This next batch of pictures includes a whole bunch of ships that span a fair amount of my time on Shapeways. I will start by sharing the earliest of my surface ships.
This is my 1/1000 scale model of a Russian Pallada-class protected cruiser. Three were built, one of which, the Avrora, survives today. I took several pictures of it when I was on a river cruise in St. Petersburg back in 2007. I have no idea where those pictures are stored, though I’m fairly certain that my father has them as part of his screensaver gallery. The bottom photo compares the ship with my 1/1000 scale 1812 frigate. Note that I had to clip the military masts on the cruiser in order to get it to print. I may be able to include the full masts if I ever get around to releasing a 1/700 scale version of the model.
What the hell is that thing? Have some respect, damn you, this is the diesel-electric ballistic missile submarine K-129! This 1/1000 scale model is not included in any of my shop sections, so it’s not the easiest thing to find.
The stand was not made for this model, but it works.
It was made for this one, and both were printed on my Makerbot Replicator (before I got rid of it, obviously). The geometry on the earlier FDM-printed model is completely wrong, and I eventually remade the entire model. Loft: it’s the only way to make ship hulls! Seriously, unless you work with CAD software on a daily basis, I don’t expect you to understand.
And end view of the stand, to show the shape necessary to hold a sub’s hull.
Nuclear subs may be the size of aircraft carriers, but diesel-electric subs are tiny!
The Karadenian ironclad Selsequenter, which I’ve written about in a much earlier post. As a refresher, this is a 120-gun sailing steamer from The Nine Empires, completely obsolete by the time it was built, but just powerful enough to deal some damage if circumstances required it.
A caravel airship, a hybrid of a dirigible and a helicopter, in case you forgot. This is a fairly popular type of cargo airship on the Rossberan continent.
My model of the Flying Dutchman in two different sizes (in ghostly green, of course). Feel free to point out everything that’s wrong with this ship, I’m already well aware, but at least I never once made the claim that Davy Jones is its captain! In all seriousness, the problems with Pirates of the Caribbean are so numerous that I could probably devote an entire blog to that subject alone… not it that prevents me from enjoying the films, but MOVING ON!
The Flying Dutchman compared to the ship of the Crimson Corsair, which I offer in three different sizes. The Crimson Corsair is a character from a story that I started work on as a child and never went anywhere with. It involved a Russian ship getting lost during the Great Northern War of 1700-1721 and sailing all around the world in a Munchausen-like manner. During several of their adventures, the crew matches wits with a wily French pirate known only as the Crimson Corsair. However, the Russians are also being relentlessly pursued by a Swedish man-of-war, and they eventually join forces with the pirates to defeat the Swedes.
Here’s an interesting study in the evolution of sailing rigs: from left to right (and top to bottom), these are my Caravela de Armada version 2, Caravela de Armada version 3, and English Galleon. Note that they all have the same hull, or almost the same, yet the rigs get progressively more complex and dispense with lateen sails in favour of square sails. There is a reason for this, though I will not get into that here.
Two flaming cousins, the spitfire caravel (black) and spitfire dromon (orange). The only difference is the oars. Again, point out the inaccuracies all you want (including the redundancy of the term “spitfire dromon”), but I needed some fairly descriptive terms for these ships, as I originally designed them for wargaming.
I have a few other pictures of sailing ships, namely the short trireme, peanut cog, pirate ship, fleet carrack, and manila galleon, but since this post is already a bit much, I think I’ll end it here and move on to the next group. Remember, all these pictures will be up on my Shapeways shop, plus many more. My only real chore will be scaling them down, since Shapeways has a 1MB limit for photos, and photos directly from my camera are typically closer to 4MB.
Kaja's Kreations 