1:700 Battle ship Novgorod Russia 1873

A circular ironclad with no second like it

At first glance the Novgorod looks like a mistake in the drawings. Her hull had the plan of a circle roughly thirty meters across, because only that way could she carry heavy artillery and still stay afloat in the shallows at the mouth of the Dnieper. The idea came from Admiral Andrei Popov, and to this day the whole group of these ships is called popovkas after him. The ship was completed in 1873 at Nikolayev and joined the Black Sea Fleet.

What she was for and where she ran into trouble

Her main armament was a pair of large-caliber guns in an open barbette in the middle of the deck, and propulsion was provided by several screws. The flat disc of the hull was hard to keep on course in a river current, however, and out at sea the ship shipped water over the deck. The stories that she spun around from the recoil of her own guns belong rather among sailors' legends. She went into action only rarely and became famous more for her shape than for her performance. As an immobile floating battery for coastal defense she did her job, and she survived on the fleet lists until the beginning of the twentieth century.

What awaits the modeler

The small 1:700 scale makes the Novgorod a low, compact object whose shape catches the eye at once in a display case next to long battleships. The package contains parts to be glued together; only work at the bench turns them into a finished model. It pays to align the circular deck carefully so that the barbette stands exactly in the center, and to set the wooden planking apart in shade from the metal surfaces. The small period deck fittings are usually added by the builder. Anyone who wants to go further can suggest the calm water of a river mouth around the hull, where the ship really lay at anchor.