I have loved the Hoche since the first time I saw a photo of her. She appeared to be a floating castle. Three years ago my first attempt at a scratchbuilt card model was a 1:400 version of Hoche.
I have been working for some time on the computer work and recently began to lay out and build the frames.
Since this is probably my favorite ship subject I intend to indulge myself and put in all the detail that I can. Fortunately, I have a very good friend in Renaud who loves these French ships as much as I do. So we have copies of all the existing plans and many, many photographs.
The model is built with a removable hull so that I can display it either as waterline or full hull. I have been a waterline person exclusively until recently because I like my models to look like their photos, where I cannot see the hull. But recently I built hulls for Inflexible and for Victoria and have come to appreciate their appearance. But since I cannot make up my mind about which I like best, I will design my models to be convertible!
The first photos show the frames along with my original 1:400 model of Hoche. My desire to include detail such as the main deck 13.8cm guns, along with the complexity of the side barbettes, causes the upper framing to be complicated. We have had some discussion about the hull color, which is "Vert de Schweinfurt." There is a fine model of Hoche in Paris with a red hull. The French navy used a red lead paint on its ships up until around 1880. However, this paint did not protect well against marine growths. They converted to the green paint which contained an arsenic compound. Hoche was launched in 1886 and it is reasonable to me that as a new ship she had the green hull. The Paris model was clearly completed some time before the ship was launched and thus does not need to be taken as definitive.
The final photo is of a test build of a 13.8cm gun. It does not have edge coloring and such. There are 14 of these on the main gun deck and another four two decks up on the corners of the structure.
Carl