in the instructions the bridge wings were removed by 1894. also be careful with rigging plans. there are plenty of line drawings showing the plan when launched but she sailed, not steamed, to china and a lot of the rigging was removed after arriving. i don’t think she had ratlines after getting to china either. most of my pictures don’t show them and, given the cruisers have pe ratlines and the “battleships” don’t, i would assume this to be the case. handmade ratlines are annoying in 1/192 and bigger, at 1/350 they would be insane. but… i think the TING YUEN travel website says all the ships were probably all gray for the battle much like EMDEN had her pre-war white and buff and war gra paint scheme.
i’m still waiting on my TING YUEN too. seems to be popping up on a couple of sites but my LHS hasn’t gotten it yet. but i have the other one plus both cruisers and a spare.
In some of the CGI shots it looked as if some of the ships were making 120kts. And what is up with the guy in the gold Cap’n Crunch uniform that had to have been four sizes too large? That was one terrible actor.
Getting coal dust in the lungs. Last ship I completed was Airfix Iron Duke. Now I’m working on ICM’s Konig. I have both Bronco’s Ting Yuen and Zvezda’s Varyag. (Along with the ancient 240 scale Oregon - gotta have something to go along with Mikasa, which I also have.) The Chinese cruiser looks really spiffy. Anyway a couple of comments:
I may be in for a surprise, but Ting Yuen and Varyag both look really good, especially the former. Ting Yuen has a Dragon-like look to its lines, plus the PE. I’ve heard that Zvezda’s Bordonios are a real handful - and due to my experience with Zvezda I believe it. But Varyag is new and looks great - bodes well for Dreadnought. (Ain’t going to knock the availability of the kit, but why didn’t they pick a RN WWI boss ship that fought at Jutland. Course DN was the only BB to ever sink a submarine.) Any of these kits are in a different league from the ICM Konig I’m toiling on. That kit is just loaded with plastic where you don’t want it and it fights you every step of the way. Luckily, so far, the “mission critical” fits are okay. But with 500 parts or so, it’s slow work sanding almost everything. But Konig was ICM’s first major kit I think and came out in 2000 - a lot of water under the bridge. Now maybe we’ll get a WWI battlecruiser in plastic. Anyway, buy coal burners. (Some oil, lots of coal.) Methinks there are a lot of modelers in Asia. Chinese subjects would be a major benefit. (I think Chaing used Renault tanks - I want a 35 scale Renault tank - another crime against modeling history that there isn’t one. Maybe we’ll get one from Bronco.) It does say something interesting that a government would cooperate in building a full sized reproduction of a long destroyed warship. Bet it’s a neat museum. Now I’ll know the US is on the rebound when we do that for CV-6 (or even the Kearsarge: berth it in Charleston).
I’ve known some hard core naval historians in my life. They went nuts on the boards when the Menzies book came out. Arguments predated that though. You will get a real fight over the whole issue of the Treasure Ships, and their voyages. First, were the “treasure ships” really 400-500 feet long? There are experts that argue you couldn’t make an ocean going wooden vessel without a single piece keel - that means a 400-500 foot tree. (Massive trees were a strategic commodity in England for at least 200 years.) A river barge, maybe. The actual documentation on the big ships is pretty scanty, although the large early 15th century voyages West are certainly true. Most gurus think they ended in East Africa, although the records are spare. We know a little more about the voyages into SE Asia. Some Chinese naval historians defend the description of the mega “Treasure Ship” and have come up with theories about how they could have done it. Some Chinese and Western historians think the super ships were built in very small numbers only to impress the emperor and never used on blue water. Some doubters dismiss the account of the super ships as simple misreading of very old records and reckon their size to be maybe half that claimed. (Chinese weights and measures are a tricky business for historians, as is their mapping system.) As for the discovery of the New World or circumnavigation as proposed by Menzies, Chinese historians consider it a charming idea with no foundation in Chinese records. As pointed out by one of them, the Chinese didn’t understand longitude and latitude - that would have made a very long voyage a real stretch. Naturally nobody can rule out the possibility of an Asian vessel - not necessarily Chinese - getting blown to hell and gone in a storm and ending up on the West Coast of the Americas. But by the 15th century cartography was one field where the European had developed a real world lead which they kept for a long time. So western sinologists dismiss the Menzies theory as baloney. Indeed, the Menzies theory is based on the assumption that the Chinese intentionally destroyed records of their voyages of exploration. Using that line of thought, you can prove that no American walked on the moon. And when you look at the Magellan expedition, taken after nearly a century of hard-core blue water experience, with state of the art charts (with some obvious holes in them) and how close to it came to complete failure, the idea of junks sailing across the Pacific without bases (Magellan had them in the New World) does seem to border on the realm of crop circles made by Martians.
