Joe100

An excellent start indeed. I finished a scratch build of Giulio Cesare just last year, and I can highly recommend the new Bagnasco book on the class.

Excellent work. I’m a big fan of Regia Marina ships as well. I scratch built Cesare last year, and Duilio the year before. A few years back I built Littorio, but she wasn’t a scratch build. Fantastic fun. Some of your reference photos are of Littorio and VV though,. I’d hate to see you go down the wrong path on some of the details. Can’t wait to see more !

Gorgeous!

One of my favorite subjects indeed. I recently wrote a pretty widely reprinted article on the loss of Titanic, with heavy emphasis on the minutes before and after the accident occurred. So, if you need any technical questions answered, I can probably help out. Looking forward to this build!

My god a true work of art! You must be proud!

Hey Glen, neat idea! However I don’t own any railroad rail, I use machinist blocks. Are you putting the resin under vacuum? That was the whole reason I never used resin, I could never master the bubbles. There is a French artist who uses a large vacuum chamber to make these gorgeous dioramas, or more vignettes. It appears really hard to do!

Oh and I forgot to mention, I checked my resources and the photos of Bismarck in dry dock do predate the installation of the Sonar oscillators by a few months. The mine clearing boom was present though. This is why we seldom see the equipment modeled because sources on the installation are thin. Another item you might be interested in is the theory that Bismarck may have carried a METOX radar detector. Evidence for this is very thin at best, but it is believed Group West may have installed an experimental system on BS prior to Rhine. While it’s also likely Bismarck was using her own radar antennae to pick up the British pulses, we do know that she was doing it somehow, someway. I’ve also researched the possibility that the Lorenz equipment aboard may have also had the capability to operate in the same frequency band, and it could have been adjusted to detect British radar pulses. Had she not been picking up the British radar, Lütjens would have likely maintained radio silence, and arrived safely in France. However, he thought he was being tracked, and chose to send a long, rambling, unimportant, message to Group West, which contained no information GW didn’t already have. In fact GW realized Bismarck had gone undetected and was pretty horrified when BS started transmitting. I would rank Lütjens misunderstanding of his radar equipment and the tactical situation at large as one of the biggest blunders in naval history. Most folks point to his refueling discussions early on, but I have always argued this was a non-issue. He made a rescission I would have made myself based on the circumstances. I can get into this if you like, but the whole “Bismarck left without refueling” argument is a very big oversimplification of the facts and not very accurate. His biggest fail was not keeping his mouth shut which got everyone killed. Anyway, the antenna for the METOX would likely have been installed on the fore mast, it would have been an “X” brace with each leg of the “X” connected by wire, probably not much more than 4 to 6 feet across at its widest. Not big at all, and probably impossible to spot in photos since it would have been a very last minute installation and photos during Rhine don’t give us a close enough view. It was also probably installed horizontally too, making it doubly hard to spot. I sorta think they probably just ran the wires up the mainmast and splayed them out, not bothering to install the “X” bracket. This of course is only if the equipment was installed at all. So many mysteries remain.

No, the 15” Shells were loaded elsewhere, I can show you if you like. This hoist was for the AA guns serving that part of the ship. The door below the hoist machinery lead to the AA gunner ready room, which was in turn flanked by officer’s cabins. That area of the ship was mostly officer use. One deck above, and about 50’ back, we would also have found another ammunition hoist. This one served the AA guns further up. There were many such hoists all over the ship.

The interference piece you mentioned is the cover for the ammunition hoist mechanism. The ship’s boats look awesome!

My goodness this looks good!

Greetings, it’s likely too late to fit the S-Anlage equipment to your model sadly, but it’s existence wasn’t known until not too terribly recently. One thing you have to remember is most photos of Bismarck and Tirpitz were heavily censored, and a lot of critical equipment was airbrushed out, including the S-Anlage oscillators, possibly. If you look at the famous drydock photos of Bismarck you’ll see they’re nowhere to be seen, so they were either either not installed yet or brushed out, I’m writing this on the fly and my KM references are all packed up pending a move, but I think the drydock photos are pre-installation iirc. Most KM heavies had S-Anlage by late 1940 though, including Bismarck. You’ll also notice that strange circle just below the bulb of the bow and that is a piece of equipment rarely modeled called the Bugspiere. It’s shown in its retracted position, but it’s essentially a long pole that just out of the bow where the mine clearing equipment would be attached. You can also see this equipment on Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Apparently there were 2 different configurations, one for active mine clearing and another for passive mine defense. I believe this was rigged early in Rhine after she left Poland in the passive configuration while being escorted by Sperrbrecher 13. Also, yes, the horseshoe shaped “holes” decals are the Gruppenhorchgerät or GHG for passive listening. Quite accurate too. The GHG was a series of 62 crystal microphones per side and was manufactured by AtlasWerke in Bremen. The exact model fitted to Bismarck was An301m. This is all really deep-dive stuff, and these are not really in many books about the ship sadly. here are some illustrations.

You know, that is a brilliant method. I’ve never considered adding the gun ports in that manner, and I’m interested in trying that myself!

This thread gets better and better

Absolutely brilliant!

I believe a polish company called Ammo or Armo (one of the two) does a few. I know they have HMS Captain, which isn’t exactly accurate though.

It really is amazing how famous Shackleton has become in the past few years. I do believe his star is as high as it’s ever been. Exciting to see so many Endurance models

So gorgeous!

Following!

More inspiration for my build!

I’m really enjoying following this thread, a fantastic build! Extremely involved and the way you did the Baltic stripes is genius. I did notice that Amati didn’t include the S-Anlage active sonar array. It’s censored on almost every photo of the ship though, which is understandable in the end. It’s a very obscure detail but it does change the bow profile pretty significantly. The oscillators were located at the stem and about 30’ back just above the keel, a little behind the anchor cluses. It’s a different setup to the GHG microphone arrays, which were for passive listening.

Ha! I’m just a guy making things, no more than that.

See, I’m not the only one who uses railroad rail to hold things when I’m glueing. This work is so crisp. I can’t wait to see how it looks finished

I agree! I’d take the ship model any day!

Glen is back at it again! Definitely following this!

Here is a photo of my model of her in happier, more optimistic times. Sadly, it was Shackleton himself who’s poor decision to push south against the advice of the whalers on South Georgia, which put them in the situation they found themselves in. The choice of S/Y Endurance/Polaris for the mission didn’t help matters since her hull wasn’t designed for pressure. She was originally intended to be a luxury polar yacht used for hunting trips and the like. However, had this story not played out, we wouldn’t have had one of the finest tales ever told, and for that I’m glad. It’s no surprise she’s preserved as well as she is, and I’m glad she held together on the way down. From the waterline down, she has to be a right mess and I’m glad the structure seems to still resemble a ship. Congratulations to the discoverers! Huzzah indeed.