This is my latest completed (non-sailing) warship model. I also posted
this on Modelwarships.com, not sure if anyone will be interested in it
here but you never know!
Anyway, this is a rather long post as it explains both the history of the ship itself, and how I built the model.
The Ding Yuan (variously spelt as Ting Yuan and Ting Yuen, I believe
the name translates as "Eternal Peace", rather incongrously for a
warship) was built in the 1880s in Germany and was the flagship of the
Beiyang fleet (the first "modern" Chinese navy), along with its sister
ship Chen Yuan. It took part in the Sino-Japanese War but its combat
record was rather poor, and it was eventually sunk by Japanese
torpedoes. (For a description of the battle of the Yalu River in which
the ship fought, see
here
These two ships were of a type of early battleship usually known as the
"turret ship". Other examples are the RN ship
HMS
Inflexible, the German Sachsen-class and the Italian Duilio.
Unlike the Inflexible, the Ding Yuan had breech-loaded guns. Main
armament was four 12' guns mounted in two centrally-located turrets;
two 5.9' guns were mounted in secondary turrets at the bow and stern.
Some references say that 37mm guns were also fitted but I'm not certain
of this. (There are a number of pictures of a small-calibre gun on the
previously mentioned replica website). The hull also appears to have a
ram.
Two "vedette"-type steam torpedo boats were carried on board, each of
which had two torpedo tubes. This was not at all unusual for warships
of this period - there was even a RN cruiser (can't remember its name)
which was designed specifically as a torpedo boat carrier.
Also carried are 3 lifeboats and a steam pinnace.
What inspired me to build a model of this ship (not to mention take the
time to locate the kit on eBay!) was
this website, which
I think someone posted a link to on this forum a few months ago. A full
size replica of the Ding Yuan was built a few years ago in China,
apparently complete in every detail! It's nothing short of incredible
(shame this can't be done with a historic RN warship, for example!)
The site has many photos of the replica ship and is a very useful
source of reference material - definitely necessary considering how
much scratchbuilding + detailing the kit needs.
The kit is one of the Zhengdefu 33cm "box scale" kits, listed as 1/300
but scales out to around 1/280. As it's quite a small ship (compared to
20th-century warships) it wouldn't look too out of place in a 1/350
collection. It'd also look good alongside the other 19th century
warships in this scale range, such as the Oregon, Olympia and cruiser
Zhiyuen (the latter also a Zhengdefu kit), which is what I'll do when I
get round to building the latter.
It's a very interesting kit as it is (I believe) the only
injection-moulded kit of this early style of pre-dreadnought
battleship. However the quality of both the mouldings and detail is
typical Zhengdefu (anyone who's built one of their 1/48 tanks will know
what I mean) and it requires a fair amount of both cleanup and detail
scratchbuilding to produce a good model. Reference material is easy to
find thankfully due to the replica ship! See the end of the post for
the exact details of how I improved the kit.
The only serious inaccuracy (as opposed to crude or nonexistent detail)
in the kit is the turrets - these have a vertical ridged pattern and
large hatches on their roofs, in reality they are smooth cylinders with
a flange/ridge at the base and do not have roof hatches (presumably
access is from below). The cylindrical shape of the turret makes it
easy to "reskin" them with thin styrene sheet, which improves their
appearance a lot.
The torpedo boats and steam pinnace are also pretty awful (the torpedo
boats look like scaled-down cruise liners, and the pinnace resembles
one of those candle-powered tin toy boats), so it's best to just use
the kit hulls and scratchbuild the rest of them.
Other annoyances are the flanges on top of the larger vents (easily
sawn off), and the large "sockets" on the deck which the vents, davits,
etc. are meant to fit into; removing these (with a chisel-ended craft
knife blade) was a pain. The deck planking is also out of scale but I
couldn't face either rescribing it or recovering the deck with
plank-textured styrene - hence I just scribed some plank end gaps,
which improves the appearance even if the decks are several scale feet
wide!
The model was painted with Tamiya and Revell acrylics, and weathered
with artist's acrylics. The paint scheme was based on the replica ship
(missing only the white boot stripe). The ship's colour scheme during
the Battle of the Yalu River was apparently similar other than the
funnels (and possibly masts) being repainted grey.
Anyway, here are the photos:
Three overall views of the ship.
Detail closeups.
If anyone's interested, here's a list of the modifications and
additions I made to the basic kit - this may be useful if you're
thinking of building this kit in the future. I used assorted styrene
stock, thin black thread, copper chain, some Heller 1/400 railings, a
couple of 1/350 searchlights and anchors, four 1/200ish bollards (not
sure what kit they were originally from) and a few other small odds and
ends from the spares box.
- Drilled out all guns and vents.
- Drilled out all portholes.
- Drilled out bridge windows and filed the holes into a square shape.
- Drilled out anchor hawsepipes.
- Removed moulded anchors/chains and the locating rings for the vents.
- Removed moulded hatches from turrets roofs.
- Filled in screw and rigging holes in deck.
- Scribed plank ends on deck.
- Resurfaced the vertical surfaces of all 4 turrets with 0.25mm styrene sheet.
- Added "flange" to turret bases with 0.5mm square styrene rod.
- Scratchbuilt replacement funnel tops.
- Replaced funnel steam pipes with 1.5mm styrene rod.
- Reshaped the tops of the larger vents.
- Removed moulded "railings" around bridge deck and replaced with railings from the spares box.
- Scratchbuilt binnacle + compass on bridge roof + added searchlight and railings (removed the moulded ledge which
represents the railings)
- Scratchbuilt wheel in front of bridge.
- Replaced the mast cross-pieces with styrene rod.
- Added rigging to masts.
- Added searchlights (from the spares box) to the upper 2 spotting tops.
- Added bollards to deck (2 on either side)
- Added replacement anchors + chains.
- Added "ledge" below anchor hawsepipes.
- Scratchbuilt replacement deck and details for the 2 torpedo boats.
- Added planking, seats and scratchbuilt boiler/funnel to the steam pinnace.
- Added planking to the 3 other boats.