For the few pre Dreadnought lovers around here, I want to share my new build of the battleship Massena. She has marvelous extreme tumblehome and a beautiful long bow. She was built and completed in the 1890s and seems to have incorporated at least one of the lessons of earlier French ships by having almost no superstructure.
I've been incorporated my learnings from my first attempt, the Hoche, so that hopefully this build will go more smoothly. If my plans work out it should be fairly straightforward to turn it into a kit. If so it will come out before the Hoche does since the latter needs a complete redesign before it can be a kit.
One of my goals was an improved hull frame structure. I've made it completely interlocking to remove any possibility of misalignment and also, hopefully to reduce chances of warping. The first picture shows the framing assembled (without glue) and the second picture shows it partially disassembled to display the interlocks. The spacing of the cross frames is chosen in order to allow building of shallow internal structures behind the hull sides.
Carl