P Class Luftschiffe LZ 45 L 13 (Paper and KSP replica all in one)(now with an update down in the comments)

[kapteenipirk]

And here comes the very special post just a day after a very special day (22.10. my b-day).

 

As the title suggests, you will get to see a super detailed replica of a German WW1 airship, aswell as a 1.6m long 3D papermodel of the same exact ship.

 

HISTORY AND TECHNICAL DATA OF LZ 45 L 13

The LZ 45 (as it was known by it army register) L13 (as know by its navy register) is one of a series of 22 P Class Zeppelins built for the german army  to serve as navy patrol ships and bombers.

Technical data LZ 45:

Length:163.5 m

Height:21.962 m

Width:25.789 m

Diameter: 18.69 m

Volume:32000m³

Engines:4 x Maybach C.X, 210hp, 1200 rpm

Mass:21470kg

Crew:18 to 20:  (Executive Officer, Commander, Navigator, Sailmaker (responsible for gasbags), Chief Engineer, 2 altitude coxswains, 2 steering coxswains, 8 engineers)

Armaments:

 7 or 8 machine guns: water-cooled MG-08 (navy version), air-cooled Parabellum MG 14 (army version).

 2,000 kg bombs (a greater load could be carried with reduced fuel load).

 

The design of P-Class ships varied between the years. For example, LZ 72 and LZ 38 had earlier gondola designs and LZ 60 had experimental ones. There where also some differences in rudder design.

The LZ 45 portrays the most common design configuration.

LZ 45 was built by the Luftchiffbau Zeppelin in hall 1 at Friedrichshafen and entered service in July.24.1915.

It survived thru the war and and served as a training ship for a while (a white stripe was painted on the nose), and was also the first of the airships to bomb London, dropping a total of 20,667 kg of bombs during its career.

The ship and its commander Käpitanleutnant Heinrich Mathy logged a total of 159 flights, 17 of witch where bombing raids and 45 of witch where reconnaissance flights.

Lz 45 was decomissioned in late April 1917 and was scrapped in the December of that year.

 

GENERAL INFO ABOUT THE P CLASS

The P class was a new design that was larger than preceding designs and introduced enclosed crew accommodation (open on preceding ships). It also introduced a new more aerodynamic design.

These included a front command car with a glass house like command room, a radio room and a captains rest area with two large openings with MG-mounts on either side. Connected to that is the front engine car, with a single engine that drove a propeller trough a reduction gear. These two cars where connected with a strip of fabric, this was done keep the vibrations of the engine out of the command car.

The rear gondola had three engines mounted in line. One drove a propeller at the rear similar to the front engine car, while the two others drove propellers mounted on the side of airships body trough a reduction gear. The propellers on the side where slightly offset to one another due to the position of the reduction gears into witch the propeller axles had to connect. Large openings for MG's can also be found on the rear engine car.

3 defensive MG's where on a platform located on top of the bow of the airships body, this could be accessed by a long ladder that went from the top of the ship to the corridor at the bottom of the airships body. This corridor also connects the two gondolas and has the bomb-bays in it as-well.

Amount of bomb-bays varied between army and navy versions. It is believed that army version witch needed a greater range to reach places like London had fewer bomb-bays, while the navy versions had more as they where mostly used in patrol missions.

 

You can read the Wikipedia article about the P Class if you want info on the structural design of the hull and history of other P Class vessels.

Spoiler

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin_P_Class

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Zeppelins

Some of the P Class vessels where converted to the Q Class witch was nearly identical, minus an extra 15 meters of length to allow the airship to have a larger volume witch allows it to fly higher making it harder to shoot down.

 

CAMO PATTERNS

As,with anything military related, P Class airships sported a variety of different camo patterns.

Spoiler

You can see LZ 38 is sporting the early type rear engine gondola witch has a flat bottom.

 

INCASE YOU WHERE WONDERING

Some of you might be wondering that "hey, i think ive seen this in Battlefield 1", Altough it may look very similar, the behemoth in Battlefield 1 is an R class "super zeppelin", the L30.

Spoiler

 

THE PAPER MODEL

Time to go to the actual project.

The Model that i built was designed by Thorsten Brand and can be found here http://www.landships.info/landships/models.html#  if you want to make you own.

But, i warn you, it one of the most difficult models ive ever seen, and also one of the most well researched and detailed. It would have been almost impossible for me to do properly in it's original scale witch is 1:144, that's why i printed it in A3 at school, it made the model 40% bigger, thus making everything a bit easier since the parts aren't so tiny anymore, and you-know, bigger is better right .

