*Inj. molded plastic* Upcoming Ship Kit Releases

[ModelMonkey]

Concur with ModelFunShipyard and Jodie Peeler.

Products for Essex-class ships are very challenging and costly to produce. For the most part, it is very difficult to make an Essex-class SCB product work financially.

Here's the "why".

Ship differences. No two Essex-class ships have the same features. Other than some weapons and other fittings, the Essex-class ships are all simply too different to create a generic set of products for them. This means that each product produced will only match one ship as it appeared at one time. To make a project like that work financially for the vendor, there has to be a large enough market just for that specific ship as the ship appeared at that one time. Our sales data for our Essex-class products gathered over more than 10 years confirms that no such market exists, unfortunately.

The market. For reasons not fully understood, the market for Essex-class SCB ship aftermarket products is much smaller than one would expect. Part of that is simply that Cold War subjects don't have the interest that World War Two subjects do. But more specifically, Essex-class customers (or potential customers) tend to be only former crewmembers or family members of former crewmembers, or those who otherwise have some emotional connection to a specific ship during a specific event. That's about it. What that customer wants is a product that is accurate for their ship and only their ship at the time they or their loved one served on it. No other ship or time works for them. If we don't have a product for "their" ship configured precisely for the time they were aboard, they do not buy.

The financials. For this reason, insufficient market demand, every Essex-class SCB product we offer has been produced at a loss. All of them. Most of the SCB islands we offer have sold fewer than 3. That's not a typo. Three. There are islands we offer that haven't sold any. Not one sale. Given that each island represents hundreds of hours of research and design time, those losses are just not sustainable. This is why we have stopped offering new islands. We have had to move on to other products with better sales potential in order to stay in business.

Geometric complexity. Any product that would attach to the side of the hull such as a sponson or hurricane bow would need to be designed to match the compound curvature of a specific kit's hull. That means that the product would only fit one commercially available plastic kit in one scale, limiting the market. And to do it right, we'd need the kit manufacturer's CAD file for their hull in order to have the hull geometry from which to design the mating surface of the part we were making. Or, we would need effective scanning technology that works on small-scale models. That, unfortunately again for both options, is not realistic.

Available reference materials. To design an island, for example (or any other significant feature like a sponson), of a specific ship at a specific time, we need to have sufficient, authoritative reference material of the island as it appeared at that specific time. That would include any dimensioned 2D drawings to establish overall size and the dimensions of specific features, and photos of all sides of the island with the photos taken as close to the the same day as possible in order to confirm details. For most ships, those kinds of references simply don't exist. That limits the islands that we can produce.

Development cost. Some products, like an island, require considerable research and design effort to produce, easily measured in the hundreds of hours. Ask yourself, "what do I get paid for hundreds of hours of work?". That's what it costs to design the product in terms of time. Research materials may have to be purchased. That adds to the cost as well. There has to be a significantly large market demand to pay for those costs. As the Mercury 7 famously said, "No bucks, no Buck Rogers". Similarly, nearly daily, I will get a request from a modeler asking for a complex product for which there is no market. The request is for a unique product only applicable to his one ship model. And the product is to be researched and designed at our cost. The typical request looks something like this:

"Hey, Monkey, how about a USS Valley Forge island, 1959? Sent from my iPhone."

We regrettably must decline those requests as impractical and unaffordable.

Rapidly and frequently changing ship appearance. The Essex-class ships' appearance changed conspicuously over time. And no two ships changed the same way toward the same configuration. Many of those changes occurred nearly yearly. This makes research very challenging. We have to balance which ship configuration year we want to focus on with what the market may want with the available references we have access to. Often times, we can't achieve that balance.

3D-printing technology limitations. Some products, such as a hull or a flight deck, are just not possible to produce well with the technology we now have available to us. The "build space" within affordable 3D-printers remains relatively small. A 1/700 scale hull or flight deck won't fit inside. That means we would have to offer that product cut into parts complicating the design and the effort needed by the modeler to fuse the parts and smooth seams. Generally, large, flat objects like a flight deck, would be subject to warping. There are some design tricks to minimize warping, but a flight deck would be a real challenge to print. So, even if a large format printer could be had, other technical issues like warping would have to be addressed through an iterative and expensive test print process.

