What do you do when you have a spare fibreglass Corvette hull sitting in your garage and you don’t know what to do with it?
You hack it up and turn it into something really different! Well that’s what I did when I built my Stealth Prototype Corvette ANS KURNAI (STW-04). Using a hull for APS Model’s MPC85 Corvette, I began the process of cutting and adding to end up with a very different look for the design. The model is based on a design by Vosper Thornycroft in the UK, which was loosely known as “Sea Wraith”.
The real vessel, if ever built, was believed to be almost totally Radar and Infrared invisible. With a wave piercing bow and the ability to shroud itself in a fine mist of water, it was designed to elude enemy Radar and IR seeking missiles and weapons, by looking for bad weather and literally “hiding” in it.
All surfaces are angled and the masts housing all Radar arrays, communications aerials and sensors are off set from each other. The designers believed it would be necessary for the ship to have a telescopic Radar reflector, which would be raised when the ship needed to reveal itself to friendly forces or entering and leaving harbours.
The splinter camouflage scheme was designed to “break up” the profile of the ship and took quite some time to apply. It always turns heads and it is one model that there is always plenty of questions asked about. If the real version is ever built it will also turn some heads.