The 26,573-ton German battleship Friedrich der Grosse (Frederick the Great), flagship of the Hochseeflotte (High Seas Fleet) from its completion in October 1912 until 1917 and part of the fleet's nucleus until its ignominous end with most of the Kaiserliche Marine at Scapa Flow on 21 June 1919, represented Germany's answer to the Royal Navy's 1908 escalation of the pre-First World War "Dreadnought Race".  She was, however, superior in virtually every way to her British contemporaries Colossus, Hercules, and Neptune, with thoughtfully-placed equipment, extremely efficient and effective damage-control equipment, and a significantly better fire-control system.  She was also one of the most attractive of the Imperial German Navy's fleet units, embodying a typically German ethic of simplicity and regularity of design, with square angles and a gentle freeboard.
 

    Sometime in October 2000, while resident in Leiden (The Netherlands), my general ennui and homesickness led me to devise various methods of improving upon the large-warship design of the type I had built with the French ironclad Gloire and the quasi-British predreadnought battleship HMS Queen.  Specifically, I needed to produce a much gentler hull curvature, find a way of keeping the proportions straight, and build a ship that just looked, well, "right."  My initial thought had been to produce a Second World War Japanese cruiser to annoy Richard Parsons's escort carrier from across the Pacific.  However, with LEGO as with life, it's best to prove the principle with simple tasks rather than sallying forth too impetuously and falling short.  Of course, this little saying doesn't refer to my well-demonstrated ability to annoy Richard, but rather to the point that the complex curves on Japanese cruisers would be too rough to start out with using an untried building technique.
    When I returned from Leiden in June 2001 I began work on a large hull.  This required, first of all, that I disassemble my existing ships.  This was fairly time-consuming, but it guaranteed me the light grey and tan I would need for this new project.  I also had to decide on a ship to model mine after; I chose Friedrich der Grosse (or FdG, in my shorthand) only after the forward 20% of the ship was complete and I realized what the geometries were likely to allow.  (Those with a keen eye can spot the many discrepancies between the actual ship and my model; it should be obvious that I have compressed very selectively and taken a few liberties with detailing, meaning basically that I made some of it up to dovetail with the way the job was going.)  From there, it was a labor of alternating frustration and love--sort of like moving it, reassembling it, dropping it, and updating it have been.  Read on!

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: What is this thing all about, anyways? (For now, this just redirects above.)
• History:  The actual Friedrich der Grosse and a few links, including a far better scratchbuilt model.
• Construction:  Techniques, observations, and consternations.  How do I get it out the door?
• BrickFest 2001:  Getting a little fresh air, winning a few cool awards, and almost coming to grief...
• Ruling the Roost:  What happened when the ship came home!  updated!
• Just Plain Ol' Images (Impatience, apparently, has its rewards...)

   I do plan on updating this page, although it hasn't been regular--two updates in a year and a half.  I can, however, confirm that I'm in the process of bringing together all of my ships and their pages in one place, in what I call "The Shipwright Project".  Questions?  Comments?  Email me!  I especially want to know what I can do to improve presentation without too many bells and whistles, because I have very limited space and so very much to rabbit on about (ask Tony Priestman).

    Special mega-thanks are due here to Bram Lambrecht and Troy Cefaratti--great modelers themselves--for their kind permission to use the great pictures they took of the ship at BrickFest, all the more kind because I'd forgotten my own digital camera back in New Jersey that weekend.

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Last Update:  17 January 2003.
LEGO and the LEGO brick are trademarks of The Lego Company.
Background image courtesty of Fibblesnork Backgrounds.
All original material on this page is copyright 2001, L. F. Braun.
Yes, I know I probably ought to use the ß instead of ss in "Grosse," but too many English-speakers won't grok it.
Line art of Friedrich der Grosse taken from Siegfried Breyer, Battleships and Battle Cruisers, 1905-1970 (New York:  Doubleday, 1978), 275.