CDR_Ret

Where do you call home? I lived in Vermont several times in my life and consider the state my favorite. Lived in the greater Burlington area. I also drove LCT ferries to work my way through college (UVM). Best job ever!
 
Terry

Where do you call home? I lived in Vermont several times in my life and consider the state my favorite. Lived in the greater Burlington area. I also drove LCT ferries to work my way through college (UVM). Best job ever!
 
Terry

Okay, here we go...
 
So, the obvious first step was to identify suitable plans. I first greedily gathered up everything I could find on Confederacy, good, bad, or ugly. Then I began the arduous process of sifting through them piece by piece. I ultimately decided upon Harold M. Mann's reconstructed admiralty plates circa 1979 for the National Maritime Museum. His plates are not completely without distortion, but it's minimal, and most importantly, they are complementary to one another.
 
So I imported them, used blender skew and rotate them ever so slightly (so the parallel lines are in fact parallel), then finally I scaled them.

 
 
Then I aligned each plan in the set with the appropriate axis from which I'd be working on them.



Next, I drew out the station lines.

 
 
I flipped/mirrored the bow station lines to the same side as the others, then positioned each one front to back using the half-breadth plan.
Then I used the aft most station line to shape the edge of the planking as it would appear inside of the transom and quarter gallery.

 

Hey Folks, I am both honored and humbled to announce my next Blender build:
 
USF Confederacy is my 4th ship in Blender, yet will be my first attempt at a full historical recreation. While ‘Rose’ will always be my first love, I plan on taking many lessons-learned from my little-brig-that-could and apply them to a project on a grander scale.
 
Goals of USF Confederacy Build:
 
Accurate
With Rose, I proved to myself that it is possible to do comprehensive rigging and sails on a 3D model. I had seen some absolutely stunning 3D builds on MSW before I joined, but I noticed that 99.9% of the threads stop during the rigging process (I’m talking about full digital builds; not those done to 3d print parts later). Why did so much excellent work not get completed? Well, because in the 3D world rigging is actually where the overwhelming majority of the work takes place. I hoped to be among the first, because visually, it’s the yards, spars, sails and rigging that occupy the majority of the space taken up by any model ship.
Anyway, with Confederacy I want to bring the same level of realism to the keel, frames, planking, carvings and fittings – and have it be historically accurate this time. Thus, any deviation or parts taken from the designs of other ships is to be well planned out and documented up front.
 
Light
Rose clocks in at 6.2 million vertices and requires 14Gb of RAM and 7.5Gb of VRAM to render… without water, clouds, or anything else in the scene. Even if I never sell or distribute her (I’m not in this for the money lol) I do plan on one day doing renders of Rose duking it out with other ships in an epic naval battle, or perhaps sailing up the Thames in Victorian London. Ergo, I must do more with way, way less.
I’ve long been imagining/theorizing techniques to reduce geometry/improve performance and I am genuinely excited to try them out.
 
Beautiful
Photoreal or bust, ‘nuff said.
 
Excited to share – will post steps from the planning phase later today.
 

 
Best,
-Nate

This topic reminded me of a joint US-UK naval exercise back in the Spring of 1975 that my squadron participated in. At that point I was a junior Naval Aviation Intelligence Officer assigned to an A-7E (Corsair II) squadron, VA-66, stationed at NAS Cecil Field in Pensacola, Florida. This was the year before I got my heart right and entered the Naval Nuclear Propulsion pipeline, and, ultimately, the submarine force.
 
The exercise involved both the USS Independence (CV-62) and the HMS Ark Royal (R07) operating together in the West Atlantic. The Ark Royal cross-decked a squadron of Buccaneers to the Indy and the Indy cross-decked a squadron of Corsair IIs. This was evidently a prolonged collaboration because the photos of the aircraft taken at Cecil Field in my collection were dated March/April, 1975, while the shipboard photo was dated May, 1975.
 
These photos were taken as Ektachrome slides, which were the thing back then. They're not great but they might be useful as a reference of operational aircraft. I failed to identify which squadron they belonged to but the date of deployment might narrow the choices.
 

This final photo shows a Buccaneer on the USS Independence flight deck. Several A-7Es are in the background.
 
Enjoy!
 
Terry

Yes. SketchUp 2017. For future projects, I may have to switch to another software package, as I recently found out that I can no longer install addons (extensions) due to security concerns and lack of available ones that work with my version! Even though in December, most of them were compatible and were offered by 3rd party vendors!
 

