Martes

And an initial sailing test of the command cruiser. The deck still has to be repainted, weapons properly configured. Otherwise, everything seems to work.

Preliminary texturing of the command cruiser is complete - the original model, unlike the large carrier, is a mess, and required a lot of corrections apart from replacing the hull, so it takes much more time. I still have to adapt the deck texture to rearranged armament, but the general look of the ship is already here.

Now it's Kiev's turn. Project 1143, a large ship combining STOVL aircraft, helicopters and heavy offensive missile punch, and yet not exactly carrier. Britain had conducted several studies in that direction even before the emergence of the Invincible concept - the so called Escort Cruiser of 1961: Of course in my version of Britain the ship would easily grow from 15kt to around 40, and would be developed in the same cooperation with Soviet counterparts, as the carrier above. There will be differences, though. The hull is a combination between British and Soviet forms (forward half is purely enlarged Colossus, aft run is Soviet, as it's their engine group). The flare of the bow is increased in a provision for potential quick removal of the missile armament and replacement with a conventional flight deck with a ski-jump (fitted for, but not with). Artillery is removed, the fore turret replaced with an additional twin Bazalt (Sea Boar in RN service) launcher, bringing the broadside to 10 missiles, and aft turret replaced by SA-N-9 (Sea Arrow) missile containers. The S-300 (Sea Serpent) remains in place, just as Sea Dart on Invincible. In - again - a case of Russian Reversal, this reality dictates an increase of East-of-Suez deployments, for which those ships, classified as "command cruisers" would be mostly dedicated, they would make a frequent and common sight in tropical waters - countering US carrier groups, delivering the will of the Queen and the Secretary General to the third world countries, before the inevitable showdown in the icy gray waters of South Atlantic.

After looking at the screenshots above I realized something is off with the hull - the same forward part I left from the artist's interpretation of the Soviet sketches (there are no real published plans for 1160 project, only several sketches and photos of a model), so I took the plans for Colossus-class carriers and used them to correct the lines. This, I think, makes the hull entry fuller, but more plausible - for this configuration. And now to sailing test:

Have to clear up some texture bugs, but overall the carrier works:

Oh, well... That probably had to be expected. As with most computer games, somebody figured out a way to extract the models and inject new meshes into it, and then I figured out how to use that. So now I can take the ingame models of project 1160 carrier and project 1143 helicopter carrier, and anglicize their hulls even more properly. The most simple and visible change is altering the shape of the hull forward, more or less in line with CVA-01 plans and other contemporary projects of aircraft-carrying ships. The sonar remains in place, but the cutwater is moved forward and the flight deck supports are shaped differently. Soviet originals above, modified British-style versions below. It's still very much work in progress, but I ultimately hope to see them in the water at some point.

Then textures + normal maps are your answer definitely. look at collections.rmg.co.uk by "planking"

There is no optimal workflow, unfortunately. There are multiple styles of plank covering, and some are easier to reproduce, while others aren't. The Dutch style in question is relatively easy (you can get away with through-cuts), but making some British ship with complex planking will be a torture. There are two options - either reproduce the planks by cutting the surface, or to paint them as a texture, and this depends on what the final destination of the model is. And then remember that most ships were covered by heavy amounts of paint that would, technically obscure the run of the planks, or had their bottom coppered, which makes a totally different picture.

@Waldemar works in Rhino, not Blender. It uses totally different geometrical principles (NURBS curves as opposed to vertices, edges and faces) and I am not sure the "planked" can be correctly exported to some form of blender-readable OBJ without requiring serious manual work to sort it out later. Your best hope, I think, is using solidify on the hull, separating it to two halves (fore/aft) and then making diagonal and vertical chiseled cuts with the model facing forward/aft and manually correcting the result.

As a background, my primary source for this experiment is an excellent book by D. K. Brown - Rebuilding the Royal Navy: Warship Design Since 1945, that provides the view inside the British design processes of the period. What I am trying to do is to apply those processes and reasoning using the Soviet inventory available to me in the game.

As a refining touch for the moment, I made the black stripe of anti-corrosion paint over the waterline identical for both cruisers (although to make it all less confusing the Kresta was demoted to destroyer, so it's Type 84 for Kara and Type 44 for Kresta), and got rid of rows of the purely Soviet lights in the sides of the ships, keeping them only on superstructure level. From operational standpoint, the Type 44 is a direct parallel of real-world Type 42, a ship built around a long-range air defense system, but with certain resemblance of Type 12 frigates I somehow like to imagine that in that reality the TV series Warship would have been filmed aboard several ships of this class.

