Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies

As above, it's fine. Not brilliant, but fine. The fin and rudder are best left alone in my honest opinion, unless you have Ultracast's rudder which is the correct size. You could of course just sand the top of the rudder down but the ribs under fabric detail is all spaced out for the wrong height of rudder and whilst shortening the top of the rudder is easy, making the rib spacings look like something engineers would design is an order of magnitude harder. The canopy is a few millimetres too long, but don't touch it would be my advice. The side windows are moulded separately because the kit predates slide mounting and the observation blisters wouldn't withdraw from the moulds otherwise. Do take care gluing these in as they can often appear a mess if glue goes awry. There are IIRC internal canopy framing decals which don't work well. They're best carefully masked and painted. The tyre tread patterns aren't quite right. The above is nitpicking really, and unless you know Mosquitos very well indeed you'd never notice. Overall the kit goes together fairly well, is nicely detailed and looks like a Mosquito. It's not as accurate as the 1977 Airfix Mosquito in terms of external shape (none of the 1990s Tamiya 1/48 kits are particularly accurate, some like the Beaufighter and Spitfires, much worse than the Mosquito), but it's easier to get a nice model for the shelf from it. My only recommendation for constructional gotchas is as follows: I hate the nose joint on this kit. In my experience, the result of using the kit engineering isn't really good enough and it's better to test the clips first just incase it happens to fit beautifully on your specific example, but on most of these kits (I've built numerous examples of it and the better I get the worse the kit looks) I cut the engineered clips off and carefully glue the nose to the fuselage half flat on a true surface. I find using the engineered clips usually appears to fit well but on closer inspection you usually end up with a concave angle in the fuselage side between the wing and canopy that's a hassle to fair out properly with filler. In other words, the clips tend to splay the joints out slightly. You can tape the fuselage together, and you can even include the cockpit floor as bracing but it won't be enough to prevent a kink in the fuselage contour which is mightily annoying. I don't like filling and sanding, and find it's better to just do whatever is necessary to ensure it's straight, true and a fair curve (sorry for boat building language) at source, which as I said usually means removing the clips.

I'd venture that perhaps the reason the deck doesn't have the 1mm locating holes for the bitts is that they would be make the fit and positioning of the spurnwater PE strips critical. With the deck undrilled you can drill to suit.

If memory serves, the first raid by the USAAF in Europe was against railway marshalling yards in Rouen, France, and the lead aircraft was B-17E 41-2578 "Butcher Shop" captained by Paul Tibbetts who would later captain the B-29 "Enola Gay" dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Again it's been a while but I think the boss of the 8th Air Force Ira C Eaker was flying B-17E 41-9023 "Yankee Doodle" on a diversionary raid as part of the same operation.

Hi Stuart, most of the pre-war photographs I have of the class at sea show the boats inboard where they won't get smashed by heavy seas, and there's a mixture of showing them with or without those strap things.

I dare say that's neater than my 1:1 scale effort Evert-Jan.

Hi Pete, I agree MicroMaster makes excellent stuff

It's often underestimated how far the nose will tend to drop during an aileron roll like that and worse the aircraft will tend to side-slip towards the ground in the knife-edge phases of the roll. You have two choices really; either pull the nose up high enough (with sufficient airspeed) on entry to buy enough height on the first half, or exit the roll lower than you started. Unfortunately even practising at height may not be the assurance necessary if you aren't dilligent with the entry and exit height on the altimeter, and it leads you into thinking you have the measure of the rate the nose drops at but not realising you lost altitude by side slipping. You can think you know your aeroplane well and not really know it as well as you think. Really you want the nose still above the horizon as you pass through inverted, and be aware that most aeroplanes don't fly very well upside down so even seeing the horizon doesn't mean you're not descending. If you get to inverted and the nose is on or below the horizon you're probably going to finish lower than you started and you need an escape plan. The aileron roll is perhaps one of the easiest, safest aerobatic maneuvers a pilot can do at height. Even I can do it. To do it precisely enough that you exit at the exact same height you started takes a great deal of practise in that type of aircraft, and I suspect most display pilots would pitch up a little higher than they need so they could exit the maneuver higher than they started, then just relax the recovery of the maneuver to make it finish where they wanted it.

