Japanese Heavy Cruiser Takao

Takao logo
A MOC by L. F. Braun, June-July 2002; rebuilt July-August 2005 (site currently under reconstruction)

Takao
Takao in its rebuilt 2005 incarnation at Brickfest 2005, 14 August, 2005 Washington DC.

OVERVIEW

The heavy cruiser Takao was one of the mammoth Japanese "treaty cruisers" (or "A" class cruisers) built theoretically to the limits of the Washington Naval Treaty--10,000 tons but modified during construction to reflect the London Naval Treaty of 1930 and eventually displacing nearly 15,000 tons. These ships were fearsome surface combatants, and in 1942 ships of a similar class were responsible for handing the United States Navy the greatest defeat in its history at the night battle of Savo Island. Takao itself was primarily support for the fast carrier and amphibious assault units that expanded Japanese territory before May 1942; afterwards, she and her three sisters (Chokai, Maya, and Atago) were primarily retained as carrier escorts or as a raiding group. Takao was in fact close in many ways to being a capital ship; although she only carried a cruiser's guns, the torpedo tubes, displacement, and speed were closer to being worthy of a battlecruiser. During the war, these ships survived massive damage, and Takao herself ended up surviving the war (if resting her keel on the bottom of Singapore's harbor), being scuttled in 1946 in the Straits of Malacca.

The four Atago-class ships were also something else: Elegant and graceful, each with its own "personality." They were bedecked with directors, searchlights, observation posts, and all the fixtures of a finely-oiled machine that was one part steel, one part muscle and sweat. Conversions kept the ships, completed in the early 1930s, up to date and in peak fighting condition, and even during the war the repair and maintenance of Japanese fleet cruisers was second in priority only to servicing the precious aircraft carriers. The geometries of these ships and the workmanship that went into their construction are even today pleasing to the eye, and devilishly hard to recapture; the greatest failing in my rendition of Takao is that I was unable in the time I had available to render the conning tower faithfully. The full measure of grace the ships possessed is apparent in photographs, however, and I think you can see its echoes in the ABS rendition.

Takao underway, c. 1940. From Skulski 1994, p.2.

As a model, Takao represents my first foray into post-1914 warship construction. It is at once a departure from all previous models and a return to a goal I had held for years prior. Takao is also the ship I've been happiest with to date as a feat of engineering, in spite of its 3/4-complete status at the time of its debut at Brickfest 2002. Lastly, but not at all least, Takao is by far the biggest thing I've ever built. Ever. Of any kind, out of any material. So large is the ship, in fact, that transporting it took on a decidedly farcical quality, and as luck would have it I could only barely get the whole thing in my teeny tiny car. This webpage is its story, from conception and accretion to approbation, dissection, and finally to storage.

Of course, my imminent departure to South Africa is keeping this to simplicity, so I'll get to it and provide some links. First a few quick thanks: For construction, to Darren Loader, Anne Boie, Gerry Venteicher, and Brett Antaya; more than any others they offered through their BrickLink stores (and sometimes at a bonus discount, yay) massive quantities of dark grey parts without which the ship could not be. In the inspiration department, of course, is Richard Parsons; his beautiful HES Valhalla (if you look at my Friedrich der Grosse page, I mention it there) was my initial inspiration to build one of the class of ships that originally sank it. Further inspiration and encouragement came from Shaun Sullivan, who is now producing an amazing naval creation of his own that should make the techniques I used in Takao as obsolete as FdG made the blocky shipbuilding that came before it. For photography, there are a ton of great shots out there; but most notable are Troy Cefaratti and of course Todd Lehman, whose desire for a photo shoot in Boston particularly for the ship allowed me to get a fun day of NELUG BrikWars in too. There's no way I could forget to mention Peter White, whose transglobal gift of railing fixings to me turned out to be a lifesaver at exhibition time, because I spent hours putting railing on the ship at the fest. If I've missed anyone, please let me know!

UPDATES:

17 January 2003: The site is ready to go, basically; unfortunately, most of the material on the ship after its return to New Jersey following BrickFest must wait until I have those pictures to hand.

22 October 2004: A few corrections of typographical and other errors.

SECTIONS

The extended planning phase of Takao involved design after design after design. That, and an awful lot of BrickLink buying. I explain my methodology (insofar as there was one) and share construction diagrams in this section.

This section includes pictures of various stages of construction of modules and eventually the explanation of how Takao was put together. As usual, I was fairly bad at taking pictures during the process, so there are just a few spates of photos taken at certain points of the construction.

BrickFest 2002, in Washington D.C., was the first place the ship was ever fully assembled as well as its first public appearance. It also meant lots of people taking lots of pictures, for which I'm ever grateful. My favorites are under this heading, along with my account of transporting such a beast 200 miles in a Geo.

Bringing this behemoth home, and taking it back out to Boston for a bit of a road trip, was another matter altogether. This section chronicles the continuing saga of Takao--including, perhaps, its eventual disassembly.

Back to Main - Planning - Construction - Exposition - Continuation
The Brick Shipwright

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