| I haven't seen this particular kit, but I think the general subject of components like gun shields is worth a little discussion. It may indeed be that somebody at Trumpeter measured from the bottom of the deck instead of the top, but such components present other problems for the manufacturer, and as modelers and purchasers perhaps we ought to take those problems into consideration. In the first place, consider how thick the plating of, say, a 40mm gun tub actually is. I don't know the precise figure, but I suspect it's less than half an inch. On 1/350 scale, that's about 0.0015". Say the fitting in question is four feet tall; that's about 0.14 inches. In practical terms, a scale reproduction of such a thing in styrene would be extremely brittle; it would be thinner than the typical piece of flash. A big part like a deck with a bunch of scale gun tubs molded integrally with it would be unlikely to survive the packing and shipping process without getting damaged. Then think about what the mold to produce such a part would look like. It would have a bunch of tiny grooves, .0015" wide by .014" deep, all over it. (These numbers are based on the assumption that we're talking about 1/350 scale. In 1/700 the problems are even worse.) I suspect modern, computerized mold machining technology is capable of producing such a thing, but in practical terms it wouldn't work. The molds for kits like this are expected to have hot liquid styrene injected into them, at high pressure, every few seconds. The parts are then ejected from the mold in a great hurry - in many cases before the styrene has completely hardened. (For it to harden completely inside the closed mold would take hours, if not days. The manufacturer can't afford that.) There's just no way a styrene kit manufacturer is going to cast gun tubs of scale height and thickness integrally with a 1/350-scale cruiser's deck. There's also the problem with "draw angles." If you take a close look at a plastic warship kit, you'll see that scarcely any of the features cast integrally with a deck or other major component intersect it at a 90-degree angle. If they did, the part would have trouble getting out of the mold. Close inspection will reveal that those integrally-molded gun shields are tapered - they're thicker at the bottom than at the top. The taller they are, the thicker their bottoms have to be. If that gun tub were of scale height, the bottom of it would be so thick that people like us would scream bloody murder. So the kit designer has to decide on some sort of compromise solution. One of the best, obviously, is to cast the gun shields as separate pieces. That drives up the parts count, and thereby makes the mold and the kit more expensive - in an economic environment where people like me are having second thoughts about buying kits because they're so expensive. (Here I'm in danger of getting out of my depth, because I know scarcely anything about how the economics of the plastic kit industry work. Dr. Graham's fine book on the history of Monogram says that when that company was designing its famous 1/48-scale B-17, back in the late seventies, the designers struggled to keep the total number of pieces to an absolute minimum because every additional part added significantly to the cost of production. I'm not sure how universal that situation is. The typical 1970s Heller kit, for instance, sure doesn't give the impression that anybody was worried about putting too many parts in it.) And a certain segment of the market, which the manufacturer has to worry about, doesn't want the parts count - especially the number of really small parts - to rise above a certain number. The near-ideal solution to the gun shield problem, of course, would be to make them out of photo-etched metal. (.0015" is pretty thin even for photo-etched stainless steel, but anything less than .005" probably would make most of us happy.) Some of the manufacturers are moving in that direction; I hope more of them do. But here again they have to be concerned about money. In order to stay in business, the manufacturer has to find an extremely delicate balance between the practical limitations of the manufacturing process, the level of difficulty the customer wants in a kit, and the price the customer is willing to pay. If I remember right, most of the 20 mm gun shields (the ones mounted on the deck - not the ones attached to the gun mounts) in the Trumpeter 1/350 North Carolina kit are cast as separate pieces. (I don't remember about the 40mm gun tubs.) They're ludicrously out of scale in terms of thickness, but about the right height; I could certainly live with them. I'm a big fan of the North Carolina, but I haven't bought that kit because I can't afford it. (I'd only buy it if I was prepared to abandon all other projects and work on that one till it was finished - and I'm not going to do that.) I have bought the Trumpeter 1/700 version, which I really like - though its integrally-molded gun shields and tubs are tapered, way too thick and a bit short. That one's on my disgustingly large pile of kits I'm going to build some day. (If the only kits that got sold were the ones that actually got built, I suspect most of the manufacturers would go out of business in a couple of months.) Bottom line: the warship kits being cranked out by companies like Trumpeter, Tamiya, Dragon, and Hasegawa these days represent a mind-boggling advance over what modelers tolerated thirty, twenty, or even ten years ago. (Compare the revised Tamiya 1/700 Yamato to the same company's 1970s version of the same ship on the same scale. The very fact that the management decided to issue the new, improved version says a great deal - especially when one looks at the Revell-Monogram website and sees that firm's 1/535 Missouri being promoted as a "new" kit.) One reason why the standards have risen is undoubtedly that the consumers have become so much more demanding of accuracy and precision - and we need to continue acting that way. But at the same time that we're using phrases like "Trumpy screwed the pooch," it wouldn't be a bad idea to acknowledge (a) how much better the kits are than they were a few years ago, and (b) the practical problems that the manufacturers have to confront in making them as good as they are. |