Looks like you are using Sketchup. Nicely done!
 
Terry

Looks like you are using Sketchup. Nicely done!
 
Terry

Blocks are a great feature of CAD software as they allow multiple detailed assemblies to be inserted into the main file without size penalty, which in this case has already grown to almost half a gigabyte. This is shown here using the artillery example.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 
 

Welcome to the best place on the entire interweb!

I took my first stab a while back at making a single piece laser cut hatch grating.  This is a style used on Vanguard's grating set.  Here's a picture of one I cut out using some Maple, about 1.6mm thick.
 

 
It's not as clean looking as a machined or cut wooden grate, and there is a bit of risk that excessive visible grain in the wood will not look right.   But it's guaranteed to be at right angles, and it makes framing a "perfect" hatch a bit simpler.
 
To some extent the char is a drawback, but I like the "dirty" look of the grate, as this is more the style I like.  Also, a benefit of the laser char in the square holes is that it darkens the grating, creating more of that "and below is a dark area" illusion.  I actually applied flat varnish down in the cut holes to help fix the char so it wouldn't smudge.
 
To create them, you end up making two passes on the wood with the laser cutter:  a cut pass to make the holes and cut around the outside, and an etch (partial cut) to create a visual separation with the sections.  I've annotated the picture below with some red lines showing where the etch lines are.  The etch lines create the illusion of the vertical pieces being separate.
 

 
To make the cuts and etches, I used Inkscape (a free vector editing program) to create two patterns.   First the cut lines...

To create the above layout, I started by making a 1.6mm square, then began duplicating it at an even spacing until I had an area big enough for my grating.  Then I put a bounding box around it for a final separation cut. 
 
Then the etch lines, which I just created using the above pattern to let me know where they should be

I actually created these on top of each other in editor layers so that they would line up.  Here is a picture of them together in the editor.

Then I exported the cut and etch layers into separate SVG files (one for cut, one for etch), which I then passed to the Glowforge laser cutter to create the cut and etch tasks.
 
Here are a few things I've though of doing beyond this first attempt...
 
Just create an entire sheet of grating without any cut bounds.  Then I could just cut out any shape I wanted to any size (in grate grid square steps). If I want my grating to be a very specific size (width and height), it would be easy to just rescale the entire cut to match exactly the size I want.  Using individual grating strips, I can't resize the grate, as they are forced to be dimensional increments of the thickness of your wood. If putting a bounding cut around the outside of a sized grate, leave a few small gaps so that the cut doesn't go completely around the whole grate.  The main reason I'd do this is because when the outside cut completes, it will sometimes drop the piece of wood a small amount if it's not sitting flat on the cutting bed.  That means subsequent cuts and etches may not quite line up right.  Leaving the small gaps means the grate section won't fall down.

Beautiful work, Nate!

Hey Folks,
So I'm almost done with the boats and I'm starting to play around with their general position in relation to the brig.
 
Feedback welcome here:
 
The 31 foot-long boats are rather oversized for this Brig. Thus, they don't fit cleanly behind the aft channels. I'm not willing to redo the boats at the moment - I will eventually do several Launches, Pinnaces, etc. and will swap them out when I do - so in the meantime I have to decide whether to place the davit cranes behind the channels, between the spacing of the main shroud lines (extending beyond the channels), or affix rails atop the main deck... which would mean only one boat unless stacked like Russian nesting dolls... 
 
Any thoughts?
 

A very much loved aircraft type in the SAAF as well, good old British engineering at its best!

This topic reminded me of a joint US-UK naval exercise back in the Spring of 1975 that my squadron participated in. At that point I was a junior Naval Aviation Intelligence Officer assigned to an A-7E (Corsair II) squadron, VA-66, stationed at NAS Cecil Field in Pensacola, Florida. This was the year before I got my heart right and entered the Naval Nuclear Propulsion pipeline, and, ultimately, the submarine force.
 
The exercise involved both the USS Independence (CV-62) and the HMS Ark Royal (R07) operating together in the West Atlantic. The Ark Royal cross-decked a squadron of Buccaneers to the Indy and the Indy cross-decked a squadron of Corsair IIs. This was evidently a prolonged collaboration because the photos of the aircraft taken at Cecil Field in my collection were dated March/April, 1975, while the shipboard photo was dated May, 1975.
 
