Quote:
Can the USS Wahoo be built out of the 1/144 Trump Gato?
No, not out of the box. Wahoo was a Mare Island boat, and built to plans prepared by the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. Gato was built by Electric Boat to their plans. While identical in performance, there were many noticeable visible differences between Gatos putatively of the same class - limber hole patterns, steel versus wooden deck sections, bow hatch locations, bridge arrangements, torpedo tube shutters, just to name a few. You can actually tell the difference between Mare Island/Portsmouth Gatos and their Electric Boat/Manitowac sisters simply by giving them very cursory visible examinations.
Anyway, the short answer is no, you cannot build the Trumpy Gato into the Wahoo out of the box. The long is answer is that yes, you can, IF you put in tons of time and effort and elbow grease. It can be done. Just be sure to do your research and really nail down the differences between the two plans, some obvious, some very subtle, like the curve in the fairwater from fore to aft, and the "squareness" of the roundover. I realize I will sound like an anal rivet counter, but I get perturbed everytime I see a Trumpy or Revell Gato passed off as a Portsmouth-planned boat. The two are not the same. For aircraft modelers, it would be like modeling a late model F-4E as the F-4H1 prototype, or an Allison-engined A-36 as a late model P-51D, the boats from the different plans are that different visually.
Bob