Here's what I did. You'll love this one, please read through
" border="0" /> I posted it in another thread, but the more I got to thinking about it, I feel this one deserves a thead of it's own.
I bought Dragon's 1/700 Pennsylvania 1944 kit. It has 640 parts in it. Dragon even brags about it on the box.
Dragon's approach to this kit was load it full of parts mixed from thier Arizona kit, as well as Boo-Koos of parts from 1/700 Essex class carrier kits. Dragon's approach is really a genius one. Instead of tooling up for each individual kit, they tossed in parts that were shared by almost every ship in the U.S. Navy during WW2. This way, the parts are uniform in appearance in our fleet displays.
I bought Hasegawa's 1/700 South Dakota kit, and sudied the secondary armament, and radar arrays as well. I counted the 20mm that would be required for both the Pennsylvania and South Dakota. As we all know, Hasegawa's 20s are a little less than perfect, so they need replaced, as well as the 40mm Bofors, and as well the 5" 38cal DP turrrets.
Dragon's Pensylvania kit has much better representations of them, as well as 40mm Bofors, and 20mm! BUNCHES OF THEM! In fact I counted enough included in the kit to cover BOTH the Dragon Pennsylvania AND the Hasegawa South Dakota with 3 of the 20s left over. Dragon's Pennsylvania also has 8 5" 38cal turrets included, but only enough barrels for 4 of them. No big deal. Barrels are easy, so I just used the Hasegawa barrels. Had to shorten them a bit though. Hasegawa's kit barrels are too long. Out of the box, the barrels would seem more like 5" 54s.
Dragon's Pennsy kit has 4 complete sets of radar antennas in plastic, thanks to the inclusion of SO many Essex class carrier parts so I was able to use some to get Hasegawa's So. Dakota a better SK too. I also upgraded the radar suite on my old Hasagawa Yorktown CV-10 kit as well during a minor resto, along with Tamiya's out-of-production CV-6 Enterprise kit.
And Dragon's Pennsy is the kit that just keeps on giving.
" border="0" /> It includes quite a few of the Arizona kit's parts that wont be used in building the 1944 Pennsy, so I was able to pull yet more parts from the extras to let me build a better Hobby Boss 1/700 Arizona. all the 5 inchers, foremast yardarms, boats, and a couple of others.
Best of all, I did not use one single part needed to Complete Pennsylvania!!
Thanks for listening.
" border="0" /> Oh, I mean you can wake up now.
" border="0" />