Well, making the body of the airship would have become easier since it's not so huge, but the gondolas would have been tiny.

I didn't realize that just how big it would be until about a month ago when i got re-motivated and started to build the body of the airship. I originally started by building the Gondolas first as i wanted to see if i could do those without them looking like garbage.

They turned out quite well. The only thing i was kinda dissapointed with was the fact that i couldn't cut the windows open on the windscreen without ruining the window frames completely, i instead applied a bit of gray color to make them at-least a bit more realistic.

I also decided to leave the interior mostly empty as it would have probably looked messy and wouldn't even be seen that well at the end.

Spoiler

 

The MG platform took almost an entire day to cut and assemble as there was a lot of tiiny tiny pieces that had to be put together, but in the end it turned out pretty good aswell.

Spoiler

 

The external props and their support struts/frames was a new thing to me. The instruction advised to use plastic sticks to make them, while i only had iron wire and cocktail sticks. I also only had two choises for putting the thing together, either i put them together using tape, or hot glue. I deside to go for the hot glue option as it produced a cleaner result, tough it did leave some pretty nasty blobs of glue that can be seen a little too well.

Spoiler

 

Once i started making the Skeleton of the ship and the skin surrounding it, i didn't realize that just how much my lazyness was gonna bite me in the ankle.

I was pretty confident that i didn't need all the provided supports to keep it together as there where a ton of supports that where supposed to be built.

Spoiler

Had to trim the image down cause of some personal photos that where on the shelf below.

Fun fact, the top of the bookcase in witch i temporarily put it, was one of the places where i wanted to put the finished product, but my dad said that there was no way he was gonna let me put it there since it's not "living-room furniture".

The skeleton should have had 19 longtitudal spars and nearly three times the amount of bulkheads.

I did notice once i had hot-glued all the bulkheads onto the core that, if picked up from the middle, it would bend and buckle. I was figured that applying the skin would help keep it together.

Spoiler

Gives you a nice sense of scale and a good idea of just how varied the skin of the ship is. I counted that there where about 5-6 different shades of tan.

I put the skin together in three segments, two of witch i assembled before hand and just slid over the skeleton, the nose and the middle section (witch i accidentally put in backwards) to be exact. The rear section had to be assembled around the skeleton because of the rudders and elevators.

It did stop the body from turning in to a banana, but turns out that the body would get crushed under it's own weight causing a very flattened look.

Because of this, i had only one choise, i had to install some ropes and hang it from somewhere. I didn't want the MG-platform to be unseen at all times, so i couldn't hang it from my ceiling lamp like the way i did with the Fiddlers Green B-36 Piecemaker, instead, i wanted to build a custom "display stand" so i could have it hanging over my computer screen.

So, with help from my dad, we built a custom display stand for it using couple upside down table legs and a couple garage tire mounts (or whatever those things where supposed to be).

 

This project really shines, not only because of the fact that it's now the biggest model ive ever built, but also because of the fact that it's by far the longest project i've ever done.

While some of the bigger project like the Tamiya 1:350 USS Missouri model took me about 4 day to complete, this project took me about a weeks worth of work or maby even more to get it cut and assembled.

 

Even tough the end result is a bit messy and how you doing in some places, im still quite proud of the end result .

 

KSP VERSION

And now for the KSP part of the project.

I wanted to make a KSP replica of the LZ 45 ever since i started making the paper version. But, didn't get around to it as the airship parts that i had were a bit too small, so i had to search down the comments and found a set of custom Tweakscale configs.

After i go those installed i could start making the thing. But before i could even use those, 1.3.1 came and i had to wait for a little while as the mods i needed where getting updated. Luckily it didn't take more than a few days.

I also wanted to complete the paper model first.

 

Because the custom tweakscale configs for the airship parts that only allowed me to scale the thing to 10, 20, 30 and 40m sizes, the KSP version is actually bigger than the real one.

I desided to go for a full interior on the gondolas, and as an extra made the two steering wheels work, and also added a captains view (a Kerbpro camera on a docking washer).

Yes, it has two steering wheels, one is for the rudders, while the other one is for the elevators.

The front gondolas alone ate 500 parts, so that's why the rear engine gondola is missing some details on the inside, it all in an effort to save parts.

I also ignored the offset on the outer props and made them mirrored instead. I feared that if they where offset, it could cause some control issues.

To eliminate the risk of constant crashing, i built the bow and stern of the ship separately and brought them together at the end and added the bomb-bay doors, the MG platform and the logos onto the ship.

I turned basically the entire front engine gondola into a sub-assembly and then built the rear engine car around that.

