Kolonialbeamter

Simply WOW! Thank you so much for that review, well done! Great collection! You would have been my personal hero during the 90's As for the board game, it didn't come with my set, I never even heard about it before... Those drawings look so adorable! Keep up the good work, looking forward to the next review. Regards

Thanks for bumping this amazing ship. She truly is terrifying! Very impressive! How is the rebuilding coming along? Good luck with her!

She features more or less the same interior as Sans Pareil, meaning chain pumps, stove, bulkheads, a (hopefully) working rudder. But only one double capstan. But... slightly more cannons... Oh, and I hope you've found your jaw back by now! Thanks for all your input. I think I'll stick to the first version, since you don't seem to dislike it too much, and in my eyes it's just more impressive and therefore better fitting to the the ship's (and the Bluecoats') glory. However, I like the idea of the telescopes, they come in gold... I'll keep that in mind for another update, thank you. And using those would seem like a proper Lego translation of an Océan-Class ship of the line's stern design. After some very time consuming LDD sessions, here's an update! During the last week I finally found the courage to deal with Impérial's bow, as I wasn't really convinced by it, especially not by the headrails... oh, and yes, they are annoying to deal with in LDD... Anyway, I finally managed to reshape those, plus the bow as a whole is now a bit pointier, and I extended the beakhead. Messing around with the lower hull, I got the idea of angling it from midship running aft, getting rid of these 'segments', to give the ship a sleeker appearance. Here's a screenshot of my 'shipyard', showing both methods. Orange is my working color for black for reasons of contrast, the red part is what's new. HighRes Pictures @mybrickshelf when public C&C very welcome, Thanks for watching Regards

These are the words I want to hear! I agree with Horry, It's always a joy to see a new update. And this technical one is especially enjoyable. Eagerly waiting for your personal nightmare Remember, what doesn't sink you makes you stronger. Thanks for letting us be part of this venture, and good luck with the final stage! Regards

Hi there, lovely little ship you've got here, and welcome on board. I hope, however, unlike a real bulldog it won't drool all over the crew. I very much like your midship curving and the ornaments at the stern. Not such a big fan of the ram, though. Your flickr-account is full of interesting MOCs. Very much a fan of the seaside scene. Will you introduce some of them here? Regards

I took the advice and messed around with the stern a bit, making it one stud narrower per side, reshaping that horseshoe, and 'lifting' the galleries. For comparison I applied a thinner horseshoe. I'm not sure, but I still tend to the first solution, it has more of a radiating 'here I am!' effect, more glamour... Or maybe I'm just too much used to that variant. What do you think? Larger pictures @mybrickshelf when public. Thanks again

If this works out as well as I hope it does, it'll be a great method to combine light weight sail cloth/material with realistic shaping. Waiting eagerly for your results! BTW, you then might want to think about introducing your solution to DPW, since he seems to be facing this 'no wind' problem with light weight sails on his HMS Persephone. Regards

Thanks for your input, I very much appreciate it! Concerning the slopes I must say, they are integral part of the tumblehome, so I'm afraid right now there's nothing I can do about it. I'd have to rethink the ship's structure to replace them, and at the moment I'm out of ideas... The stern on the other hand is easier to handle. The grilles mean to represent all the stern decorations, focus was on parts that are flat and golden. So this solution is again a compromise of shape, color, and structure. I'll try to apply a one stud-wide design and to improve the lower part of the 'horseshoe'. Let's see where that leads us. Thanks again! Thank you, it was actually my first attempt at 'building' water, and I'm quite pleased with the way it turned out. Unfortunatelly, taking some hands full of these doesn't work in LDD...

Great work! I especially like your use of white tiles around the ship's waist. And concerning the sails, I'm stunned by your idea with the metal wires! Or has this been done before, and I'm just out of it? Anyway, I love it! Regards

Thank you my Lord, looking forward to see both of them. Brick on!

You can find the discussion here. Regards

Thanks, I've added both of them as an attachment to the end of post #1. Enjoy! Thank you Louie - man with a thousand faces outfits (thumbs up for the new one!) - for these words and for blogging! Always glad to annoy! But seriously, I've been building these ships for more than two years now, and produced quite some 'outtakes' along the way. And there's still a lot to improve. But my ships wouldn't exist without this forum here! I can only try to give back a little. Here's a shot of Impérial's aft-section with a closer look on the swivel guns. The golden part in the middle is this one, it's 'barrel diameter' works well. Oh, and I'm working on something new, that hopefully will work as a base for a tutorial. But it will take a while. Good to know! But I'm afraid she won't see the light of real bricks until then. BTW, don't know if anyone noticed, but it seems a distant fleshy cousin of Sebeus is Impérial's second-in-command.