A bit ironically, I must thank you for reminding me of the Kresta, at least the Kresta-2. Initially I thought I won't need two relatively similar ships, having already converted the Kara to a primary air-defense cruiser. Historically, in the USSR, the Kresta-2 (1134A) came before the Kara (1134B), and Kara contained all kinds of additional systems and improvements. But I am painting Britain, and a very special version of Britain at that, and the British logic dictates that having built several ships of the 1134B project, the Admiralty becomes acutely aware of the involved expenses and requires a smaller, more compact and economical variant, which cuts the close-range air defense and the towed array (because those are moved to the specialized ASW frigates) and results in smaller hull with much smaller crew. This closely mirrors the story of Bristol and Type 42 destroyers in real world, so in our version of Britain the Kresta-2, sorry, the Type 44 Air Defense Destroyer, will be built after the Type 84, and carry the same electronics, missiles, etc., sans the removed capabilities. I can imagine the discussions in stuffy London offices quite vividly, in that Sir Humphrey's drawl - "We are building modern and spacious frigates, whatever we need those enormous cruisers for? Can't we have something... smaller? Oh, and you can put the radar on the funnel and cut the length, why on earth haven't you said so before?"

The remaining aircraft from the carrier complement - P-42 AEW And the attack/electronic warfare aircraft based on Soviet Ko-45 project, which is remarkably reminiscent of one of the real planes planned for CVA-01, which makes the whole thing even more funny:

That's nearly not all. The game, you see, is also prone to alternative reality (which considerably eases my conscience), and it includes a projected Soviet conventional carrier - the Project 1160, full with specialized aircraft, which are also based on unrealized projects. So, in our Britain that's what we have for CVA-01, which (for now) carries the Mig-23A (localized as Hawker-Siddeley Harpy), and P-42 (localized as Hawker-Siddeley Angler) anti-submarine plane (there is an AEW version, I just didn't finish repainting her yet), a specialized attack aircraft that is somewhat close to HS.125 (also not yet finished) in military configuration, and Ka-27, which now bears the name of Westland Kingfisher. And P-42 (localized as Hawker-Siddeley Darter) anti-submarine plane

Disclaimer This is not something serious, I just found another computer game to tinker with. The models are not mine - it is very difficult to change the models except replacing parts like radars or turrets (while it's technically possible to edit the meshes, it requires enormous amount of effort so I won't do that for now certainly), but at least I can repaint them and change various settings, so it is more akin to plastic modelling with decals and paint. The game in question is called Sea Power, it had been recently released as Early Access and it allows to play with various Cold War scenarios. The number of the models the game is released with is relatively limited, and there are no British ships yet. But I wanted some. It took some time, but I finally figured out how to force the game to load textures from external files, so lo and behold, the Royal Navy of Socialist Britain. The British design school of the 70-80's is, in fact, closer to Soviet than US, and simply repainting the Kara (1134b) gives a quite close impression of actually projected circa 1985 Type 43 destroyer. And that gave me a start. Imagine a Britain that ended up in the Warsaw Pact, apply the Russian reversal (in Soviet Britain the Navy economizes on you), and use Soviet projects as base, because there are no other models in the game. So 1134b becomes Type 84 cruiser (as follow up for Type 82 Bristol), 1155 (Udaloy) - Type 24 frigate, and Kiev replaces Invincible on steroids. Harrier is still there (but uses Soviet weapons), but instead of Sea Kings there are now Ka-27s. I used indexes that do not intersect with real ships in order to incorporate them later, when they, as the authors promise, will be released. In short, it's something between a dream and a nightmare for a British admiral - you get what you want, under certain conditions. Alas, it's all so niche I can't expect anybody to understand the enormous amount of joy I get from this, but I do want to share at least the visual part. Don't judge too harshly.

@Robska, that's Solidify Modifier in Blender: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/modifiers/generate/solidify.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/meshes/editing/face/solidify_faces.html

NURBS to OBJ sometimes produces strange artifacts, especially during triangulation. Note that the quads you see in Blender are actually pairs of invisible triangles, that may (or may not) change when you rotate the model. This can cause visual artifacts when the quads are relatively large, because Blender has an annoying habit to triangulate the quads the wrong way each time.

Extremely sleek and elegant hull form, even accounting for a very deep flat tuck. In a design sense she is a small carrack?

Which will look more or less like this. It's still not easy to fully appreciate Ancien Regime style French carving design in what can amount to pixel-art, but the stern ensemble looks (almost) continuous now.

A couple of new shots of La Salamandre after a long pause. Still a lot of polishing and colour correction remains for the stern, and I am seriously thinking about increasing the resolution of the side texture to make the quarter badges sharper.

Frigates and a bomb vessel:

Some more assorted shots. Warspite, Cambridge, other ships in the background.

Cambridge, darker guns and corrected gunports:

I may be mistaken, the superimposition is very rough, but: With a difference of .7m it seems that you can get the Christiania tumblehome without cutting the original upper works, just extending the sides under the gun deck either by over planking or changing the frame shape.

Liffey, again