Jun 12, 2016

The Russian sisters


The Russian armored frigates cruisers Vladimir Monomah (left) and Dmitri Donskoy (right) are completed. They were designed in the 1880s and took part in the catastrophe that was the battle of Tsushima. One interesting aspect of building Russian ships is searching for them in Cyrillic, which brings up a lot of period photos, and fortunately for me, blueprints as well. 




The Donskoy was completed first, actually the VM is the older "sister". A very straightforward build, only the masts caused me some worry, but period photos after 1903 show her to have no sails on.


A few photos show the Vladimir Monomah with a dark hull, but I found some with this white one, and it just looked much prettier. Both ships have lots of layers of paint for a smooth surface, I think there's at least five layers of white on the VM's hull. 

They will have an armored hull in my naval wargame, just like other armored cruisers, but I suspect I'll give them only two shots per turn because of the virtually non-existent secondary armament. The way it looks right now: two shots for main battery, an extra for torpedoes (unlimited range), and another for secondary (within 1m when available). The previous game suggests that this works very well.

The next completed ship is a rather unspectacular South American armed merchant ship, built of cardboard a while back, but painted up only with this recent surge of pre-dreadnoughts & associates. She will be followed by a pair of French torpilleurs, whatever that means.

14 comments:

  1. Really nice work András. You really have a lot of patience to modeling at this scale.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you - scratchbuilding is actually easier at a larger scale, at least that's my experience.

      Delete
  2. Lovely job, master of the ships!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. From now on, he will be known as the Admiral. (Well at least in my mind!)

      Delete
    2. What about my land forces, numbering some five thousand? They can't all be marines!

      Delete
    3. Supreme Commander of All Real and Imagined Military Forces in the great Nation, Szilvasy Land!

      Delete
  3. Really impressive to have built these from scratch, and I'm a big fan of anything to do with the Imperial Russian Navy. I've struggled with sources for ship colours, what did you use for reference?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you - a Cyrillic search brought up a colored buleprint for the VM, and the white hull was quite obvious on black and white photos too, same with the black of the DD's hull on a few high-res period pics. I used the bright cream/beige deck color shown on the colored blueprint, the black and white photos are not much help on that issue. Another good source is scale models, I've used pictures of them for reference on multiple occasions when plans and b&w photos were not clear enough.

      Delete
  4. Beautiful work, András. The detail you put into masts and rigging really bring these to life.

    ReplyDelete