Shipbucket

I have always like the aesthetic of US heavy cruisers, particularly the treaty era ones. I went digging through Spring Styles for something a bit different to what was actually made and immediately took a liking to this long, sleek, flush-decked desgin with highly raked funnels. If you take the guns off it looks like a yacht or something.



Anyway, I have done some kitbashing before "onofficially" but I wanted to make a drawing of my own from scratch and this seemed simple enough on the one hand, but also large and pretty.

The sketch is obviously bare bones, so I added elements to flesh it out while keeping it as realistic as I could. I ended up making two versions.

For the first version, I tried to stay as close to the sheet spec as possible. The secondary armament listed on the sheet looks like nonsense, since it references a 4" AA gun that doesn't exist. However, I kept the intended batteries just swapped the calibers, so she has eight 4" low angle guns for torpedo boat defense, and four 3" AA guns. I omitted aviation facilities because they are not present in the original sketch nor mentioned on the sheet, and I was really struggling to fit them around all the armament clutter on the single deck she has.



The second version is fleshed out on the assumption the ship is built in the same timeline as USS Pensacola was historically. I added aviation facilities in the obvious place and reduced the secondary armament to the standard four 5"/25 DP guns, and added their associated height finders and directors.



I hope you like these! I may do more variants, either a hypothetical WWII refit of this design, or one of the other preliminaries in the same series, and add them to this thread if/when they materialise.

I've had a few rounds of feedback on the Discord channel but I'm open to more especially seeing as this is my first full drawing I do consider them "finished" at this point and I've been staring at them for a while, but I can be persuaded to do some further tweaks.

Beautiful ships!

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MS State Guard - 08 March 2014 - 28 January 2023

The Official IJN Ships & Planes List

#FJB

I'd like to see a version modified to 1945 standards. Excellent drawings!

Welcome aboard, very impressive drawings. Always good to see these USN never-weres brought to life.

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Hood's Worklist
English Electric Canberra FD
Interwar RN Capital Ships
Super-Darings
Never-Were British Aircraft

Yes very nice entry into the shipbucket! Welcome and good job!

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Shipbucket mainsite, aka "The Archive"
New AU project "Aravala"

I don't have much to add--great submissions.

Thank you all

I've started a different project but I will return to this to make a wartime version, I know what equipment I'm going to use and where to put it, just need to modify the drawing.

That sounds great! Looking forward to seeing it.

Very well done! Welcome aboard!