KuK Radetzky
by Paul Helfrich

1/2400 KuK Radetzky (Viking Forge)

Here's a small-scale tribute to a country that not only no longer has a navy - it doesn't even have a coastline anymore. I'm speaking of Austria, of course, and in its glory days as the Austro-Hungarian empire, its territory included all of what would later become Yugoslavia (now Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, etc). This gave them an Adriatic coastline and a natural naval rivalry with Italy.

The Radetzky-class battleships had a main armament of four 12" guns and a secondary armament of eight 9.4" guns. Although built after the British "Dreadnought" revolutionized capital ship building, they were basically a conventional "pre-dreadnought" design. Radetzky, along with her sisters Zrinyi and Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand, saw mostly coastal bombardment action during the Great War. They were all turned over to the Italians after the armistice and subsequent fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and were scrapped in Italy in the 1920s.

The Viking Forge 1/2400 ships are not nearly as detailed as the GHQ line, but with the addition of some stretched-strue masts, they're not too bad, considering the small scale.