BTW - that was a photo of the MS Maasdam, taken in Jamaica, and is copyrighted to moi (but if you want to use it as reference, go fer it :) ) /P

Twice the distance from the middle to the end, This applies to all liners. :O)

Re message 6: how long do ships' lifeboats tend to be?

I dunno..never been rich enough to get on one..;) I guess (and this is a guess), that 30-50' would be about right..once again, I'm just eyeballin' it..;) you can see some lifeboats in Pic on post #2, as you can see, there are more of them, and they're shorter than on your original model, which is how I'd look at the sense of scale. Don't know if there's a standard for lifeboat size, but working off that pic, maybe from the lampposts, or even if you can see a human being on the deck (I think I can, but my eyesight isn't what it used to be..;). There's got to be something about lifeboats on the Web somewhere..(just ignore all the URL's for the Hitchcock movie..;) good luck.

I used to work on tuna seiners. About 300 feet long and 45 feet wide with a helicopter on board. Its hard to say the size of your ship. Looks like some of the proportions are off. I would guess the life boats to be about 25 or so feet long, maybe 30. The anchor winch on the bow and the size of the bridge overhand makes that look like a large yacht. But 5 life boats on each side tends to imply about 200 or more people on board. There's an indentation on the side of the bridge which is a walkway. The door area there would probably be about 7 feet tall. The proportions that would work for me would be an 18-20 long life boat and I'm going to guess that its about 350-500 feet long or so.