Shipbucket

Hi All,

Just putting a request out for anyone who may have digitised plans/reference drawings/photographs of the Minotaur-Class Light Cruisers of late-WWII, particularly of HMS Swiftsure/Supurb. My intent is to draw a prototypical representation of said ship/s to the current SB standards, then use it as a basis for creating an AU sub-Class of RN-style light cruiser for my Falkland Islands/DCFI AU project.

I have some basic (albeit quite poor) imagery of the ship from the interwebs and have access to digitised versions of a couple of the standard reference works by those such as Friedman and Brown & Moore [which do include some very basic plans], but i'd like to get my hands on some properly detailed and accurate reference imagery/plans for this project if they are indeed out there in the public domain and easily accessible. In particular, i'd love to talk to anyone who's got good quality pictures/plans of Swiftsure during her aborted 1957-59 modernisation, or plans of what she'd have looked like on completion.

Please either post in reply or send me a DM if you can assist.

Cheers,

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AU Democratic Commonwealth of the Falkland Islands (DCFI) [under development]

aren't Minotaur class the same as Crown class

https://laststandonzombieisland.com/tag ... s-cruiser/


Crown class
http://shipbucket.com/drawings/4301

My understanding of what I've seen/read led me to believe that whilst the Minotaurs and Tigers were in the Crown Colony/Fiji-class lineage, there were sufficient design differences in key areas such as overall displacement, superstructure design, armament layout etc for them to be considered at least a distinct sub-class rather than just repeat orders 'Fiji's.

Thank you for the links btw, however, I would note that the laststandonzombieisland article contains a few inaccuracies and errors [ie: the preserved HMS Belfast is described as a Crown Colony Class Light Cruiser - it is not, although Fiji's and Minotaur's are part of the same design heritage that goes back to the original 1936 Town-class design].

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AU Democratic Commonwealth of the Falkland Islands (DCFI) [under development]

Hi Oberon

Give me a day, I might be able to help

Cheers
GD

I've had a look in my files but I don't have anything on my HDs that would help sadly.
There are a couple of plans of Swiftsure/Superb in Friedman's British Cruisers, but are for August 1945 and January 1946 respectively.

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Hood's Worklist
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Hi Oberon

The ones Hood's referring to are the ones I have, too.

Nothing as-designed, or as-rebuilt, only as-completed.

Sorry
GD

I might have drawn something re Superb as completed

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Thanks Gents,

I have access to the digital version of 'British Cruisers' as an e-book but unfortunately, the plan of Swiftsure you refer to is too poor-a-quality to be of use (rubbish scanning quality when digitised). The superb image is however workable and I should be able to adapt the differences from looking at photographs of Swiftsure and some of the Ceylon-batch ships which shared much the same bridge layout.

On importing into Photoshop and trying to scale up the superb image however I came across a snag - if one scales the image based on the documented 'overall length' dimensions [555.5ft = 1111 Px in SB scale] any and all parts one would seek to use from the RN weapons parts sheet are out of scale by several pixels!.

Have any of you experienced the same issues and how have you overcome them??? [assuming that the parts sheet pixel drawings are to true SB scale...]

Cheers

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AU Democratic Commonwealth of the Falkland Islands (DCFI) [under development]

Hmm, that's interesting Oberon. How much are they out by?
What deck height are you getting on the resized drawing? circa 16-17 pixels?

I know I've drawn most, but not all, of the weapons on the RN parts sheet over the years. They should be fairly accurate, certainly within 1 pixel or so (smaller LAA might be a little oversize in SB scale).

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Interwar RN Capital Ships
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Never-Were British Aircraft

When the image is scaled as accurately as I can manage I get 16 pixels deck-to-deck.

To double-check my accuracy I overlayed my scaled plan with Portsmouth Bill/KW Vestergaard's SB drawing of HMS Jamaica and whilst the deck heights line up and the size of major components such as gun turrets are only about 1-2 pixels out vertically, horizontally the turrets are 4-5 pixels out and waterline hull length differs by approx 25-26 pixels. This is [of course] on ships that are supposed to have the same size hulls! Where am I going wrong?

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AU Democratic Commonwealth of the Falkland Islands (DCFI) [under development]