I feel more than a little guilty for having started this thread, because it has indeed descended to a level of discourse that I find highly distasteful - and that, as I hope everybody concerned will believe, I never intended it to reach. I hope, though, that we can return to a degree of civility in talking about this superb kit for just a little longer, for two reasons. One - I need to retreat from a point I made earlier, and two - I think one of the points that have been raised is worth discussing, for reasons that go beyond this particular kit.
Having had my poor old post-middle-aged eyes directed into the proper places, I can confirm that the upper decks of the Dragon Buchanan do have a barely-perceptible cross-hatched pattern engraved in them. It's so faint that I can only see it when the light is at the right angle, but it's there all right. I've put a "later edit" notation to that effect in my original post.
I was interested in - and frankly more than a little surprised by - Mr. Smith's assertion that "almost the entire steelnavy era crowd loathes port and starboard split hulls." I have no reason to think he's mistaken - and I imagine that was indeed a big consideration in Dragon's decision to split the hull top/bottom. But I'm having trouble understanding why those modelers feel that way.
Maybe part of the problem is that my principal interest is in sailing ships. Nearly all plastic sailing ship hulls are split port/starboard. (The only exceptions that come to mind immediately are the Pyro Gertrude L. Thebaud, the nice little Imai waterline sail training ships, and the three Monogram "beginner kits," the Constitution, Cutty Sark, and United States, that were released in the late seventies when the company was looking desperately for ways to attract new customers.) Sailing ship modelers take it for granted that sticking the hull halves together and smoothing the joint is a basic part of building a model - just as aircraft modelers take it for granted that they're going to have to deal with seams running down the middles of fuselages.
The old, original 1/700 "Waterline Series" kits from Tamiya, Hasegawa, Fujimi, and Aoshima, also released back in the seventies, generated gasps of awe because (with a few exceptions) their hulls and maindecks were cast integrally, thereby saving the modeler the problem of cleaning up a joint where the hull met the deck. In view of the mediocre standards of parts fit that we were used to in those days, that made sense. But if the hull and deck parts are cast separately, as in the Dragon Buchanan, that advantage disappears. (Let it be noted that, on the basis of dry-fitting, it looks to me like the fit between the decks and the hull of that kit is excellent.)
After I thought about this a bit I got out my unbuilt Tamiya 1/700 U.S.S. Missouri. (It, too, is awaiting my attention in my embarrassingly big stash.) Its hull is molded in port and starboard halves; the modeler assembles them to a "waterline plate" with five thick reinforcing "bulkheads" mounted on it to make the hull stable. The port and starboard halves, unsupported, amount to strips of styrene with curvature molded into them; if you hold one of those hull halves at one end, the other end will flap almost like a piece of paper. But the "waterline plate" and the "bulkheads" make the resulting assembly plenty sturdy. The fit of the halves at the bow and stern (the only places where they touch) seems to be excellent; if any filling and/or sanding is necessary, the combined length of the two seams will be less than an inch.
The hull halves of that 1/700 battleship are considerably longer than the hull of the 1/350 Buchanan. In height, they're almost identical at the stern; at the extreme bow the Buchanan is about 1/32" taller than the Missouri. It looks to me like the same kind of tooling that made the Missouri's hull halves would be perfectly capable of doing the same thing for a 1/350 destroyer - with no slide molding or other unusual technology necessary.
That Missouri is strictly a waterline kit, and adding the underwater hull inevitably would create some additional complexity - and the potential of more seams to fill. The manufacturers' track record for making tight-fitting hull halves isn't exactly distinguished. (One of my all-time favorite small-scale warship kits, though it's about thirty years old now, is the Italeri 1/720 H.M.S. Hood. Its hull is molded in four parts: port upper, starboard upper, port lower, starboard lower. The fit between the two lower halves is, to put it mildly, not up to the standard set by the rest of the kit.) But I'll bet a modern company like Dragon or Tamiya is perfectly capable of making a pair of full hull halves that would fit together as well as the halves of the typical aircraft fuselage - i.e., pretty daggone well. And I continue to think that Airfix was onto something with its idea of molding a full hull in halves, with a scribed waterline inside.
Several parts of the Tamiya Missouri (not the hull halves, admittedly) have "flashed-over" holes in them to accommodate such things as anti-aircraft mounts, so the same parts can be used for other members of the Iowa class. Surely the same approach would work for scuttles in a hull, if it were molded in port and starboard halves. (The modeler could pick which scuttles to drill out, depending on the date.) And yes - fore and aft of the armor belt on the Tamiya 1/700 Missouri are a series of extremely fine raised lines representing the edges of the hull plates.
On its website, Tamiya uses the fact that several of its latest ship kits (the Indianapolis, Missouri, Iowa, New Jersey, Mikuma, Mogami, Kumano, Suzuya, Repulse, and maybe one or two others) have hulls that are "divided in two halves in order to reproduce the finest details" as a means of promoting them: http://www.tamiya.com/english/products/31342mikuma/index.htm . I can't claim to have read every review of those kits that's been published in print or posted on the web, but I have the impression that all of them have been well-received - for good reason.
I can't blame the manufacturers if they're responding to market research in splitting their hulls top/bottom. But I hope the Tamiya approach catches on, and that the 1/350 kits will catch up.
I haven't seen the new Hasegawa 1/350 battleships unassembled. How are their hulls broken down? And do any of you fellow Ship Forum members have strong opinions one way or another about hulls that are molded in port and starboard halves? More specifically, if Dragon, having established the first-rate reputation that it has, were to release another destroyer, would any of you decline to buy it because the hull was split port/starboard? I certainly wouldn't. As a matter of fact, at this point I'm likely to buy just about any new ship those people make. And I wish they'd think about getting into the sailing ship field.