Hi there, my candidates: Frigate: Fleur de Lys, Sloop: Mignonne. If historical accuracy matters to you, here's more reading (on frigates). Good luck to ye, me Lord!

Splendid model of an underrepresented ship typ, great choice of colors, lovely details and characters, fantastic scenery. Oh, I just can't get enough of that sort of water in MOCs. And how I wish TLC had an official part equivalent to Brickarms' universal clip... Marvelous!

I watched the first episode yesterday, and it was quite promising. I hope this is somehow an expression of a new desire for pirates/age of sail related adventures in pop culture... Maybe becoming the Pirates's equivalent to "Game of Thrones"... A man can dream Thanks for finding!

Hi there, not sure I fully understand your question, but why don't you check out bricklink for inspiration. The Viking bow element you're referring to comes in three colors. However, more common here are these and these, along with their related midsections here and here. The "old" midsections from the 90's feature an even greater variety in sizes and colors. Regarding brown, there are three different shades, classic brown, reddish brown and dark brown. All in all, there's plenty of material to choose from. Good luck with your ship! BTW, don't forget to check out the Ship MOC Index for even more inspiration! Regards

Very nice! With this level of preparation, retaking the capital will surely be successful! Just one thing. I don't really know how to address this issue... but... I think... you have an owl-molester (a mowlester, so to speak) amongst your men! And now, back to Pirates! Brick on!

... Belgian motorways... Clever way to improvise! Sure, it sucks not to have all the necessary parts at hand, but you managed your way around this obstacle quite successfully. Thanks for sharing! Regards

[pid][/pid]158 C Ahoy! I'm proud to present to you my biggest project so far, the 120-gun Ship of the Line Sans Pareil. Construction began in January 2012, even before that of Vengeur, and I had finished her basic looks way before I finished any of my prefab hull ships. I started out in real bricks, but every budget has limits, so LDD had to do the rest. It did, and here she floats: Poor Redcoats. She is a modular build, as you can see here. And can hold a full interior. You can't really see it in this picture, but using some string the ship's wheel can actually be connected to the tiller, creating a working rudder (at least I hope so ). Furthermore, all the (brown) walls in the officers' areas are made to be removed to create a realistic battle environment. The key elements to her structure are these (old style) hinges. They are – unlike the new ones – completely flat and have hollow studs, which means they can be placed in half-stud distances, great for shaping, especially for that transition between the middle and upper gundeck. She's been my main project for a long time. However, she has always felt strange to me in a way, never was a true love-child. I can't really put my finger on it, maybe it's due to her obscure scale. Her waterline measures 116 studs in length (equaling around 90cm), length overall is 180 studs (1,40m), the lower gundeck is 30 studs wide. I guess that's roughly 2/3 minifig scale. So she doesn't qualify for that. But neither does she qualify for minifig illusion scale. I wouldn't even put her in the same category as Dread Pirate Wesley's excellent HMS Persephone. The relative height of her hull does bother me. But maybe it's mostly the SNOT technique I used for the hull but never really grew fond of, because it doesn't allow for adjustments nor to be fiddled around with... At least in LDD it is extremely frustrating ... Like for example I know the waterline clearly needs reworking, she's got to be lower and should enter the water at an angle of almost 90°. But in order to achieve this, I would have to change the entire base structure, not to mention all the hinges... It'd be an unbelievably time consuming act. I don't know if I'll ever update her. Anyway, she is a Behemoth, a monstrosity in some sense. She will always be a unique shape in my fleet, forever 'sans pareil'. 11700+ parts (Lego structure only) HighRes. pictures @mybrickshelf Thanks for watching, C&C as always welcome! If you have questions, please ask! Regards

