Victorian Science Fiction: How I Build Them

VSF is an alternative history in a world were steam powered technology is used to explore the world and beyond.

Victorian Science Fiction: How To Build An Iron Ram

The Larger Iron Ram

I seem to have lost some photos along the way. Here are some brief notes on what I do have.

The model provide several portholes along the sides of the vessel with two that were forward looking. These all called out to be converted into gun ports. I decided to places small guns in each of the sideways facing ports much like a wooden sailing ship of the mid nineteenth century. I made hatch covers out of thin card and glued them over these ports. I left some in the open position and one in the closed. For the forward looking ports I decided to mount large guns with curved gun shields. These were fabricated from aluminum tube and cut up pile jar for the shields.

This underside view shows the pile bottle shields glued to a spure used as a cross member. Some foam core was use to make an inner deck onto which can be mounted the smaller guns. The small guns were made from small plastic tube and a chunk of foamcore as a support.

Here is a close up of the types of guns represented.

The command tower is a very simple cylinder. It was formed by wrapping thin card round a pile bottle. Punch out of thin card were glued to make view ports and rivet studded bands were added to provide a Victorian era look. Some detail on how this is done can be viewed on my The Smaller Ram page and the Rivet making page.

This view shows a double row a rivets in a brass band above the door. This was used to help hide the union of the card used to form the cylinder. A small pin was added as a knob on the door.

This view show my attempt to match the contour of the hull with the base of the tower. Also a somewhat more sophisticated view port from by stacking a pair of punched bits of thin card.

Priming:

I decided to recover the work put into the structure originally intended for the Small Iron Ram's pilot house. I use it here as a deck house at the rear of this boat. To it I have added a few covered portholes and a door. You can see some of the difficulty in trying to compromise between the reduces scale of the ship and the scale of the figures. The deck structures are scaled to the figures so that and crew set on the deck will not dwarf them. This results in the deck structures looking too big for the hull. I felt the round pilot house was simply too tall looking sitting on top of the ship all by itself. The addiction of the rear deck house helps to reduce the visual impact of the pilot house. It still looks a bit clumsy, perhaps I can use the colors of the finial paint job to help in this. Added a few small details, a pair of hatches in the rear to load coal and a short mast to the pilot house to raise a flag on and some rails to help the crew stay on the curved deck. I then gave the model a quick coat of primer. Now it is time to research and consider the color scheme of the paint job.

More to come soon:

To return to The Iron Ram How To page, simply click here.

To return to The Building How To page, simply click here.

To see the finial models go to me Battles page VSF Battles.
Or you can go to the Model Gallery Page.
Or to head back to the The Victorian Science Fiction Page.

For more inspiration go to my Victorian Inspiration page or
theMajor General's. or THE AFRIBORIAN CAMPAIGN. pages.

I hope to be able to add more latter.

Thank you for looking:

DyeHard

You can write me at:
e-Mail

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.