The Fiddly Bits

So far we have acheived something that floats. She’s ready to leave the dry dock and move on to fitting out. This is also the bit where your ship develops it’s distinctive character and identifiability.

Some recommended prep work. If you still have the deck plan view glued on to your hull you save your self some problems by marking out where your turrets will be centered and also your superstructure. This will help you greatly later on. You can use a scalpel to punch through the paper and then you simply clean off the paper and glue residue before you start mounting turrets and other bits.

Above you can see the marks that will help guide in the barbettes and superstructure drawn in red.

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Shaping the Hull

If you have a blueprint, printed to scale you can now proceed to making the hull of your ship. Quite naturally this is the first step in the process and also the step that most defines the look of your finished ship. This is where you’ll want to spend a little extra effort while shaping and sanding so that it gets the right look and feel.

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Part Two: Tools and Materials

I use a wide variety of tools for my ships but that is not necessarily the only or even the best tools for the task. Some you can do without if you like, or can’t afford them. I generally improvise and occasionally I whip out the Dremel when I feel lazy…
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Part One: Gathering the Data and Producing Blueprints

The first thing you need to do is to do your homework. It’s critical that you get the facts right before you start commiting time and plastics to a ship that might otherwise turn out wrong.
Since War at Sea uses miniatures that are made to scale and are in general quite good and correct (except Zara which is a Pola *cough* ) it is imperative that you start out with finding the correct dimensions and preferably some plans for your project.

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