@The Bitter End, MSW team, everyone involved in re-constructing the old lost threads there or here !
THANKS A LOT FOR ALL YOUR EFFORTS !!
I wasn´t able to catch up with Haiko´s reconstruction of his building log - and that is kind of "hard" as there is so much more to know about the very long way we both were going the last year in discussing, sharing ideas and pictures, paintings, sketches, drawings, recently even 3D´s..
Haiko´s skills and therefore his results are amazing. I need to thank him for encouraging me to really "re-collect" my last 20 years of amateur-investigation in the wake of this mighty ship. My own building log lost too - but that´s not a big miss as I did not really start building - and most of the content of research presented there is still available for me in my personal folders and texts. If I had a choice I would beg for reconstructing
@USS Frolick ´s "a stern view" series .. as there was a really great collection of information gathered by so many fine researchers in MSW. I am sure it was reviewed by a lot of people here too ! Also I miss
@Force9 beautiful building log of his Constitution - but there is a copy in
finescale forum . Of course there are MANY great building logs or discussions lost in MSW´s breakdown which can not be counted!
I already told Haiko: reading through this - kind of "condensed" - building log is a bit as if one is watching a movie about a really good book. There is always that feeling "oh, they missed an important detail" .. There are so many details in our research not being talked about. But .. maybe there will be another place sometime, somewhere to do all that
Haiko stated it already. One of the very impressive pleasures and experiences was how - by discussing in detail the technical, symbolic, "cosmetic" details of features - especially in the stern and the quarter gallery - but also in technical details like scuppers, air vents, mouldings, or even the planking of the original deck which I never saw in any model before. (I believe today´s ship got straight planks, produced in a modern lumbermill - not following the curvature of the ships hull and therefor needing much more efforts to produce planks with changing width over their length.) .. Now I lost my train of thought !
.. Ah.. by discussing in detail all those side effects, the intention of the builder, the needed outcome of the design, the advantage for the ships safety ... by all that theoretically evaluation and balancing arguments ... the astonishing effect was: as soon as Haiko started
building those discussed details in his model, the result came to life and beauty ! I don’t want to sound too poetic, but it was a bit as if a flower opens up and starts blooming. A really astonishing effect if one experiences the development of the model without the feature, with a very first added "prototype" of the feature ... and then later with more detailed versions - until at the end the final version is in place - and you can only think "WOW"!
An example? We tried to reconstruct the very early stern - and used the 1812 Hull models stern as basis for that. The storyline agreed on is, that the 1812 stern is a much modified compared to the original stern. We used the contour, tried to match it with Cornè´s 1804 battle paintings and Haiko did rebuild it.
Much later, when he started rebuilding the galleries and the mouldings along the ships side, we found that a certain protrusion in the contour of the stern, on top of the galleries, matched perfectly with one of the mouldings on top of the gallery. Suddenly that up to then not understood feature made sense - and the result was a perfectly balanced design!
I have to thank Haiko for encouraging me to dig into and sorting my collection of information - most of them being based on graphical depictions - as my approach was in the beginning to just compare visually what was available (and there is a lot !) .. Just the last year I had - also due to Haiko´s encouragement - started adding doing research in texts too also by using AI to transcript digitalized sources. Thankfully he is helping in this much more time-consuming and boring task a lot. The idea was and still is: even if there are mistakes in a representation: there might be "correct" details. And by hunting for comparable details in source not connected, not depending from each other, one may increase the likelihood of having a more realistic interpretation.
What I understood the recent years: whatever we think might be the realistic view on it - there is ALWAYS a chance of misinterpretation as we might not have considered all needed or maybe even not all available information. So whatever we think might have been, its nothing more than a phantasy, a reflection of our thoughts - and we can only try to maximize the
likelihood of something. We will never know for sure! Even if there would be a photo (and there are of course) - its only a fragment of a second for which
this "reality" was true for
this perspective. 10 min. later the carpenter might have changed a detail ! So even a changed perspective might change our view on the "reality" we think we saw.
All drawings available - might be an idea someone wanted to be realized - or it might be a drawing of what was done .. or it might be a drawing done including mistakes and wrong interpretations. A text might be understood in a certain way. But the fellows writing it did not write everything. They might have understood things between the lines, things being so self-evident for THEM, that they did not bother writing about it. They might (and did) use the same words in other meanings than what we today think the meaning is. And we, in our digitalized world with photos, videos, .. "realistic and true documentation", get a wrong interpretation.
But I believe its worth digging in deeper, trying to find more evidence, trying to minimize the personal or temporary bias ... and trying to get rid of myths and false statements which by often repetition and by the weight of "capacities" don´t get questioned. For me this quest is fun ! Learning, being curious. And by learning about those technical details I accidently learn more about history, about the men and women living in those days, about culture and art (I am a mechanical engineer .. ART or art history was never important to me .. until ... )
Thanks Haiko, for accompanying me in this voyage! Thanks to everyone in these forums, for sharing thoughts, transmitting knowledge, sharing that interest in those beautiful (and sometimes brutal and cruel war-)machines.