Can the battleship be built without the larger gun shield? In other words, is there anything more than a big hole under it? It looked like the cruisers have considerable gun detail.
Yes, they can…if you build the “battleready” variant the instructions would have you leave the “turrets” off of the two side-batteries, and underneath those shields are some really cherry 305mm (I think) cannon…very impressive slide-molded detail w/ hollow barrels…
I thought the Yalu clip was spiffy. Maybe the CGI didn’t match the jaw-dropping “Red Cliff” but it was like Citizen Kane compared to “In Harm’s Way” - history’s worst movie.
Odd the way history moves. The IJN and the USN were, in a very real sense, born within five years of each other - the IJN in the Sino-Japanese War and the USN in the Spanish American War. And after Tsushima, both knew they existed ultimately to fight each other.
As for China the war with Japan was bigtime history. The Chinese knew the Western barbarians were clever with machines and had a certain skill at war (skill at war was a sign of barbarians in Chinese history) so losing battles to them, while bad, was understandable. But losing a war to Japan? That was unthinkable. Especially as the European powers had to protect China from a Japanese dictated draconian peace. That was it for the Manchus and 2,000 years of imperial history. The Boxers etc were just a footnote. There must be some smiles in Beijing now. (They make good models, so we have to cheer them on for at least that.)
I got to page 5 and turned back (a lot of reading there) Now , I definitely would like to see a whole series of these ship types . Why ? Well, when I was little (a loong time ago) The many toy ships I played with resembled them and the WW2 stuff looked like the future had intruded into the world already . They are unique and do fill a gap in the miniature version of logical progression of ship design at work here . The EMDEN history I already knew( Relatives from AUSTRIA and GERMANY immigrated BEFORE the *&$^ NAZIS ruined everything) So, now that we have them coming , I have to ask . How many ship types will we see? I particularly would like to see what was called ( " TORPEDO BOATS " ) the real forerunners to DD,S And how they progressed over the decades .Seeing them in three dimensions in miniature would give all of us a real appreciation of what these crews went through living and fighting these vessels. Boy , I bet they were wet ships ! tankerbuilder
Tanker: I think it depends on the perception of how well subjects like this sell. I think there’s a market for WWI stuff already, it just needs to come out and do well before they’ll get into the smaller ships.
There’s always resin. Maybe the 100th anniversary of WWI will help a little. WingNut is doing very nicely with their wonderful biplanes. But I want my 35th scale Reanult tank - it was the mother of all tanks and you’ve got to be nice to mothers. (Also the 50th anniversary of Vietnam - time does fly.)
i assume you are talking about TING YUEN. i don’t think it is FREETIME’s fault on this. my LHS has had this thing on order since april? SPRUE BROTHERS doesn’t list it which means it just isn’t available. and my DREADNOUGHT i pre-ordered from DRAGONUSA is shipping today and that has been a couple on months easy.,
it is frustrating though. maybe tha’s why i have 2 CHIH YUEN and a CHING YUEN (in my stash
Guys, here is one on eBay right now for a very reasonable price of 27.00 bucks with 8.00 bucks shipping. The seller is in Pennsylvania and has good feedback. If I were to be wanting one of these anytime soon I believe I would pick one up from this guy.
For what it’s worth White Ensign lists both Ting Yuen and Dreadnought as available. I’ve bought several items from them and they deliver very fast and their prices are very reasonable. (Prices are listed without VAT too.) Course their web site takes a little getting used to.
