BB62vet wrote:
Gerry,
An interesting comment/reply - it doesn't surprise me that the YAMATO hulls have more detail than the IOWAs do. I believe the reference you were making to Pontos hull plating was the MISSOURI model completed by Kim in the Gallery - his model (once again - my opinion here) overstated the hull plating, esp. the vertical plate lines. Unless you are within 5-10 feet of the ship, you won't see this on the real ship, why would you depict it on a model? I can see lightly scribing the vertical lines representing individual plates, but not as his model shows. It's (once again - my opinion) simply overkill. The horizontal lines, however, are a different story - they actually are visible from a moderate distance as they are NOT in the same plane as the row of plates either above or below. As such, they are visible and worth showing on the model. With all the other detail that the model company has put into these kits, I'm quite surprised their hulls are as nondescript as they are.
Adding the vertical butt plates (these are available as a 3rd party add-on) also improves the overall hull appearance. I can see that once you get into the smaller models (scales less than 1/350) it becomes harder to properly show or mold these types of detail. But, for those of us working on the larger models, I think the manufacturers could do a lot better in this respect.
Any pictures of your YAMATO would be nice to see.
Hank
Hank,
Sorry for the very late reply. All my pics of my 350th Tamiya Yamato is on a hard drive which has become corrupted...
Hope this pic will give you an idea of the detail Tamiya added to the hull.