These photos were taken as Ektachrome slides, which were the thing back then. They're not great but they might be useful as a reference of operational aircraft. I failed to identify which squadron they belonged to but the date of deployment might narrow the choices.
 

This final photo shows a Buccaneer on the USS Independence flight deck. Several A-7Es are in the background.
 
Enjoy!
 
Terry

This topic reminded me of a joint US-UK naval exercise back in the Spring of 1975 that my squadron participated in. At that point I was a junior Naval Aviation Intelligence Officer assigned to an A-7E (Corsair II) squadron, VA-66, stationed at NAS Cecil Field in Pensacola, Florida. This was the year before I got my heart right and entered the Naval Nuclear Propulsion pipeline, and, ultimately, the submarine force.
 
The exercise involved both the USS Independence (CV-62) and the HMS Ark Royal (R07) operating together in the West Atlantic. The Ark Royal cross-decked a squadron of Buccaneers to the Indy and the Indy cross-decked a squadron of Corsair IIs. This was evidently a prolonged collaboration because the photos of the aircraft taken at Cecil Field in my collection were dated March/April, 1975, while the shipboard photo was dated May, 1975.
 
These photos were taken as Ektachrome slides, which were the thing back then. They're not great but they might be useful as a reference of operational aircraft. I failed to identify which squadron they belonged to but the date of deployment might narrow the choices.
 

This final photo shows a Buccaneer on the USS Independence flight deck. Several A-7Es are in the background.
 
Enjoy!
 
Terry

This topic reminded me of a joint US-UK naval exercise back in the Spring of 1975 that my squadron participated in. At that point I was a junior Naval Aviation Intelligence Officer assigned to an A-7E (Corsair II) squadron, VA-66, stationed at NAS Cecil Field in Pensacola, Florida. This was the year before I got my heart right and entered the Naval Nuclear Propulsion pipeline, and, ultimately, the submarine force.
 
The exercise involved both the USS Independence (CV-62) and the HMS Ark Royal (R07) operating together in the West Atlantic. The Ark Royal cross-decked a squadron of Buccaneers to the Indy and the Indy cross-decked a squadron of Corsair IIs. This was evidently a prolonged collaboration because the photos of the aircraft taken at Cecil Field in my collection were dated March/April, 1975, while the shipboard photo was dated May, 1975.
 
These photos were taken as Ektachrome slides, which were the thing back then. They're not great but they might be useful as a reference of operational aircraft. I failed to identify which squadron they belonged to but the date of deployment might narrow the choices.
 

This final photo shows a Buccaneer on the USS Independence flight deck. Several A-7Es are in the background.
 
Enjoy!
 
Terry

Thank you very much for sharing those stories and pictures Terry 😁. Knowing MSW there are probably some ex. RN on here who will know which Naval Air Squadron those Buccaneers belonged to. Those cross decking exercises must have taken a lot of training to achieve 😲

This topic reminded me of a joint US-UK naval exercise back in the Spring of 1975 that my squadron participated in. At that point I was a junior Naval Aviation Intelligence Officer assigned to an A-7E (Corsair II) squadron, VA-66, stationed at NAS Cecil Field in Pensacola, Florida. This was the year before I got my heart right and entered the Naval Nuclear Propulsion pipeline, and, ultimately, the submarine force.
 
The exercise involved both the USS Independence (CV-62) and the HMS Ark Royal (R07) operating together in the West Atlantic. The Ark Royal cross-decked a squadron of Buccaneers to the Indy and the Indy cross-decked a squadron of Corsair IIs. This was evidently a prolonged collaboration because the photos of the aircraft taken at Cecil Field in my collection were dated March/April, 1975, while the shipboard photo was dated May, 1975.
 
These photos were taken as Ektachrome slides, which were the thing back then. They're not great but they might be useful as a reference of operational aircraft. I failed to identify which squadron they belonged to but the date of deployment might narrow the choices.
 

This final photo shows a Buccaneer on the USS Independence flight deck. Several A-7Es are in the background.
 
Enjoy!
 
Terry

This topic reminded me of a joint US-UK naval exercise back in the Spring of 1975 that my squadron participated in. At that point I was a junior Naval Aviation Intelligence Officer assigned to an A-7E (Corsair II) squadron, VA-66, stationed at NAS Cecil Field in Pensacola, Florida. This was the year before I got my heart right and entered the Naval Nuclear Propulsion pipeline, and, ultimately, the submarine force.
 
