Shipbucket

OK, I'm coming from NationStates, and I was directed here. I already know about the smoke stack, radar, and rudder, but I don't know how to fix that. Also, people keep telling me that I need to revise my armaments, so what would you suggest I use for a modernized Soviet era crusier?



Also, I feel I need to work on my Patrol boat a little bit more, any suggestions?

Welcome.

My advice to you would just be to spend some time comparing what you have drawn to some of the stuff in the archive's Russia folder. Once you get a feel for what real ships look like, it's a lot easier to draw your own. I would abandon the angular superstructures first and foremost.

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USN components, camouflage colors, & reference links (World War II only)

Hello and welcome to Shipbucket!

First things first, I'd advise you to follow Colosseum's advice: look up real designs in SB format, either from the archive or the board. Look up both Russian and Western ships; the era is more important than the origin, and Russian/Soviet designs can be so idiosyncratic as to be completely incomprehensible. Compare Shipbucket darwings with plans and pictures of the real ships.
If you want to have a better look at the overall inner workings of a modern ship and how much space the essentials can take, and what parts not to forget (like propeller shafts...), take a look at Erik_t's fusion destroyer thread, where he goes to extreme lengths to model the inner works of his ship in SB scale. There are other good examples on the boards and in the archive that elude me right now, so just have a look around.
Then, If you're more concerned with the various mission systems used on military ships and want to have a better look at IRL layouts, I'd direct you towards Charly015's blog archives where, without even having to read in Spanish, you will find a lot of ship pictures annotated with the different weapons and sensors onboard, like this one.

The end goal here is not to bury you in information or set unattainable goals, but to give you pointers to understand how a ship works, so you can build a design rather than cobble parts together. Start there, draw a few ships to see where everything fits together. Take some scaled elements from other drawings, even the stick figures that hang around the decks of some ship drawings, see how much space you need for everything. Once you get the hang of that part, we can talk about which Soviet systems go on which ships in which era. I could go on and on about that (I generally do, and you'll definitely need some pruning from your designs here), but that's the easy part. First the ship, then the weapons!

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Soviet Century/Cold War 2020 Alternate Universe: Soviet and other Cold War designs 1990-2020.
My Worklist

The patrol boat will definitely need to go into the Shipbucket template with your name in the credit lines too.

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USN components, camouflage colors, & reference links (World War II only)

Seems top heavy, and for a patrol boat i don't think it needs such a great armament

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Wansui!

OK, so after looking at cruisers from both the US and the SU from the era I'm going through, I completely scrapped the cruiser, apart from the hull. My question is there anything I can recycle from my botched cruiser attempt to use on the new cruiser.

Not to dismiss your effort, but I think you'll have an easier time scrapping it completely and restarting from scratch. The hull itself is a starting point, but you'll probably have to rework the bow, which is far too pointed.
I know I keep repeating that, but you'd better start by figuring out what your ship is for. What are its missions? its targets? area of operations? range and endurance? and so on. This part should give you pointers for the systems and therefore layout, but also for the general shape and size of your ship.

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Soviet Century/Cold War 2020 Alternate Universe: Soviet and other Cold War designs 1990-2020.
My Worklist