Hello,

I am interested in building a 1/144 scale battleship. Does anyone have plans for your boats or a resource I could use to help myself make a 1/144 scale battleship? I can get blueprints and ship plans for the SS Suffren. This is the battleship I would like to build. I'd love to look at blueprints and any plans ya'll have for building boats so I can try my hand at it.

 

I'll be honest, I haven't built MOC in years.... Like 15. I've built with plans and even eyeball like a puzzle with my daughters. Some of this is my own rekindled passion after taking the girls to legoland and getting them some sets to build. They like to build and marvel. That's fine by me. I did that some myself. Eventually, all my sets became part of the melting pot until my lot was sold. I don't know what it would cost to get a decent set of bricks to try and build an MOC. I went ahead and downloaded LDD to try and get started. I'm curious how well I can do with it. I'm also curious how I can go from a LDD model to purchasing bricks so I can display this like I would want to do. My end game is to build it and sink it in my aquarium to enjoy as a massive ornament.

Is it possible to get plans for the pirate ships at the lego scale model exhibit? Those were awesome!

The blueprint shows the full hull. The top is water line up from the side and the bottom is in action renamed in 1944. I don't think this ship class was ever bedazzled but if anyone has experience with dazzling or can offer to the idea for an MOC, I'm all ears. 

Hi @prepmaster and a very warm welcome here at EB.

Now you have make your own topic and think that some people wanted help you furhter with your request.(beause you ask many times in someone else there topic to help, that i ask to make your own, to not spell there topics with ask that got nothing about there topics.

Because you wrote earlier that you have no experience in mocking and don't have many parts for this battleship in house.

You can order loose parts at www.bricklink.com and there are a lot of shops for you in de States to choose at, from new ore used parts.

I don't know how long and wide this ship is, but a ques it's somewhere about the 170 and 200 meters and 30 meters wide?!  

Than in scale 1/144 it will be at least  1.18 meters long and 20 centimeter wide.

There are two types of techniques styles to choose for building the hulls, studd up ore (SNOT) studd out and studd out gives you the most beautyfull hulls but a lot more difficult to build.

I don't know if you wanted make a complete ship ore only a waterline model, but for your first moc and ship it's a lot easier and cheaper to started with a waterline model.

For a quick calculation for a waterline model at that size, that you must think about the 10000 parts and depents all how much detail you wanted at to.

I don't like myself LDD for making a one of a kind model and started building with the blueprints and calculate it back in scale.

If you have any more questions please let us know.

Edited January 12, 20187 yr by Edwin Korstanje

Welcome to EB, prepmaster!

It is always a good idea to search as many builds as possible, and find out what you like the most...by size, techniques used etc...There are lot of great ship builders here.
It may be a good idea to check out our Pirate forum, too. There are lot of ships that could give you some insights on how these bigger ships look inside and how they grow etc.

Also, you have Edwin here, who is really good with ships!

 

I would say you made a bold choice, one that might discourage you in the process of getting it done. To get your rusty skills up you might want to start with something less bold or smaller. 

I did some small research today of the SS Suffren and a great choice and for a 196 meter long and 20 meter wide ship is almost a speedboat with a topspeed of 32 knots(59 km) and 75000KW power.

French_heavy_cruiser_Suffren_in_Hampton_Roads_on_15_October_1931[2] by VFracingteam, on Flickr

In the scale you wanted to build her it's gona be in 1/144 a 1.36 meter(4.46 feet) long and 13.8 cm(0.45 feet) wide. Calculate in LEGO studs and it's 170 studs long and 17.25 studs wide. Here you can find a great tool how to calculate very easy it back in Lego studs and is from our good friend Sariel http://studs.sariel.pl/.

I don't know how big your budget is and if you have the time and patience to do some project and you must think at least at € 1700,00(USD 1900) for the bricks, 300 hours work and a lot of fail and rebuild.

If i was you, than for your first ship, with no experience the best choice is a waterline model and the innerstruction of the hull is the most important that it's strong. Also the best choice to start with a hull that's studs up and is a lot more easy to build than stud out.

When you wanted make a complete ship with underwater hull than you have to think about a 5000 parts extra.

I build know over the 4000 ships and construction kits for shipyards and shipowners, but they are all commercial ships and never build a real warship, but your SS Suffren is very good to build in LEGO.

To give you some examples what you can build with diffent techniques from stud out, stud up ore the hulls and superstructures with LEGO Technic and hope what you ever try build that you choice, to go for the best details you can build. 

