WHAT I'VE LEARNED SO FAR: I know there are a couple people out there who are going to work on their own superdetailed Gatos and have asked me a lot of questions both here and in private so I thought I would do a quick review of my work and ask the question: "is it worth it?"
"Old gato" is gonna help me a bit and hopefully illustrate how drastic the mods were on the Cobia.
My main "gimmick" on this build was scratchbuilding the pressure hull and "see through" deck. But was it worth it?
Completely rebuilding the exterior surface of the deck was
Totally worth it. I'm not even done and the difference is really night and day. Without it, the standard solid deck is hardly better than a bathtub toy to my eyes. This is one mod that is really worth the pain and suffering to get a great Gato.
Next, scratchbuilding the pressure hull?
I'm gonna say not really worth it. I easily put a hundred hours into doing it and while it DID look cool on it's own, I just covered it all up and now it's gone.
Here's what a standard Gato looks like under the deck:
Here's what my modified hull looked like before covering it up:
Obviously a lot of work had to happen to get it from point A to B. But now that most of the deck is in place I can't see much of anything unless I shine a flashlight up the drain channels. From above, I can see flashes of light and shadows along the drain channels but that's about it. Besides that, the standard kit design is very strong and very VERY easy to get a straight deck out of.
My gato on the other hand? Reshaping the hull was easy part; the
real challenge was to get the deck on straight, take out all the wobble and make it strong enough to actually stay that way should it be accidentally bumped or hold any kind of weight.
It took uncounted dozens of tiny supports to totally stabilize 3 feet of skeletonized plastic and it is
still very weak compared to the unaltered kit.
If I was gonna do it all again, I would cut large rectangular holes along the top of the standard kit (leaving the kit engineering intact otherwise) and paint the inside of the hull black, or maybe even just smooth out the top of the kit hull and paint it black . I might have redone the extreme forward portion of the pressure hull but that's it.
I would still cut the deck supports out like I did:
This:
Vs This:
... and build the deck otherwise the same as I did. It would result in virtually the same effect with about 1/4 of the work. Everything else (with the possible exception of the area under the forward deck around the escape trunk) just isn't visible enough to add to the finished product.
If you want to superdetail a Gato, the Eduard PE set is a MUST! It provides so much great detail!
Likewise, it's really necessary to redo a lot of the molded-in stuff; the deck is the big one but the hatches on the kit deck need help too. The torpedo tube doors look crappy in standard kit form as well; if you aren't lucky enough to have an old gato to loot pieces from for you new gato there are other sources for resin doors and they wouldn't be too hard to scratchbuild either.
Outside, the molded "weld lines" are too large and conspicuous and should be sanded off and replaced or at least reworked.
My other big mod was "oil canning" the hull. I tried to stay very slight so I wouldn't get a "gato accordion" like I explained earlier and while it's hard to see in the pics or with just primer it really makes the ship look like a ship instead of a slab of plastic. This is a big job that I'm thinking will be worth it, especially when I'm done painting.
Hopefully that's helpful to you guys... as always I'm happy to provide assistance to those who are aiming to make great gatos. I hope I've helped to encourage the creation of a few "extreme Gatos" out there to give the hardcore U Boat builders a run for their money (or maybe get THEM to do at least a couple of American subs
). WW2 American Submarines are my favorite ships/boats of all time and they deserve to have a strong showing in the plastic model world, especially when we have something like the Revell kit to start from!
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but yea, the urge has returned. 
) More to come, hopefully next week. 
nah ... "insane" 
You'd have to be to afford all the X-acto blades I've gone through so far. I personally own 14 real surplus diesel submarines which I use to maintain my completely legal and moral Latin American trading empire. I even own a 5 million acre ranch on Mars. Shhh, though... I'm trying to stay 
