The Ship Model Forum

Need help on colours:

Currently I am building Torpedoboot S90 as it was around 1900 while the Boxer Uprising in China. (Kit 1/700 Kombrig)

To my information it was in the typical East Asia Fleet colours with a white body and yellow stacks and superstructure. What colour did the deck have?

On some few available pictures like this https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... doboot.jpg it looks like a complete while forecastle, but black area on the main deck.
Do you think this is an effect of shadow or painted dark?

Thank you all in advance
Juergen


Picture by Wikipedia in the public domain

in another group I got the hint: Gröner makes a reference to yellow deck. So on the picture the dark area is shadow!

I don't agree. It's too even for shadow and much of the black area is in the open. It even looks to be censored.

This photo shows a lighter area where the black is.


This model of a period ship has a grey deck.


And if you trust art, this shows a dark brown deck on east asia sqdn ships.


Further more,
These photos indicate decks were either wood, metal, or covered in what looks like non skid sheets like corticene.




Personally, I'd opt for dark brown.

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Darren (Admiral Hawk)
In the not so tropical climate of the Great White North.

thank you, Darren!

First of all I would seek advice on the Forum of the Arbeitskreis historischer Schiffbau. There are many experts on the Imperial German Navy.

To my knowledge there were no wooden (main) decks on small units such as S90. Linoleum may have been used on higher decks.

The decks were made from iron/steel sheets. Originally, they were painted in a tar-based oil-paint that had sand mixed into it in order to increase wear-resistance. When wet, if was also sprinkled in fine sand, just as one does when preparing tarmac roads. This was done to reduce the stickiness and to make decks less slippery, when wet. The colour of such decks would be like that of a tarmac road. The areas with more traffic would be lighter in colour, the corners darker.

However, the rooms under such decks are very uncomfortable. No heat and noise insulation. Therefore, at some stage the Navy began to put layers of coarse cotton twill onto the decks, soaked in the above paint. Not sure, how the fabric was fastened, perhaps if was just kept down by the paint. The colour appearance was the same as above.

Incidentally, the Austro-Hungarian Navy put cocos mats (like woven doormats) onto the decks of their torpedoboats in order to improve the climate underneath the decks.

I don't have access to my information on the colour schemes of the Imperial German Navy right now, but it is possible that the water-ways (if there were such) were painted yellow. However, the colour scheme of torpedoboats was always a bit different.

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Eberhard

Former chairman Arbeitskreis historischer Schiffbau e.V. (German Association for Shipbuilding History)

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wefalck, thank you so much!

Most torpedo boats had steel decks. According to Gröner, they were painted black ("Schwarz Teerfarben"). I would suspect them to be also black in case of S 90 - but that would have been terrible in the tropics. The awnings helped perhaps a bit...

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in more detail for S90 Gröner references Colour Code 11 until 1911, which is white and yellow. For yellow he writes Oberdeck, Aufbauten....
1912 he explicitly mention S90 and Taku changing to grey.

But of course Gröner is great but not always true. The pciture by Admhawk shows a dark deck section (and footer of the stack) to be very dark.

As next step I follow advice of wefalck and requested membership in the forum Arbeitskreis historischer Schiffbau.

In the end we will have as so often contradicting information and have to make an interpretation.

As far as I am aware, S90 was the only torpedoboat overseas. The 'colonial' colour schemes didn't really fit small units, such as torpedoboats. Therefore, there may have been differences to the 'ideal' one.

There may have been slight variations to the colour schemes in individual ships. Cross-checking against photographs is important though this is sometimes difficult with b/w photographs.

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Eberhard

Former chairman Arbeitskreis historischer Schiffbau e.V. (German Association for Shipbuilding History)

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The photos above certainly look dark enough to be black decks. I've seen some paintings where the funnel is a light grey while the superstructure is yellow. Seems to fit the first photo I posted.

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Darren (Admiral Hawk)
In the not so tropical climate of the Great White North.

I think that the description of the deck colours are at the very end of the description of the different colour patterns, because they did not differ (see "Decksanstriche").

The reference to the different decks e.g. for the pattern Nr. 11 refers to which vertical part of the hull and superstructure is white and which is yellow (above or below main deck), not to the colour of the decks themselves.

For sure, S 90 could be an exception - but the photo does not indicate that. The yellow looks less dark than the deck, i.e. the decks were probably black. Interestingly, the lower part of the superstructure is much darker than the funnels above. Which could indicate that the lower part of the superstructure was painted also black.

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This interpretation makes more sense and fits to the pictures.

Anyhow this would be a hard German grammar fault by Gröner