Two events that happened at about the same time gave me an interesting idea.
The first event was common. I was browsing the Paper Modelers forum and came across a post in which the author complained that paper modelers did not pay enough attention to the post-war ships, especially modern ones. After a little thinking over, I agreed with the author. Indeed, there are few models of modern ships.
The second event appeared in the news. The British destroyer HMS Defender had sailed around the Crimean peninsula, causing a lot of noise in the Internet, TV and paper news. I became interested in the event and, naturally, in the ship, which became the center of attention of the whole world.
It turned out to be a modern destroyer class ship, built within the framework of the rules of modern naval architecture. The general principle of this approach to the construction of ships is the minimum visibility on radars.
Everything that could be hidden had been hidden in the hull of the ship and its superstructures. The hull and superstructures themselves are made with large inclined surfaces that effectively dissipate radar radiation. Thus, the ship becomes very inconspicuous and looks futuristic.
This immediately caught my attention. First, a very unusual shape. And secondly, I immediately thought that such a ship is much easier to model. It does not have such a huge amount of parts as on ships from WWII.
In short, despite the fact that I had already modeled the plane, despite the fact that I really do not like to take on a new business without having finished the old one, my curiosity overpowered and I fell into the temptation to try to quickly make an HMS Defender model. It seemed to me that I could make a ship with such simple shapes quickly.
However, I overestimated my capabilities. Although the ship is simple, the number of parts on it still remains very large, and I really didn’t want to greatly simplify the model. Then I thought that I would bring the project with the ship to some significant stage, and then I would see what to do next.
And so it happened. I modeled all the largest parts of the ship and stopped there for now. The decision was simple, first to finish the plane, and then return to the destroyer. After the airplane model, I will already have a clear idea of how to practically texture the models. And it will help me make the HMS Defender model the way I envisioned it. It will be simple and beautiful.