I'm not sure there was one originally. Admiralty Pattern 631 Bronze Grey was introduced deep into peacetime between the wars, and may have been intended to somewhat approximate the often greenish Home waters but such that deck operations didn't obviously render it filthy right away.

I see you chaps have this all in hand I am looking forward to seeing the build Jon. Checking back through your order history I believe you have all the colours you might need for this already which is nice!

Yes basically, and they mean that the sharpest cut-off of any plank is 45 degrees in this case so they don't end up with long spindly pointed ends on planks that you can't fasten down properly because you want a decent width of timber to put a fastener through the middle of.

If it helps, I have some diagrams in R.A. Burt's British Battleships 1919-1945

Hi Noel, whilst the cost of living is certainly having an effect on what people spend on hobbies as far as I can see, I think your second sentence is the key one here. All the costs of operating a business still exist when we travel to a show, only we add a (significant) additional expense we don't normally incur to be there. A trader does not open their stall at 10am on the Saturday at £0, they're already in a rather big hole whereby if they went home with no sales they'd be hundreds, potentially even over a thousand pounds down on where they were before they started. If sales are lack lustre during a show (and I've had some like this), then it would very literally have been better to just stay at home and watch a few internet sales roll in as usual. Now since net profit from a show is actually very small once normal costs and the enhanced costs of attending the show are taken into account, a theft has a massive impact on the outcome of the whole day's trading. It's not one for one. It's more like one theft wiping out the effects of ten to twenty other sales assuming all were the same product/value/margin. And that's before some joker swaggers up expecting discount and thinking they're doing you some sort of favour by offering to take your stock off your hands to save you the effort of loading it back into the van to sell at proper price online later!

If it's any consolation, I found the learning curve for this to be near vertical, and the shear number of hours one must have disposable and willing to sink into learning how to do anything useful was prohibitive. You're doing a great deal better than I ever managed.

I've no horse in this race, but have definitely seen categoric proof in other areas of WWII camouflage where someone has post-eventu had positive identification of some colour samples and official nomenclature, and used what appeared to be logic to assign the unallocated sample to the unallocated official term which satisfied everyone until primary source documentation found later directly contradicted this logical deduction, and where further investigation established that there was significant additional information which would have been required to get that right. In my own experience, it is infinitely easier to cast a very credible doubt than to prove what is absolutely correct when it comes to camouflage. Indeed, the best one usually has to settle for is a theorem which generally reconciles, with some areas which continue to frustrate in their lack of clarity, but at least it doesn't directly clash with primary source evidence and generally fits secondary source evidence.

Worth tagging @dickrd - there is big a gap in the records. I think it's particularly noteworthy that HMS Warspite refitted at Puget Sound in late 1941 and that other ships which refitted overseas which we do have complete records for often show that they had their hulls scraped back to metal (to avoid compatibility issues) and recoated with a locally made product where something of suitable quality was available. e.g. when British ships were drydocked in Australia they tended to be painted with locally manufactured "Majors" brand coatings. The major US Navy yards definitely had products available which met the quality requirement. I don't believe any firm evidence exists for most of the wartime period, but I would not be surprised if she was refinished with the US cold plastic type composition, at least until her next docking at Durban in October 1942 where she *may* have reverted back to a British type - but she was only in for a week so perhaps not. She was docked again for about a month at Durban in March/April 1943, then again for a few weeks in May on the Clyde. There were plenty opportunities to revert to a British type. The record is at best incomplete. Still, there doesn't appear to be any firm evidence she was ever red, only incomplete evidence that at some times at least she used products which only came in grey or black from the relevant manufacturer, and where we do get to see her hull below the waterline it doesn't appear very black.

