Here's my mostly finished USS. Pine Island. I'll try to take better photos in daylight. The old Revell kit, which seems to scale out to about 1/425. I always liked this model when I was building US Navy ships as a kid, at the time the Currituck, but it seemed too complex and I never owned one.
My major surgery was to remove the cast railings/spray screens, which meant removing big areas of this ships sides and building back up the structure with styrene strip.
I used the GMM 1/400 PE set extensively for railings, 20 mm guns, radar and crane rigging. I used Toms MW sailors for the crew handling the line to the Mariner. That particular detail was very important to me- its what strikes you looking at operational photos. I also added the hangar bay doors.
I really struggled to get the Mariner to look right being loaded by the crane. Somehow the geometry was wrong, I suspect in the end the boom is too short. But I got things kind of ok.
My inspiration was a good article in an issue of Air + Space this year about Operation Highjump in Antarctica in December 1946 and the lost Mariner "G for George". I'm mostly interested in aircraft, however reading the article I remembered my fondness for the ship too. So I did some research, gathered together photos and the kit, and here you have my first ship model in 35 years.
The idea for the water was to look cold, windswept and forbidding. I thought about ice flows etc. but it seemed wrong so close to an aircraft operation.
