Last night at the monthly IPMS Chapter meeting one of our newer members brought in this fabulous diorama. I had to share it with you guys here. It depicts USS Franklin as she was being assisted by USS Santa Fe after being bombed off the coast of Japan in the Spring of 1945. The Franklin is the Trumpeter kit and the Santa Fe an Iron Shipwrights kit. The photos that I took with my cell phone camera did not do this justice. Under the smoke were LEDs or some other lights to represent the fire in the hanger deck… anyways have a look for yourselves
Incredible job there, not only does the smoke look very convincing but that’s a zillion tiny figures, painting all of them is a job in and of itself.
You have some very talented guys in your club, heck about 75% of the guys in ours haven’t built a model in years- they buy kits, go to shows, constantly talk about all the great stuff they’re going to do but you never see any finished results…
Whoa! Now that is really remarkable. He has certainly applied some fine skills into the dio. I’m also taken by the shear number of figures depicted and painted. Impressive to say the least.
This is 1/350 scale guys. I dont beleive that the figures are PE, as they appeared more 3 dimensional. The fire/smoke effect was kind of washed out by my phone’s flash. It was far more black in the room to the Mk.I eyeball, and the red orange lighting from the hangar deck was more visible. Yes there were litterally scores of figures performaing all the various firefighitng tasks. The water spray from the lines to the fire was so simple to see it was a brilliant thought- its the twine that bundles many products for shipping stiffened into the appropriate shaped trajectories, and with lots of clear gloss or whatever to represent the water build up.
I saw lots of other guys taking photos (with better cameras & devices) so hopefully some will end up on our club website in the next week or so.
Stik - Thanks so much for posting this amazing work, lot’s of talent went into this project.
Question for you or others: I know zip about ships, wondering what the fire hoses from Santa Fe directed at Franklin gun stations were spraying them for, was it to cool ammo stored at/in them?
