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Ahoy pirate fans and well met castle fans,
The Vikings sets are vool, but after visiting the Vikings Exhibition at the
Australian National Maritime Museum in January, I decided to experiment with
building some more accurate (after a fashion), viking vessels.
Initially, I planned to extend the standard viking ship by an extra hull
section, but after some experimentation I decided to stick with the standard
three. The proportions at three hull sections are pretty good, although I admit
my main constraint was a lack of oars and 4x4 dish shields to go any bigger.
The overlapping shields are probably the most distinctive viking longship
feature, and they were certainly a challenge to achieve in lego... using 3x3
shields may have been easier (and more realistic), but I have far less of them
than I do the 4x4 shields, and I would have needed more for the same length.
The shields are mounted on 1x1 round plates on headlight bricks which are
slightly angled and have a 2.5 stud spacing. The result looks nice, but is quite
fragile.
The rigging is new, the sail is parchment paper (much better than stiffened
cloth!), and the sail controls are a tad more realistic than Lego’s version
(though I never complain about getting more chains!). Viking sails were woven
wool though, so they would have been heavy - probably not quite heavy enough to
need chains, though.
The vessel is fitted out with supplies and an (authentically) large crew.
Here are some more pics of the completed vessel (click for the full sized
image):
No post or article about vikings would be complete without a mention of the
inaccuracy of the horned helmets, so this is it.
(I’ve set the FUT to .pirates and .castle, but please consider appropriate FUT
if responding)
Cheers
Richie Dulin
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Message has 4 Replies:
 | | Re: Viking Longship
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| (...) snip (...) Nice! And the parchment paper is a great idea... I'm already stealing one of your tricks for a boat I'm working on, and this makes two. One of those (URL) striped canopies> would look good - are those historically accurate? Marc (...) (18 years ago, 12-Apr-06, to lugnet.pirates, lugnet.castle, FTX)
| | | Re: Viking Longship
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| (...) Fabulous! This is funny timing because I'm in the middle of researching Viking ships now for a BrikWars game. (In fact, If you could recommend good links to Viking info online, I'd really appreciate it.) (...) [snip] Really? cool. I was (...) (18 years ago, 12-Apr-06, to lugnet.pirates, lugnet.castle)
| | | Re: Viking Longship
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| (...) SNIP (...) Well done, Richie! It looks great with all those oars. My own longship project is limited to 4 oars per side because..it's all I have. :) (...) They look great; I'd love to pick up a couple more copies of this set to fill out my (...) (18 years ago, 12-Apr-06, to lugnet.pirates, lugnet.castle, FTX)
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