County Class Cruisers

Book excerpt: “A detailed look at British 10,000-ton Treaty Cruisers. “A gem of research by the author, covering the design and progressive improvements to each ship.”—Malcolm Wright, author of British and Commonwealth Warship Camouflage of WWII The ShipCraft series provides in-depth information about building and modifying model kits of famous warship types. Lavishly illustrated, each book takes the modeler through a brief history of the subject class, highlighting differences between sisterships and changes in their appearance over their careers. This includes paint schemes and camouflage, featuring color profiles and highly detailed line drawings and scale plans. The modeling 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. This volume covers the British 10,000-ton Treaty Cruisers, thirteen of which were built to three slightly varying designs between the wars. With three funnels and a high freeboard, they were impressive ships, and all enjoyed very active wartime careers—three were involved in the Bismarck action and another with the sinking of the Scharnhorst. “This book by Les Brown is rather like the Sci-Fi ‘Tardis’ in that its outside belies the tremendous amount on the inside.”—Malcolm Wright, author of British and Commonwealth Warship Camouflage of WWII