Kongo Class Battlecruisers

Book excerpt: The 'ShipCraft' series provides in-depth information about building and modifying model kits of famous warship types. Lavishly illustrated, each book takes the modeller through a brief history of the subject class, highlighting differences between sister-ships and changes in their appearance over their careers. This includes paint schemes and camouflage, featuring colour profiles and highly-detailed line drawings and scale plans. The modelling section reviews the strengths and weaknesses of available kits, lists commercial accessory sets for super-detailing of the ships, and provides hints on modifying and improving the basic kit. This is followed by an extensive photographic gallery of selected high-quality models in a variety of scales, and the book concludes with a section on research references—books, monographs, large-scale plans and relevant websites. The subject of this volume is the Japanese Kongo class, four ships built during the First World War as battlecruisers, but extensively modified and reconstructed between the wars as fast battleships, so that each ship presented a different appearance. They were the chosen escorts for the elite IJN carrier forces, and saw much action during the Pacific War.