Flyhawk Prince of Wales

[cruiserguy]

Hi Everyone,

 

A guy called Mike E posted this link to the forthcoming Flyhawk Prince of Wales on Steelnavy.net . It looks so good, and here's the link.

 

https://toylandhobbymodelingmagazinepublishing.wordpress.com/2017/09/14/【flyhawk】1700-prince-of-wales-test/

 

Will.

.

[MikeR]

Nice. Very nice.

 

Mike.

[73north]

Lovely detail

 

I am looking forward to when they release the new-tool HMS Kelly in 1/700 scale .. to see the improvement to the old Matchbox Kit ( which I built years ago as a kid )

[VMA131Marine]

Looks great! Everything that Flyhawk has done to date has been brilliant; even their M1A1 SEP is a cut above other kits of this subject and their HMS Hermes is in another league compared to the Aoshima kit.

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

It really is very nice. I suppose I'll need to try to reach some colour conclusions on it soon. Tamiya's is absolutely miles off - that is clear. The Hermes painting guide matches some other published views but knowing what I know now, it lacks credibility.

[cruiserguy]

Good Morning Jamie

 

Are you talking about the camo pattern, the colours used, or both? My hazy memory recalls some discussion as whether PoW wore a 4 or 5 colour pattern at her loss. Or maybe I just imagined the whole thing!

 

Sincerely,

 

Will.

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

12 minutes ago, cruiserguy said:

Good Morning Jamie

 

Are you talking about the camo pattern, the colours used, or both? My hazy memory recalls some discussion as whether PoW wore a 4 or 5 colour pattern at her loss. Or maybe I just imagined the whole thing!

 

Sincerely,

 

Will.

 

Hi Will,

 

A wee bit of both. The shape of the pattern is more or less agreed upon but there are still some disagreements about where similar toned shades apparent in some photos but not others. You're also correct in that there were either 4 or 5 colours used. People are disinclined to agree on that!

 

Next, I think the message is getting through slowly that which names correspond to which colours, and what the colours themselves looked like is not what the collective wisdom of the past 40 years has had it. There are many anomalies in the widely accepted RN Colour Palette that simply don't tie-up with period documentation.

 

Prince of Wales is particularly difficult because there is only one reel of colour footage that I'm aware of in existence, and fairly washed out and poor quality at that, and it only records the port side of the ship. Firstly, the colours we *think* we see on that footage are identified using the colour names widely used nowadays, but those colours in many cases do not look anything like either controlled samples held in various archives around the world, their written descriptions from the period or recorded period colour measurement data.

 

So, we find ourselves trying to annotate B&W photographs taken with unknown film type, using only colour tone compared to one poor quality long-range shot on a 70+ year old colour cine film reel with flawed understanding about which colours were named what and what they really looked like.

 

This is the extant colour footage (posted to another forum by Evert-Jan Foeth)

[cruiserguy]

Good morning gain, Jamie,

 

Thanks I see the problems people might have here. However, I am delighted to find my memory is better than I thought. Looking forward to getting the kit, whenever it arrives, as I particularly like this class of ships.

 

Sincerely,

 

Will.

 

PS Just looked at the film again, I can see at least four distinct tones - just hedging my bets.  

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

30 minutes ago, cruiserguy said:

Good morning gain, Jamie,

 

Thanks I see the problems people might have here. However, I am delighted to find my memory is better than I thought. Looking forward to getting the kit, whenever it arrives, as I particularly like this class of ships.

 

Sincerely,

 

Will.

 

PS Just looked at the film again, I can see at least four distinct tones - just hedging my bets.  

Including white I personally think it's 5 distinct colours.

 

The top of the funnel, the aft deck house bulkheads and the lightest stripe up the hull near the stern are white - most agree on that.

 

The darkest shade that looks black is almost certainly M.S.1

The next darkest, bluish tone may be B5, but if it is it's faded, weathered and washed out which is feasible. It could potentially be other shades though, a beat up 507A Home Fleet Grey (although probably too light for that) or possibly the 50/50 emergency mix of 507A and 507C that gives a tone similar to many currently think 507B is (and indeed Snyder & Short show as B5).

On the bow there's a ragged horizontal stripe that's a touch darker looking than the paint above and below it. Some believe that is the greenish M.S.3 and that the paint above and below is 507C Foreign Stations / Mediterranean / Light Grey. That's feasible. It could also be that the horizontal strip was the bluish 507C making the paint above and below M.S.4. Currently, everyone thinks M.S.4 was a sort of weak milky coffee coloured khaki but all period documentation and original annotated samples at both Kew and Portsmouth clearly describe and show a light neutral grey.

 

As you deduce, the whole thing is a series of opinions based on poor footage and each piece of logic depends on the other assumptions being true! When we know for sure that some shades don't look like what we have been told they did, it just adds confusion.

 

The logical thing seems to be to finish revising the colour palette as best we can such that no verifiable evidence is contradicted, then everyone can revisit what colours they think they're seeing in the photographic records.