All of these problems also affect products for ships like the Forrestals and is why we have stopped working on those as well. Without sufficient sales to sustain further Essex-class and Forrestal-class products, we abandoned working on islands for the Midways, too. We just can't afford the losses, unfortunately.

[ModelFunShipyard]

I would like to add to MM's wonderfully laid out response, that those are exactly the reasons we're 99% unlikely to see an SCB Essex in plastic form (in my opinion, at least). Trumpeter did theirs to complement their WWII Intrepid, and they had a surviving vessel to use for reference, and you can't go better than that. However, as Steve has just pointed out, that will only depict Intrepid in its current configuration (right before museum ship status). It's not the same ship that took part in the Vietnam War between '66-'69, much less the one before it.
Maybe I'll be proven wrong, who knows.

[Killerbeans]

Thank you for the detailed response, Steve. I'm squarely in the crosshairs of you demographic. My dad was on Essex when she sailed around the horn, and I knew a plankowner fron 2nd Hornet.

[Dan K]

Just saw this on a Chinese forum:

[jpeeler]

Thanks to Steve for laying out some cold, hard truths about the Essex class in particular, and the challenges of being an aftermarket supplier in general.

And Steve, I have to apologize to you, because I've urged you onward on some of this stuff but have failed to follow through with orders because I've had too many non-hobby demands eating too few dollars. (I was on the cusp two weeks ago, but hobby money had to be diverted to the veterinarian to repair a malfunctioning cat.) I will make good on this soon, I promise. I appreciate what you do, and you deserve better from the likes of me.

Jodie Peeler

[ModelMonkey]

Jodie,

No worries at all! You have been and remain a friend and valued customer!

And Killerbeans, I hope that my explanation made some sense. Like you, I am a huge Essex-class fan and hope that some work we have done will offer modelers a chance to enjoy building a ship of the class not specifically offered in plastic.

Cheers!

[SeanF]

Steve,

As the proud owner of 7 of your SCB Essex islands, I deeply appreciate the effort and quality you've provided. The other more generic SCB Essex bits - the pilots' escalator, crane sponsons, 3" gun tubs, etc. - were also immensely helpful in building my collection. I have two of your Forrestal islands, and was hoping to see those big bow sponsons someday... totally understand, though. (Back to scratchbuilding my own, like I did for my Essex hurricane bows and hull bulges).
3D printing really can be a double-edged sword, where low- (but not no-) demand parts that would otherwise never see the light of day could be viable; but then it runs into that desire for it to be printed not just most of the way, but all of the way to perfection ("for this specific ship at this specific time or else I won't buy it - and who cares if literally no one else will but that one specific item, not my problem..." Ugh.)
I think I tweaked all seven of the islands I bought to one degree or another to get what I needed, and boy am I glad for the head-start they gave me instead of scratchbuilding and/or resin-casting my own each time! I mean, any application of aftermarket 3D parts is a modification to a model. Anyone who's going to add PE railings and radar, rigging, etc. certainly has the skill to tweak a platform or add an extra hatch or somesuch to take a more-general add-on part to get closer to their specific target. And anyone who isn't interested in adding all those fine detail parts likely isn't detail-oriented enough to miss the small differences. But how I wish that translated into sales for you; there's stuff I'd love to get that'd be good enough to start from, but it won't get made because perfection kills it!

Back on injection-molded kits for a moment... high praise to Dragon for running as far as they did with their straight-deck Essex series. Not that I need any more 1:700 Essexes, but I do wonder who will pick up those molds in the future (or if they already have?)

Sean F.

[ModelMonkey]

Thank you so much, Sean!

It's always really good to hear that we helped save a friend some headaches.