HMS Tantalus

Weaver · June 15, 2018, 04:24:52 AM

Thanks for all the good wishes for my auntie folks - I shall pass them on of course. She's probably staying in hospital until next week now: they're struggling to keep her heart-rate down so she might yet need a pacemaker. She seems fine of herself and is more frustrated at being stuck in hospital than anything.

Still think I'm going to miss the deadline with the submarine. However, progress has been made.

1. Hull together and modified with bulges, 'skegs' (sea legs) and new hatches:

2. I forgot that the design needed maneuvering thrusters. Fitting transverse ones in the bow was no problem because I'm deleting the original torpedo tubes, so they just need oval scribed doors replacing with round ones. However, there's not much room in the aft ballast tanks because they have the drive shaft and a lot of other equipment running through them, and a self-imposed limitation is that none of the mods must be visible while the sub's on the surface. The solution I've adopted is steerable thruster pods hanging from the horizontal planes. Here are the pods, made from 1/72nd RP-3 rocket warheads and LVTP Buffalo idler wheels (God those things have proved useful!):

zenrat · June 15, 2018, 04:50:01 AM

Quote from: Weaver on June 15, 2018, 04:24:52 AM
...She seems fine of herself and is more frustrated at being stuck in hospital than anything...

That's a good sign.

Subs looking good. Going to have wheels or tracks for bottom crawling?

Weaver · June 15, 2018, 03:15:22 PM

Quote from: zenrat on June 15, 2018, 04:50:01 AM
Quote from: Weaver on June 15, 2018, 04:24:52 AM
...She seems fine of herself and is more frustrated at being stuck in hospital than anything...

That's a good sign.

Subs looking good. Going to have wheels or tracks for bottom crawling?

Well she never has seemed ill as such. She had a breathless-and-chest-pains incident last week, but it was thought to be stress/upset from my uncle's death (there are some stress conditions that mimic a heart attack but aren't one, technically), so the doc booked her in for an ECG on Tuesday and when they saw the results from that they whisked her straight into hospital. She was gobsmacked!

Nah, the sub's too big for bottom-crawling. All the real-world examples of spy-subs use thrusters to position themselves accurately and then drop onto the sea bed on skegs. The skegs might be fixed or retractable. I decided to go for fixed ones to save volume, but have them faired-in to reduce turbulence and hence drag/noise.

Weaver · June 15, 2018, 07:03:20 PM

Well the F**k-up Fairy seems to have moved in good and proper around here: just put a first coat of paint on the sub, in the middle of which it fell over, so it now has a lovely patch of dust and debris stuck to it's bow with black paint...

By no means unrecoverable, but it adds another paint/dry cycle that I don't have time for....

NARSES2 · June 16, 2018, 06:27:26 AM

Booger, I feel for you $:-\$

TallEng · June 16, 2018, 11:03:33 AM

Quote from: Weaver on June 15, 2018, 07:03:20 PM
Well the F**k-up Fairy seems to have moved in good and proper around here: just put a first coat of paint on the sub, in the middle of which it fell over, so it now has a lovely patch of dust and debris stuck to it's bow with black paint...

By no means unrecoverable, but it adds another paint/dry cycle that I don't have time for....

Maybe you can explain it away as 'made unintentional contact nose first with the sea bed'

(I believe the RN has 'form' for that sort of thing?)

Regards
Keith

Weaver · June 16, 2018, 12:45:17 PM

I sanded it down and repainted it, but I can't touch it now until tomorrow afternoon when it's had 24 hrs to dry. Handling it today, after only 8 hours drying, it felt like it was going to fingerprint if I held it too tightly.

PR19_Kit · June 16, 2018, 01:21:54 PM

Give it a coat of Klear over the sticky paint. I find that speeds up drying times, even on Xtracolor paints!

Weaver · June 16, 2018, 07:31:14 PM

Quote from: PR19_Kit on June 16, 2018, 01:21:54 PM
Give it a coat of Klear over the sticky paint. I find that speeds up drying times, even on Xtracolor paints!

It's some random rattle-can black from a car shop: not sure how it will interact with a clear coat to be honest...

Weaver · June 17, 2018, 02:55:08 PM

I'm not going to get this finished in time.

I've just spent an hour trying to get the pump-jet duct lined up and the masts in straight, and in the process established that the black paint is STILL fingerprinting. That makes me not at all confident that the decals will work out okay, so I'm going to give it another 24 hours of drying.