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USS Olympia

Model Shipwrightscrew-mate Dr. Al Ross shares a stunning masterpiece build of his USS Olympia, in this MSW feature!

While my primary area of interest is small combatants, in my job as kit developer for BlueJacket Shipcrafters, I end up building a wide variety of vessels. One of my more recent efforts was the cruiser OLYMPIA, a limited edition kit of 200.

At a scale of 1/128, the hull is approximately 32” long. Construction is multimedia; carved basswood hull, laser-cut basswood superstructure, Britannia fittings, some resin components, and about 600 pieces of photo-etched brass.

To create this kit, I worked from the original C&R drawings and photos, drew up the kit plans and the artwork for both the laser and photo-etched brass parts, made the metal masters for the Britannia castings, made the wooden and styrene masters for the resin parts, wrote the instruction book, and took several hundred photos as the kit was being developed that eventually ended up in a CD on the kit.

This is the display model and was built from a production kit.