papierschnitzel

Wako pirate ship concept

Added 2018-10-04 09:29:04 +0000 UTC

After last month's gunship I want to go back to the Asian theme for October. I had planned to do the Samurai Villa building but to be honest I have not had the time to formulate the design to my satisfaction. So while I am in the groove on working on boats, I thought I'll start the Wako pirate ship. I have been wanting to do it for quite some time now.

I decided early that my reference will be the image from the Osprey book Fighting ships of the Far East (2). Most of the gaming builds I have seen, look like they also took this as their inspiration.

As usual I did a quick 3D mockup in Blender and then sketched some details over. In the sketch you see that the model will be about 14" long and 7" wide.

This will be somewhere in the middle between the kobaya and the sekibune (closer to the large one) from my Samurai Fleet builder set and a nice match for those boats!

Looking at the geometry of the Wako ship, the only challenge will be the railings. As they will be most fragile part, I want them to be detachable (for storage but also so you can rebuild them in case they get damaged over time).

I will also be working on the next ship from the Pirate Fleet builder series in the background - the Sloop - which I will release the month after.

For now I will get starting on the test build!

Happy building,

Chris