HMS Queen Elizabeth - Aircraft Carrier - Part 1: hull

HMS Queen Elizabeth just before leaving for Westlant 2018.
Taken from the deck of a Brittany Ferries ferry. 

I first became interested in warships in the early70s and watched the TV series Sailor about the Ark Royal, just a couple of years before she was paid off and scrapped. I remember too reading in many books that the UK could no-longer afford aircraft carriers (they never quite explained why the French still could) and the future was frigates, destroyers and through-deck cruisers. It seemed a much diminished world and I regretted that I'd never seen, and now never would see, a 'proper' RN aircraft carrier.

Then came the Falkands War, won only because the government hadn't quite managed to dispose of Hermes and Invincible before the Argentinian invasion. That old veteran (despite the removal of its catapults and arrestor gear) and the new 'through-deck cruiser' (despite the design being optimised for a very different war, with a small deck and even smaller magazines relative to the hull volume) were able to provide just enough air cover with their Sea Harriers to successfully land the necessary forces to re-take the islands, albeit at grievous cost in men and ships.

It was soon apparent that the Invincible class CVS weren't quite as big as the RN needed (especially in the post cold-war world) and that, within the limits of their cost, and even size, more could have been achieved if aviation had been prioritised - just look at the slightly later Spanish and Italian Harrier carriers with almost the same capacity on much smaller and cheaper hulls. But they were bought and paid for so, for thirty years the RN had to make the best of what it had.

So it was with great interest that I followed the design development, political and inter-service twists and turns of the two larger new aircraft carriers identified as a key plank of the 1998 Strategic Defence Review. What would the ultimate design be, what aircraft would be chosen, would they be built at all, even if built would they be sold or even scrapped on completion? It has been quite a roller coaster ride but, at last, the ships are built, commissioned and working towards operational capability.

With all that, I had to have a model to represent the first of the new carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and my wife bought me the Mountford kit as a birthday present.

Sadly there were a few issues with the kit. The first one I found was that the deck was bowed: about 3mm higher in the middle than at the sides. Mountford kindly sent me a replacement but that was just the same. However, emboldened by having a spare, I cut the ski-jump off with a razor saw and sanded it flat. That brought a new problem - the height from flight deck to the side walkways was uneven but checking on more pictures showed that the kit walkways and platforms were not much like those of the real ship anyway. Another big problem was the lift openings - in the real ship, these cut through the wide starboard side sponsons but on the kit, the sponsons somehow continued under the lifts. Some fairly major work would be needed if I wanted a reasonable representation of the real ships.

I don't have any photos of the earliest stages but I decided to cut out the lift openings then make a new flight deck and walkways out of plasticard.

My first go at the deck wasn't quite right and I had to cut it up to match, intending to fill the gaps and sand it all flush but I later replaced it with a single piece, stuck on with epoxy and held together with G-clamps to make sure it was nice and flat.

The hull was slightly too narrow at the waterline and shape of the sponsons was wrong too so I had to do a lot of re-shaping, mostly building them up to approximately match the correct profiles.

Once the deck and sponsons were more or less OK, it was time for the walkways and platforms. HMS Queen Elizabeth has a lot of platforms but very few right angles so this took a long time. As well as the many great photos now available on the web for reference, I got a huge amount of help from looking at the WIP thread of a 1:350 scale scratch built model HMS Prince of Wales for Airfix on Britmodeller.

Eventually I had all the platforms completed and, with a new ski-jump and a blow over of Halfords primer, it all starts to come together.