This polishing is exactly my problem with her; even small improvements, minor adjustments are very hard to achieve. The hull indeed is very smooth. But this technique proved to me very inflexible. Sophisticated, but at last a dead end. Building her always more felt like sculpting rather than constructing, something I never managed to recreate on another ship. And I like the idea of having a common technique linking my ships with each other. I once tried to build a frigate using this hinge-technique. Found it too complicated, I gave it up. In comparison, the – so to say – standard technique following CGH's frigate tutorial, proves much more versatile and satisfying. Usable on prefabs, custom hulls, for carracks as for ships of the line. What brings me to a glimpse onto what's ahead. Yes, I will (eventually) build something in real bricks, unfortunately this won't be until in a few years from now. But I have a designated WIP, that I'm going to present to you real soon, in fact, pictures are rendering as I'm writing this. Again, it's digital, again it's a first rate ship of the line, again Bluecoat... based on the look of Vengeur... how very boring ... But featuring a custom brick built lower hull technique (waterline to gundeck), that I consider a neat equivalent to the standard upper hull technique! LDD... could be better. It still has basically the same range of tools it used to have. But at least TLC still supports the program, bricks are updated regularly, which is very nice! To “get into” LDD you don't need much time, it's very intuitive to use, quick to learn and you have (almost) all the bricks you need, when you need them. Sure, for more elaborate creations you need to build yourself some tools in order to simulate gravity, but all in all I think it offers a lot. I suggest you give it another try. Here's the carronade you're referring to. I got the design from DPW's HMS Persephone, credits to him (or to whomever first came up with it). Thanks for reading, Regards

Thank all of you for your comments and kind words. Firstly, I'm afraid to disappoint those that hope to see her in real bricks some day, for I'm not going to build her. It's not mostly due to budget, but rather to a pursuit of perfection. And I'm not really happy with her. So I surely will break up at least her midsection as soon as I need the space. Maybe I'll keep what exists of the bow. But that doesn't at all mean the Redcoats are off the hook! Thank you so much for blogging! It's quite an honor to me. The captain appears less impressed, but he's probably just doing his duty, planning the next move against the Redcoats. Can't fool a Ship Expert, can you? Yes, she's based on – or let's say more than heavily influenced by – HMS Victory. My material was more or less limited to Perfectionist's pictures of her here at the master index. I build her at a time when I had no clue as to what a ship has to look like, what belongs where, and so on. Like learning to write letters, I merely tried to copy elements without an understanding of the concept behind that, what I was copying. That might explain things like the one or other gun port in an off position. Plus, I originally build her to Victory's correct gun port pattern, but due to her height, she appeared stubby, so I lengthened her. A detail I took over from Victory is a little batch marking the place where Nelson was mortally wounded during the battle of Trafalgar. It's represented by a chrome-golden 1x1 tile right at the feet of the ship's captain. To the Bluecoats this represents idontknowwhat, maybe the place of yet another Redcoats' surrender in the latest battle. Every picture showing her finished is a picture of her LDD model. It's not photoshoped or the like, it's a software called POV-Ray, that allows you to generate photo realistic renderings of your creations. Here's a shot of the related LDD perspective as-is. I hope your kids know to appreciate their father as quite a promising builder himself! Good luck! Future ships will feature cannons. But believe me when I say, placing over a hundred of them onto tiled gundecks without the help of the opposable thumb and gravity is more than annoying! If anyone is interested in a particular shot of her, just tell me. Regards

Hi, I'm more than glad you're still working on her. She is a most exciting project to follow and very promising. I adore the lower hull and think not using tiles is the better choice. I first thought differently, and took the liberty (hope you don't mind) to make a quick design comparison. Here's your design covered with tiles and those little slopes compared to the original. I think especially the slopes don't generate a nice effect when put next to each other. Can't wait to see more. So, selfish as I am, I demand from you to build faster! Brick on!

It has, indeed. Although it's - I think - rather the number of polygons that truly matters. Therefore, tiles are "better" than studded bricks, worst parts I found in LDD so far are those I use to represent the rigging. They eat up a lot of computing power and memory space. And LDD is a pretty old program by now, not capable of handling today's hardware. I have models up to 30000+ parts, and my computer usually get's significantly slower after around 15000 parts. Some tips: If you turn off "show outlines on bricks" and If you hide a part of your creation that you don't need to see during building, your computer should perform better. And try hiding all bricks when saving your creation; this helps me a lot. Raise the (right) colors and brick on! Regards

Hi, this sounds very interesting. Never heard of PeBe, but surely gonna ask my parents about it. Despite having received the one or other small set as a western relative's present and my grandmother and father both having had quite a number of old bricks from the 70's (I guess), my "Lego-age" only began after the reunification of Germany. Thanks for sharing this interesting find! Regards

Hi, if you're not too much of a purist, and you consider they are less rigid, try cutting one of these to the appropriate length. Regards