On a long and boring night shift with nothing better to do I decided a bit of gratuitous Googling was in order. After many hours perusing many ships and boats of various shapes and sizes, I decided that I like this one. It's just about wierd and obscure enough to catch my interest.

This is the French battleship
Charlemagne, one of three of the class built between 1894 and 1899 seeing service from 1897 to 1931. They were 386' 2" long with a beam of 66' 7" and kitted out with:
4x twin 305mm main turret guns
10x single 5.5" guns
8x single 100mm guns
20x single 47mm guns
and finally
4x 450mm torpedoes mounted in pairs above and below the waterline.
In my preferred scale the model works out at roughly 775mm long.
Armed with what is actually quite a comprehensive set of drawings that I also found on the internet, I came up with these working drawings for the laser cutter.

...and this is what I've achieved so far.


Eventually it will be driven by 3x 385 motors and a 9 or 12v battery - tests will prove which is more appropriate later in the build.
So much for the hull then.
The superstructure will be a whole different set of challenges - there's quite a lot of it. Maybe I'll go all out and have rotating turrets, operating casements and an ultra level of detail, maybe I won't. I don't know yet. It all depends on how complicated I want it to be and my finite knowlege of all things R/C.
In common with my habit of stretching reality a little, I've decided that this model will be of an imaginary fourth ship of the class, named
Napoleon - for obvious reasons - and in that way, if I get anything not quite right then prove it Mr Rivet Counter.