 

20414330_292935011177134_9054423914671458000_o by VFracingteam, on Flickr

Nieuw Statendam 22 by VFracingteam, on Flickr

SEA AXE FCS 5009 Coast quard by VFracingteam, on Flickr

Triton met Logo 3drw by VFracingteam, on Flickr

004 by VFracingteam, on Flickr

003 by VFracingteam, on Flickr

Damen Shipyard 002 (2) by VFracingteam, on Flickr

Damen Shipyard 001 (2) by VFracingteam, on Flickr

V12 Caterpillar+logo 1_1 by VFracingteam, on Flickr

107_0790 by VFracingteam, on Flickr

Greetings Edwin

 

 

You're not hijacking this topic now are you Edwin...? 

39 minutes ago, Legorigs said:

You're not hijacking this topic now are you Edwin...? 

I hope not @Legorigs and only wanted help @prepmaster to give him some ideas with different techniques. his ask for got some building instructions of ships, that i can't give because the exclusive rights for my clients, that i only want help him with pictures and advice.

On 1/12/2018 at 6:43 PM, Edwin Korstanje said:

I hope not @Legorigs and only wanted help @prepmaster to give him some ideas with different techniques. his ask for got some building instructions of ships, that i can't give because the exclusive rights for my clients, that i only want help him with pictures and advice.

Ah!!! That would have been glorious though. Let me ask you this, Edwin, do you have any unused plans or could I see technique or part diagrams for a hull? That's honestly what is bothering me. Maybe just some close up views so I can guess?

Well, I looked at some pictures on the internet and watched some videos on youtube. I think I have an idea of what I need to do. Next dilemma on my mind is how do you order parts? Is there a parts catalog? Do I need to be giving catalog numbers? catalog names? I may go ahead and do 1/35 scale if for some reason that becomes affordable. I like the idea of minifigure scaling after see the USS Missouri by Daniel. That was impressive. 25ft of impressive!

At http://www.bricklink.com you can order by hundreds of sellers new and used parts.

4 hours ago, prepmaster said:

Well, I looked at some pictures on the internet and watched some videos on youtube. I think I have an idea of what I need to do. Next dilemma on my mind is how do you order parts? Is there a parts catalog? Do I need to be giving catalog numbers? catalog names? I may go ahead and do 1/35 scale if for some reason that becomes affordable. I like the idea of minifigure scaling after see the USS Missouri by Daniel. That was impressive. 25ft of impressive!

For me personally, I have a decent collection of parts from my childhood but I mostly build virtually. I will use my collection to prototype sections and techniques. Then I will complete the build in Lego Digital Designer, LDraw, or Stud.io. I will then use that file to create a BrickLink wanted list and use the tools on BrickLink to buy the parts at a decent price. 

I noticed you want to maybe build at a very large scale. It will be EXPENSIVE to build that large. An example is this Mini-Fig (1/40 ish) scale Star Wars AT-AT. It's 17.5 inches high, about 17.5 inches long and 6 inches wide. It also has 2500 parts and ordering all of those parts will run north of $250 after shipping for multiple orders. I just ordered 300 pieces to complete a MOC and its $30 before shipping from 3 different sellers. It will be about $40 all in for that one. 

For a very large ship I would recommend surfing craigslist/offer-up/ebay for large bulk sales that you can pickup for less than $7-9 per pound. Then figure out a away to sort them into a usable arrangement so that you can make the sub-structure from a rainbow of color but have the correct colors sorted for the hull, deck, and super-structure details. This will be very time consuming but you can get the price per part down to a reasonable amount but a couple hundred thousand parts will still run over $5k and thats before you invest time in cleaning/sorting/storing. That also is all before you can start even building. 

I know this all sounds discouraging but this sounds like your first MOC and a very ambitious one at that. I would hate for you to start just ordering parts en masse without some experience under your belt. That alone can cost tons of wasted money and time.  

I would honestly recommend that you work on a small project or 2 just to get yourself familiar with the MOC process of Design, Prototype, Re-Design, Order Parts, Build, Re-Build, Re-Order, etc..... Then once you are feeling good about how to navigate the process, dive in on this super cool monster. 

Amen to that @supertruper1988+1

What i find a bit strange is that noone mentioned what would be my first step when doing anything in a scale: grab a few blueprints of the original (preferably a side-view and a top view), get a drawing program on your PC (I use paint.net), open the various images and draw aligned grids over them to determine the size in studs. Then, when you have that, you can start taking your bricks and "following the lines" on your grid so that the shape of your build matches the shape of the model.

(Now I'm not a scale builder, but I sometimes use scale references like this for my Technic builds)

You would get something like this: (I just picked any scale for example's sake). In my example, every grid cell is 1 by 1 stud, so this assuming studs-sideways building. if you want to build studs-up, or studs-forward (relative to the ship's orientation), then your grid changes, because bricks are not cubical but area actually cuboids whose height is 1.2 units (so a 1 x 1 brick is 1 x 1 x 1.2 units).