by Dennis Vella
1/192 HMS Rodney (Scratchbuilt)
HMS Rodney was the second ship of a class of 2 built under the constraints of the Washington Naval treaty of 1922 and although the designers came up with a number of novel features to reduce overall weight,they could not manage to create a design with the three most important battleship requisites. Armour, Armaments and Speed. Of these three, speed was the one to "suffer" and the class had a top speed of only 23 knots which while still the equal of that of WW1 Battleships was by 1940's standard well below that of WW2 battleships.
Never the less on the eve of WW2 these two ships were the most powerful battleships in service with any combatant navy and in reality they gave, especially HMS Rodney, a good account of themselves.
The model
The ship was modeled as she was in 1929/1930. The model is based on the A&A plan at 1/192 scale with additional details obtained mainly from the book “British Battleships” by Raven and Roberts and from a number of photographs used to check the details shown on plan.
The material used is balsa for the hull and superstructure while brass was used for small items including guns, masts, shafts etc. The paint scheme is the inter wars grey in use at this time.
The model took around 385 hours to finish and was built in the middle 80's.
