter galleries look different from the La Renommée model but maybe, with a little bit of research quarter galleries and stern can be modified to depict Venus or any frigate of the Bellona-class?

Finally, what happened to Venus? In 1789 Sweden was in war with Russia. Venus was stationed in Gothenburg on west coast of Sweden. On June 1 1789 Venus was scouting the waters between Gothenburg and Skagen on the northern tip of Danish Jutland when Venus met a Russian fleet of ships which started hunting Venus. Venus tried to reach safe harbour on the Swedish west coast north of Gothenburg but winds where unfavorable and Venus sailed into the Oslofjord of Norway, which then belonged to Denmark. Facing a superior adversary Venus was forced to surrender to the Russians. My sixth-generation ancestor major Magnus Hanson was taken prisoner of war but was released the year later after when peace was settled. According to family tradition major Hanson was sentenced to death for cowardliness but was pardoned by the king after Magnus Hanson’s wife had visited the king and pleaded for her husband’s life. Family tradition is probably wrong because court records are preserved. He got no death sentence. The penalty was a fine equivalent of six month pay and a dishonorably discharge from the navy.

“Major” Hanson in my ears sound like an odd rank for a navy officer. In my service days in the Swedish Marines (eighties) navy “majors” were addressed “örlogskapten” which is equivalent to a lieutenant commander in Royal Navy but research I have done shows that major was a perfectly valid rank for a Swedish navy officer in the end of eighteenth century.

And now, by the end my post I want to say to Landlubber Mile aka Mike that if you feel I have kidnapped your build log ask a moderator to move this long winded post somewhere else or delete it.

Best regards Henrik

[Landlubber Mike]

Hi Henrik, many thanks for your thoughts and observations.  Just to be clear, I didn’t mean to imply that the Euromodel kit was of the Venus.  Clearly they are different ships.  All I meant was that Chapman’s Architectura diagram - which the Euromodel kit is based - looks very similar to the Venus which Chapman designed.  
 

In zu Mondfeld’s book, he shows the stern of the Architectura kit (again, the subject of the Euromodel kit) and calls it the Jupiter.  Whether there indeed was a Jupiter I don’t know and can’t find any evidence of such a ship.  But, I think based on the fact that it was in Architectura and bears so many similarities to the Venus that it is likely a Swedish ship and not a French ship as Euromodel suggests.

 

All that being said, I think this is one of the most beautiful kit subjects on the marketplace, and the kit itself is fantastic when it comes to the plans, materials, etc.