Mass Production: A Suggestion for Standardizing 1:300 Naval Gun Bases

So, I’ve recently been bitten by the 1/300 naval bug and I love that there are so many variants of the ships, whether it’s smaller guns on a 73′ Vosper, or the massive guns on a Flower Class Corvette, or a mish mash of whatever was available on an armed trawler, there are lots of potential armament possibilities available.

Throw in the sheer amount of ships, big and small where there aren’t already 3D models readily available and the whole space is ripe for some excessive CAD modeling. One thing that will speed this up is standardization, namely a decent set of all the key deck guns featured in WWII sea battles, sitting on some standardized bases. What do I mean by this you ask?

Currently there are a few sets of naval guns available (some are spread across multiple models by the same designer):

• Deweycats which are on 7mmx1mm and 9mmx1mm bases
• Grugnogs (and offwhitetigers, which are modified, baseless versions of Deweycat’s German guns) which use pins/plugs.
• Others whose guns are directly attached to the ships themselves (I’m not a fan of this, as true scale guns often break during wargaming, or require wire which just results in me gluing my fingers together).

I propose that future STL designers for WW2, 1/300 naval models attempt to standardize how their guns and for any gun that they design, they make it available in the following two formats that are being used by other wargaming modelers/designers:

• Grugnog Style Pin Format: a standard pin that is ?mm round by ?mm deep, with a mounting hole that is ?mm deep by ?mm round
• Deweycat Style Base Format: either a 7mm round flat base, or 9mm round flat base, maximum 1mm high. Holes to be dug into models are to be 7.5mm or 9.5mm round respectively. I find that these tend to print better on both FDM and resin printers in comparison to the above pins, but are not as good with tight spaces.

This allows the ability to quickly create deck gun packs that can be added to preexisting models of other scales, ensuring that they print properly on both FDM and Resin (as true scale barrels simply do not work at this scale for most guns) and results in standardization across different modelers designs for the same nations ships as well as allowing other designers to quickly model other variants of the same ship with different armaments.

 

What do you prefer? Guns printed all in one on the ship? circle bases? pins? plugs? something else?

What about other scales or types of vehicles? Should designers aim to have standardized turret mountings for tanks – how would this work in 1/56, 1/100 etc?