Building the Beast

My updates have been a little sparse over the past couple of months. While I've had my reasons for not posting (including work and that I injured my shoulder), I am hoping to have more posts as I get ready for the Enfilade 2013 convention.

To kick this off, I'll post some information about one of my Enfilade projects. The game title for this project is "Hunting the Beast" and covers the Operation Tungsten raid. This is a joint effort with Kevin; he is providing the Fleet Air Arm planes and I'm bringing the German planes and the target for the raid, the battleship Tirpitz.

I started off with the 1/700 scale Tirpitz kit from Aoshima. The kit is a pretty standard naval model and I'm not planning on doing anything too fancy with the kit (no photo-etch parts this year after the trouble I had on last year's project)

I took a couple photos of the construction, but they really weren't that interesting (just a gray kit that you couldn't pick out many details on). I'll just say that I didn't have any problems putting the ship together (even though all the instructions are in Japanese). The model itself represents the 'as-built' version of the ship, without torpedo tubes (added in late-'41) or the heavier anti-aircraft armament featured on the ship during the Tungsten raid. My guess is that not too many of the players will notice the missing items, especially since Tirpitz is only a target and flak platform for the game.

I'm using the paint scheme information from this website as a basis for my paint job. Here is an 'in-progress' photo of the paint job I'm using on the ship.

 I've still got some work to do, but the camouflage pattern seems to be coming through okay. Painting the super-structure is kind of a pain (lots of little parts in the way) and I doubt I will get it to be exactly like the historical version. It won't win any modeling awards, but it will probably get a 'thumbs-up' in the TLAR (That Looks About Right) department.

Kevin and I are going to get together this coming weekend to walk-through the game. So I'll try to snap a few photos of that to give everyone an idea of how the 1/700 scale ship looks with 1/300 scale planes.