Shipbucket

First off, I know that the colors are all off, and they can easily be changed.

This ship came from a design that I created a while ago, with many influences coming from the HMS Dreadnought of the Royal Navy.
As I was browsing through Shipbucket looking for inspiration, I also took a few cues from Soviet and British designed ships (Drawn by Gollevainen and Hood, respectively; Sovyetskiy Soyuz Class and HMS Kent) that I used for influence on developing the design concept (though no parts from the ships were actually used.)

Obviously I used various parts sheets I found around for the weaponry, lifeboats and equipment, the plane... etc. Though the hull itself is scratch drawn.

I don't really have much technical data about the ship, especially because I'm still tweaking the design a bit.

In order to give myself more freedom with design, I used the fictional country I created for NationStates, Churchillainia, for the design, although that is mostly to give the ship an independent identity and flag. The top flag on the stern is the country flag, and the flag below it is supposed to be the flag of a sailing naval vessel (CVN in this case stands for Churchillainian Vessel of the Navy, a designation I'm still considering changing.)

I'm more than open to constructive criticism; I'm still very new to this, and a lot of how I put the details onto the ship was influenced by drawings I saw on the site, I don't really have a full idea myself of how the specifics of a ship are supposed to work and influence its design. All in all, this is mainly just an experiment in designing ships somewhat realistically, and in the Shipbucket style.

At first I thought this was a very nice early style dreadnaught or maybe even "super pre-dreadnaught" that was drawn bigger than Shipbucket scale. But then I notice what I thought were 8-inch gun turrets were...16-inch gun turrets....

Interesting It is certainly well drawn, but overall, and with all due respect, it is just won't work and I would suggest a top down view to see why: just too many disparate calibre guns superimposed and just not working well in their placements; and the hull looks unstable with all that top weight. These type of designs are really the equivalent of an Echer drawing (like his staircase): just because it can be drawn it doesn't follow that it could actually exist in reality. And why use modern features (like the RIB's) on a design from the last century? But I don't want to discourage what looks like a good drawing talent, so good luck

So many things wrong here.
First off, you're going to need something like four or five times the beam of an Iowa to be able to fit 16 inch wing towers.
I don't know the exact mounting you've used with the bofors, but I do believe it's a fairly modern one.
Then of course there's the RHIBs. If memory serves, they weren't invented until the seventies or so.
Then there's the calibre's. If I'm not mistaken, you have sixteen inch main battery, 10 inch secondary, 8 inch tertiary and 5-6 inch Quaternary battery in casemates. And then there's the small guns that looks like 3" torpedo boat mounts that doesn't look like it's capable of engaging air targets, in effect giving you a Quinary battery.
And not a director in sight.

_________________
“Close” only counts with horseshoes, hand grenades, and tactical nuclear weapons.
That which does not kill me has made a grave tactical error

Worklist

Source Materiel is always welcome.

As a drawing it is a very promisisng start. As a ship... well ... Go to the Wikistates gems in the Alternate universe section. There you'll see what I mean.
In a nutshell here are some of my observasions:
Propellers are way too small for a ship of this size.
The rudder looks too big, and ship's draught is too much - you'll need enormous power to move that ship, especially when considering the beam, you'll need for all those guns

_________________
Thank you Kim for the crest

"Never fear to try on something new. Remember that the Titanic was built by professionals, and the Ark by an amateur"

You know what, I'm going to say this....



I know we here at Shipbucket stress accuracy and realism and realistic, credible drawings above all else. This is an edict passed down to us from Ian, and of stepping way overbounds in enforcing it, I know I am the biggest offender.

And indeed in my first post I was ready to rage as I usually do, but then...

Well, I remembered that this was the beginner forum, and if nothing else this forum was created so that people can make silly work here and be coached without too much embarassment. And I'm also going to say, it's a nice drawing.

So rather than point out the inaccuracies, as it seems like this guy knows more than what the drawing lets on, I'm going to classify it as an interesting sci-fi/fantasy twist and say that it's a nice drawing.

But at the same time your bridge is way, way out of scale and belies the actual scale of the ship (hence my first post). Personally, I'm not too keen on that. Furthermore, if it was up to me I'd ditch the Iowa-style turrets and either scoop some up from a WWI-era British battleship, or draw new ones from scratch in order to better fit the design theme/aesthetic of the overall vessel.

Thanks for the feedback! first off, I shrunk the ship down to 75% of the original size. It actually did end up far larger than the design originally was meant to be at.
I also took the chance to make a side view, which ended up changing the design a lot. I replaced the lifeboats with more appropriate ones, as well as replacing all of the guns with almost-original ones. It went from having a far too wild selection of guns to just two calibers in three gun types. I wasn't sure exactly what the gun directors for the ship would look like (I wasn't even sure in the beginning if I ship intended to be this old would even have them) so that's something I haven't fixed. But overall most of the issues with the design have been addressed.

http://i546.photobucket.com/albums/hh41 ... ematic.png
The link is a sheet with the scale bar, name, and just the side view.
In summary, many of the design errors, namely the size, were problems that came up in the drawing process that I was just too lazy to fix . I actually like this version much more, and it's far closer to the original idea.

Well, I was thinking something more along the lines of this, and perhaps this would better illustrate by what I mean by scale:



Shipbucket scale is 2 pixels = 1 foot, BTW. It looks like you were thinking about an order of magnitude bigger or so. Right now even your "smaller" revision has the largest broadside of any ship ever conceived (a whole crapload of 15 inch rifles) and apparently was designed to be crewed by Zentradi.

What is up with the crazy freeboard in the bow section? Other than that, I like it. I've always liked the wilder designs. I'd like to see you make some escorts to accompany it. Or a battlecruiser.

_________________
"All your base are belong to us"

For a first try it's a worthy effort. Might I suggest getting rid of the beam turrets and the lower row of casematesm then lower the freeboard forward? At this point I think it will resemble a cross between "Dreadnought" and "Queen Mary", which would make for a good-looking ship!