Naval History Forums

Doing a 1/100 scale model of Prinz Eugen and Scharnhorst. I know for example many American battleships had camber of appx. 7-9 inches in height at the center of the deck to the outer edge to allow water to run off. Anybody know what the German ships where?

According to Henry Schade of the USN Tech Mission in Europe, Bismarck had 12 inches of camber.

Did this camber have much beneficial effect? A few inches doesn't seem very significant to me.

I realize this is an old thread, but for the benifit of people reading "in" at a later date, the Camber of these decks was there primarily for deck strength, not shedding water. The slight arc provided good strength over weight. Oddly enough many aircraft carriers had cambered decks. It's pretty well the same principle as the arc in a bridge.


Kevin

rivnut wrote:I realize this is an old thread, but for the benifit of people reading "in" at a later date, the Camber of these decks was there primarily for deck strength, not shedding water. The slight arc provided good strength over weight. Oddly enough many aircraft carriers had cambered decks. It's pretty well the same principle as the arc in a bridge.


Kevin

That makes sense.

Yes, I've been modeling for ages and used to think all sorts of things about the camber until I read a few technical articles.

kevin

The one thing I know about the deck camber is that the centerline peak on Scharnhorst is a straight line from the stern all the way to around the front breakwater. In other words if you look at the ship from the left or right side, you could draw a straight, horizontal line from the very tip of the stern to the centerline of the breakwater. Everything else slopes down from there to the edge. I don't know if the camber maintains a constant radius from front to back, in fact I kind of think it doesn't, but I don't know for sure. It took me quite a while to figure out the straight line thing but a lot of things fell into place once I stopped trying to make the centerline peak follow the curve of the deck edges. While doing the Scharnhorst, it took me about 2 to 2-1/2 months to finish the hull. I am doing another German subject and it took me maybe a week to do the hull, and I think the straight line fact is one of the major reasons it took such a short time. Of course I learned a lot about doing hulls so it is not the only thing, but I think it was definitely one of the bigger ones.

This is an interesting line of information. Being neither a modeller or engineer, I had no idea of the significance of camber.

Hi,

Bismarck data: camber 1 ft at main frame, radius is constantly 420.6 m.

HTH,

Bernd.

Thank you very much for the information. I assumed if Bismarck was 1 foot than Scharnhorst was probably in the neighborhood of 10 inches and P.E. 8 inches taking into account the width of the ships. I always thought camber was for water run off but didn't think about the benefit of having shells bouncing off the deck.