In the Navy - a larger scale

If you browse the posts under the 'Naval' label you'll see that I have got a large collection of small, wooden toy ships. My recent thinking has been about producing something bigger and more accurate - and since a while I really liked pre-dreadnoughts.

Those wooden toys are supposed to be something like that anyway, but I looked at some blueprints and decided that, while keeping things simple (so all ships will be the same length and have similar designs), something new, and larger, is needed.

These are the pixelated plans of a bunch of ships. Based on proportions of a digital Russian battleship blueprint, I made a 1:1 rough plan of the first model on paper to see the real dimensions of the thing: with the average battleship being about (and usually slightly longer than) 100m, a model would be 18cm long and roughly 3-4cm wide, so the scale is closest to 1/600. A cruiser, then, would be about 14cm long. This larger scale spares me some of the more fiddly work I would have to do with 1/1200 or similar sized vessels.

The hull will be made of balsa wood along with most other props like the bridge and probably the main turrets. To my understanding balsa is easy to work with and if all else fails I can still use it for something else. Most hulls have very distinct features including upper and lower decks, and a 6mm & 8mm thick piece will be used: as can be seen on the picture, the two switch their relative places on the two battleship types of both navies. I did not bother much with historical accuracy in the end.
The main guns and masts will be made of wooden sticks and other gun barrels and whatnot from wire. I have some trouble with the ventillation funnels, they are a very distinct feature on these ships but I believe they can be made out of bent plastic sprues in the appropriate size. For the smokestacks I'm planning on using plastic tubes 6mm wide.
I still need to get some fine sanding sticks besides materials for the project, but these will be acquired soon enough.

The fleet will be Jackewlinese and their opponents will be those of the Veuden Confederacy. The setting is similar to the Fleet Grey - Fleet Green setting, with submarines and airships available. On first try I'll make a pair of both Jackewlinese and Veuden ships (plus probably some cuirsers) and run a test battle, likely on a large area in the house, considering the scale.

Other news:
I'm receiving a large amount of traffic from China on the blog, must be the bots again. Further proof is that it is mostly on older posts.
And only one exam remanining in this term after an extremely lucky chain of them and then two weeks of freedom and painting mayhem :)