 

Here's a little flying demonstration video.

I put some vernor-thrusters into the nose to aid in turning cause as you can see on the video, with the rudders alone, the ship turns very slowly.

 

https://imgur.com/a/L6qIm

The album didn't appear correctly so i put a link to it instead.

Technical data LZ 45 (KSP):

Length:206 m

Height:37.7 m

Width:28.3 m

Diameter:20.0 m

Engines:4 x BA-4U Cyclone piston engine

Mass:287.102 tons

Crew: Unmanned

Armaments: Unarmed

Parts: 1140

Mods used: Heisenberg Airships pack, Infernal Robotics, Tweackscale, custom tweakscale configs for airship parts, Hullcam VDS.

 

Overall, i'm very pleased with how it turned out , just wish the servos that make the dummy propeller spin wouldn't be so annoying and loud .

I have plans for more airships, but i'm not sure witch or when i'm gonna make em. And yes, you may get to see a fully working U.S.S Macon.

 

And there it is for you, a giant paper model and a super detailed Zeppelin all in one. I hope you enjoyed this rather lengthy post .

 

Edited July 23, 2018 by kapteenipirk
albums broken

[selfish_meme]

I think this is the first Zeppelin replica I have ever seen, well done

[GarrisonChisholm]

This is astonishing.  I'm speechless, regarding Both aspects of modeling.

*note the long silence and evident absence of speech*

 

Bravo.

[kapteenipirk]

30 minutes ago, selfish_meme said:

I think this is the first Zeppelin replica I have ever seen, well done

Yea, i haven't seen any airship replicas either, tough i'm pretty sure some have been done before, whether they have been showcased or not.

Thanks .

16 minutes ago, GarrisonChisholm said:

This is astonishing.  I'm speechless, regarding Both aspects of modeling.

*note the long silence and evident absence of speech*

 

Bravo.

Thanks .

[selfish_meme]

11 minutes ago, kapteenipirk said:

Yea, i haven't seen any airship replicas either, tough i'm pretty sure some have been done before, whether they have been showcased or not.

Thanks .

Thanks .

I think @Columbia built one with a fairing, but I don't think it was a replica of any particular airship

[kapteenipirk]

19 minutes ago, selfish_meme said:

I think @Columbia built one with a fairing, but I don't think it was a replica of any particular airship

Yea, there have been airships on the forums in the past, stock and modded.

[kapteenipirk]

Time for a not do happy update.

 

Remember when i said in the main post that i left out quite a lot of the internal structuring...well, it just bit me back hard.

Actually it has had an effect for a long time.

Some time ago after the model was hung, i noticed that the middle of the hull was starting to cave in, so i tried to remedy the issue by adding some extra ropes, 4 to be exact. They helped in keeping the ship together by having it hang from 6 points instead of just 2.

Unfortunetly, that wasn't enough, as when i came back from my little summer holiday, the support ropes had come off and the ship was i pretty bad shape. The middle had caved in badly, the nose looked like it was the result of a head-on collision, and the tail had a huge gap in the bottom side and was pointing up by about 15 degrees.

I kept it like that for a while while i figured that what to do about it.

 

Today i decided that the ship was too far gone, just too much damage and no real way to truly fix it.

Instead of just crushing it or burning it, it sliced it up and created a little "memorial" for it.

I decided to keep:

The gondolas, the most interesting part of the ship, and perhaps the most time consuming.

The MG-platform, bout a days worth of super careful assembly and cutting.

One of the side propellers, they may have looked a bit ugly with the huge blobs of hot glue, but there wasn't really a better way to do them with the materials i had in hand (recommended way was to use thin plastic sticks).

the external oil-tanks, why not.

the ships number, an essential thing to keep.

A piece of the skin from the ships bow, mainly kept to preserve one the iron crosses.

2 of the rudders, don't really know why.

And a piece of the hull, a perhaps painful reminder of the massive scale and the even bigger failure that was the result of nothing more than pure lazyness, and use of too weak of a material at too large of a scale.

 

It did make me pretty sad having to slice it all up, but i feel the little memorial is a pretty nice way of preserving the project. All the essential details/parts are still there...and who knows, maby one day ill rebuild it...and if i do, ill be able to use the bit's i already made.

 

And now that the ship is gone, i think im gonna populate the stand by hanging a few of my papermodel aircraft's from it. A Fiddlersgreen Grumman Duck and Bf-109, maby even some of my Homeworld ships...that sort of thing. It helps in clearing some spots on my shelf's witch are just way too full right now.

 

So, a sad end to a once mighty model .