The exercise involved both the USS Independence (CV-62) and the HMS Ark Royal (R07) operating together in the West Atlantic. The Ark Royal cross-decked a squadron of Buccaneers to the Indy and the Indy cross-decked a squadron of Corsair IIs. This was evidently a prolonged collaboration because the photos of the aircraft taken at Cecil Field in my collection were dated March/April, 1975, while the shipboard photo was dated May, 1975.
 
These photos were taken as Ektachrome slides, which were the thing back then. They're not great but they might be useful as a reference of operational aircraft. I failed to identify which squadron they belonged to but the date of deployment might narrow the choices.
 

This final photo shows a Buccaneer on the USS Independence flight deck. Several A-7Es are in the background.
 
Enjoy!
 
Terry

This topic reminded me of a joint US-UK naval exercise back in the Spring of 1975 that my squadron participated in. At that point I was a junior Naval Aviation Intelligence Officer assigned to an A-7E (Corsair II) squadron, VA-66, stationed at NAS Cecil Field in Pensacola, Florida. This was the year before I got my heart right and entered the Naval Nuclear Propulsion pipeline, and, ultimately, the submarine force.
 
The exercise involved both the USS Independence (CV-62) and the HMS Ark Royal (R07) operating together in the West Atlantic. The Ark Royal cross-decked a squadron of Buccaneers to the Indy and the Indy cross-decked a squadron of Corsair IIs. This was evidently a prolonged collaboration because the photos of the aircraft taken at Cecil Field in my collection were dated March/April, 1975, while the shipboard photo was dated May, 1975.
 
These photos were taken as Ektachrome slides, which were the thing back then. They're not great but they might be useful as a reference of operational aircraft. I failed to identify which squadron they belonged to but the date of deployment might narrow the choices.
 

This final photo shows a Buccaneer on the USS Independence flight deck. Several A-7Es are in the background.
 
Enjoy!
 
Terry

This topic reminded me of a joint US-UK naval exercise back in the Spring of 1975 that my squadron participated in. At that point I was a junior Naval Aviation Intelligence Officer assigned to an A-7E (Corsair II) squadron, VA-66, stationed at NAS Cecil Field in Pensacola, Florida. This was the year before I got my heart right and entered the Naval Nuclear Propulsion pipeline, and, ultimately, the submarine force.
 
The exercise involved both the USS Independence (CV-62) and the HMS Ark Royal (R07) operating together in the West Atlantic. The Ark Royal cross-decked a squadron of Buccaneers to the Indy and the Indy cross-decked a squadron of Corsair IIs. This was evidently a prolonged collaboration because the photos of the aircraft taken at Cecil Field in my collection were dated March/April, 1975, while the shipboard photo was dated May, 1975.
 
These photos were taken as Ektachrome slides, which were the thing back then. They're not great but they might be useful as a reference of operational aircraft. I failed to identify which squadron they belonged to but the date of deployment might narrow the choices.
 

This final photo shows a Buccaneer on the USS Independence flight deck. Several A-7Es are in the background.
 
Enjoy!
 
Terry

This topic reminded me of a joint US-UK naval exercise back in the Spring of 1975 that my squadron participated in. At that point I was a junior Naval Aviation Intelligence Officer assigned to an A-7E (Corsair II) squadron, VA-66, stationed at NAS Cecil Field in Pensacola, Florida. This was the year before I got my heart right and entered the Naval Nuclear Propulsion pipeline, and, ultimately, the submarine force.
 
The exercise involved both the USS Independence (CV-62) and the HMS Ark Royal (R07) operating together in the West Atlantic. The Ark Royal cross-decked a squadron of Buccaneers to the Indy and the Indy cross-decked a squadron of Corsair IIs. This was evidently a prolonged collaboration because the photos of the aircraft taken at Cecil Field in my collection were dated March/April, 1975, while the shipboard photo was dated May, 1975.
 
These photos were taken as Ektachrome slides, which were the thing back then. They're not great but they might be useful as a reference of operational aircraft. I failed to identify which squadron they belonged to but the date of deployment might narrow the choices.
 

This final photo shows a Buccaneer on the USS Independence flight deck. Several A-7Es are in the background.
 
Enjoy!
 
Terry

For the casual visitor and ignorant ones like me, SIB = "ship in bottle". (I had to go look for this term to learn what it meant....)
 
Terry

For the casual visitor and ignorant ones like me, SIB = "ship in bottle". (I had to go look for this term to learn what it meant....)
 
Terry