Japanese Battleships: Fuso & Ise Classes [Paperback]

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 survey 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 two related classes of Japanese 14in-gunned battleships, originally built during the First World War but subsequently totally reconstructed. They are famous for the towering forward superstructure, usually described as a pagoda bridge, that they featured when rebuilt. Ise and Hyuga underwent further reconstruction during the Second World War to emerge as a unique hybrid of battleship and aircraft carrier in a desperate attempt to compensate for fleet carriers sunk earlier in the war. Pagoda-style structures were a distinguishing feature of Imperial Japanese Navy battleships, and none were as extravagant as those on the Fuso and Ise-class vessels. Originally planned during World War One as a single rank of four hulls, the first two (Fuso and Yamashio) differed from the final pair (Ise and Hyuga), regarded as a separate class. Their development, careers and fates are described, combined with good contemporary images, intermingled with artist's impression to highlight differing configurations. Notably, as US Navy airpower devastated Japan's carriers, both Ise-class units would be converted into hl³(