Nice story, Beth. For a kid who liked building models as a kid, this would be the perfect toy. This reminds me of James Cameron building a large replica of the Titanic for the movie. I would imagine these 3D CAD model tools will become useful in the movie and gaming industries.
What a fun use of 3D modeling tools. But I also found interesting the mention in the article about "leveraging a full-scale CAD model of a complex assembly like a plane or ship to create a representative model form", for the purpose of making design mods, to help reduce cost and time. Any idea if this is being done yet?
Actually, this is nothing like a toy. This is years worth of painstakingly recreating the battleships in professional 3D CAD tools and then building scaled, but still pretty significant, physical models using steel and other real materials. The idea is these models will be museum quality and will be used to showcase to the general public how these ships functioned.
I too found the idea of building a full size 3D digital model and then scaling it down to create a representative physical model an interesting technique. One of the gentleman involved in the project who spent his career in aerospace engineering said it's a process that is starting to take root in product development, but not yet on any wide scale.
What a great and amazing story. Although this is clearly not a toy, it's a labor of love -- a project that's rooted in his passion for building model ships. The engineering community could learn lessons from his use of SolidWorks on this project.
Good point. It's the process of using the full-scale CAD models to create the 100% accurate scaled, representative models that was interesting in terms of potential for unearthing design problems much earlier in the process without going through the pain and expense of creating a full-size, and in this case, humongous, physical prototype. As it is, the scaled model is over 28 feet.
The actual battleship is anchored in Pearl Harbor next to the Arizona memorial. It is possible to take a tour of the inner workings of the ship which will let you see inside the gun turrents and engine room. Highly recommended!
Two battleships on one page is almost more than I can take, but that's for traffic reasons. As for the story, this is an excellent, fascinating, and valuable example of historical archaeology brought to life via CAD. Kudos to McKinney. I wonder if there's other work going on regarding ships built centuries earlier, where the CAD tools may help uncover/illuminate mysteries regarding their construction.
Absolutely, CAD is playing a role in other historical explorations--ship building or otherwise. We've reported in the past on 3D tools like CAD and visualization packages being used to reconstruct archeological sites like the Great Pyramid of Kheops. Specifically, French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin tapped Dassault's 3D solutions to recreate the pyramid construction site in 3D.
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