USS South Dakota-class: Alabama w WoWS camouflage

Box the kit comes in! It's all quite impressively packaged. Not sure how they all get it in the box 

The gun turrets come with excellent detail without any real photoetch additions, with nicely inscribed parts 

PE ladders always help a little bit more though: just can't match the 3D appearance in styrene! 

5 inch guns are also good looking, stock.  

You can see that I chose to add the ladders, but skipped the brass barrels - included with the platinum kit, but skipped as I don't find them to be visually worth the extra effort on secondary guns (also, as you'll see shortly, this kit has more than enough PE as-is!) 

Fun to show friends the scale of these parts 

It makes a rice grain seem somewhat titanic! 

These little porthole assemblies were tricky to glue. I actually used tamiya extra thin - way too hard to get CA to cooperate on parts this thin and small. You just end up globbing up your tweezers with CA.... 

Side-by-side with her older relative, the Missouri 🙂 

Potentially making a mistake - but wanted to try a new process. The platinum kit includes lasercut masking sheets and nice and thin wooden deck stick-ons. Seemed harder to try to add that later, so I'm putting it down now and spent time later really trying to adhere the masking sheet. Wish me luck >.> 

The surface detail of the photoetched brass is very fine, to the point that capturing photos of some of it causes unavoidable moire patterning - my graphics engineer brain can't ignore it! 

The tower assembly is massively detailed. This is barely even started 

If I had one gripe, it's the quality of the PE instructions. Not for the faint of heart, very crowded and unclear, with sequencing of steps that doesn't make sense. You have to flip back and forth and check before you glue anything down to make sure a later step isn't actually telling you that you need to do something BEFORE the step you're currently doing! 

Very fun and intricate levels of detail, though.