Folks:
I guess this fits into the general category of "turning lemons into lemonade."
The Lindberb model of the Virginia / Merrimack is pretty dreadful: a one-piece hull and one piece superstructure with a few add-on pieces (cannon barrels, smokestack, cowl vents), so I decided to experiment a bit and use some parts out of the old spares box to see what I could come up with. I decided to build a "what if" version of the model depicting what the Virginia might have looked like later in the war if she had not been destroyed.
I added shutters for the gun ports, added two larger boats and some derricks to handle them, and painted the casemate gray and weathered it quite a bit (the Virgina's casemate was originally painted black, but it seems as though later Confederate ironclads were painted gray) . The gun port shutters were typically hinged on a corner, but I modeled them after the vertical shutters on the CSS Atlanta since they seemed a bit more interesting.
If anyone is interested, I'll post some better pictures later this week.
Now that I'm through fooling around, I can get back to the Firefighter.
