Hi all - not certain if this is the proper category but as it is largely a naval weapon it seems the best fit.
I received this as a gift from my brother in law Jim - dedicated armor builder who has recently gotten into 3D printing. This is my first time working with 3D printed material other than some 1/350 figures for a couple of ship builds . Detail is incredible and some pieces are EXTREMELY FRAGILE !
There are several options - single or twin mounts with or without shields and conical or tripod base .
All variants assembled and in primer . The ring sights and shoulder yokes are extremely fragile and needed reinforcements with styrene strips here and there. The drum magazines are handed left and right and I did not have enough right hand ones so the gun with single mount and shield has a left hand drum installed backwards. ( hopefully the armorers considered this when loading the rounds in the drum ! ) .
At that scale, a diorama would have to be huge to get the Zero out at an appropriate distance unless you employed forced perspective with a 1:48 or 1:72 aircraft, but that would constrain viewing angle; it would be easier to build a smaller diorama of the mount on a ship’s deck, with a photographic background of an incoming Zero, where you could scale the background to an appropriate dimension for the range the cannon would be shooting from. You’d still need a gunner, and probably two more figures holding spare magazines for reloading.
There’s a very famous painting of Victoria Cross winner Teddy Sheean strapped into an Oerlikon and firing at Japanese aircraft as his ship, HMAS Armidale sank in the Timor Sea. His actions saved a lot of his shipmates as he drew the focus of their attacks rather than the crew in the water. Amazing stuff. I can never see an Oerlikon without thinking of him and I’d love to make a model of this.
