Every so often we decide to go big with our terrain projects and when that happens, something strange happens, we decide to plan stuff out!

Early sketched plans for our ship board....we pretty much stuck to this design on this one.

This project and series of articles will make it look like we are only building one ship, when in reality we are building two of them at the same time.  We are going big, because we can, and we like the idea of having a board that has some flexibility.  A couple of examples of setups would be as the diagram shows above, as a single ship with a dock attached to a beach, and as two ships with a pier in between the two and a beach on one side (for a larger scenario).

A freshly cut stack of polystyrene ready to be made into to large ships

One of the major components to construction of these ships was the fact that we decided to use a different type of adhesive from what we’ve used in the past.  We’ve decided to use liquid nails in combination with a couple of toothpicks to help hold these large beasts together.

Bottom layer of one of the ships

Freehand curve on the bow of one of the ships

The Trick to the “freehand” is to do one really well with a pen and then after cutting off the scrap, use that scrap to draw the other curve so it’s symmetrical.

Rather than add more foam to these ships, we opted to build just the walls to the box

More of the framing for the captains quarters

Finishing the first layer of the hollow shell of a captains quarters

Finished Captains quarters (the rough part of it anyways)

The reason we decided to make a hollow captains quarters is because we weren’t going to model the inside, and we will be putting steps that will accommodate large models rather than look accurate to scale.  We also where making a bit of a consideration of the amount of foam used to build this, and we were running short at the time!

Raised bow of the ship being trimmed up to fit

Completed front end of the ship

One ship roughly built

In the next article we will be showing off a few more of the building aspects of the ships.  We will be showing how we achieve the armor plating on the outside of the ship, the steps to get above the captains quarters, and possibly the beginning of the wood planking.

Click here to see Part 2