Nice work Casey. I must say your mathematical abilities in this space far exceed my own.

Dark grey, all of them. Corticene was phased out from 1940 and no new ships would have been fitted out with it whilst it was being stripped out of ships which did have it as they came in for dockyard work

One of the long list of reasons why: 1) Businesses prefer to sell online nowadays and do not favour physical shop fronts, and; 2) Businesses continually surprise a certain sort by not offering discounts at shows (because the cost of doing business at a show is much higher, not lower, and the risk of theft is greater, not smaller). Threads like this do help raise awareness that our demographic of modellers is infested with selfish entitled types who genuinely think it's ok to just take what isn't theirs via some mental gymnastics to justify to themselves that there's either no real victim (because it's just a hobby, right ? and the maker can just do another one) and it's not their fault the stuff costs so much and they wouldn't be forced to steal if the stuff cost 50p like they think it should.

I'd be down. I really liked 1/600 scale. It just felt nice.

The Tamiya KGVs certainly are old now. Not bad, but old. Trumpeter's Hood in 1/350 dates to something like 2002 IIRC. The Trumpeter County-class cruisers are much more modern and actually bad kits. Where they tend to go wrong is using (unlicensed) copies of Profile Morskie plans which often differ significantly from the builders' plans where those still exist, so any and all errors Profile Morskie shows are faithfully replicated by Trumpeter. In 1/700 scale, Flyhawk has been producing some absolutely beautiful kits of RN subjects recently. My singular complaint is that they're not in the scale I happen to prefer

HMS Norfolk isn't easy, but if you're comfortable with scratchbuilding there are Trumpeter County class cruiser kits (HMS Kent is probably the closest kit they offer to HMS Norfolk). HMS King George V really needs the Tamiya HMS Prince of Wales kit. Yes, Tamiya makes a kit of HMS King George V, but it's almost identical to the PoW kit but it has some different sprues/frames and includes parts to represent KGV after her 1944 refit with some significant structural differences. The Prince of Wales kit gets you very close to KGV in 1941 though. The Trumpeter HMS Hood kit is ok - it's basically accurate, more or less, but it's one of Trumpeter's earliest kits and the parts fit needs a bit of TLC. It does build up ok though. The turrets are naff. Paint guides for all of them are not good and best ignored.

There's some overlap in the principles by which they work, but the emphasis and primary objectives are different. This well known infographic from an era long before people used words like infographic illustrates how dazzle confuses identification and estimation of inclination but I think that's fairly well understood amongst naval enthusiasts. The bit that's less well understood is that dazzle throws any attempt at hiding the ship to the wind - you'd struggle not to see one! Ships painted thus are highly conspicuous and the protection of the ship is entirely dependant upon the attacker being incapable of computing a good firing solution. The primary objective of Admiralty Disruptive pattern camouflage was to hide the ship, or at least delay the sighting or reduce the range at which the ship is spotted by the enemy. Once the game is up and the ship has been seen, only then does the secondary effect of causing some degree of confusion as to exactly what kind of ship was seen, how close it is and which way it was heading kicks in on principles similar to those which made dazzle camouflage work. As if to amplify the point, the documents like CAFO 679/42, CAFO 2146/42 and CB3098/43 gave dark, dark-medium, intermediate and light type Admiralty Disruptive schemes which all used similar (sometimes exactly the same confusion shapes) but using different combinations of the standardised camouflage paints to achieve different average Reflectivity Factors which would most effectively conceal the ship against different backgrounds. The theatre of operation and the nature of the primary threat (air attack, U-boat, surface vessel attack, by day or by night) guided the choice of whether to go for a darker combination of colours or a lighter combination of colours.

You and me both pal

From what aerial photographs I do have, and where and when I understand they were taken, my understanding is that it was well known that the Captain was opposed to having his decks camouflaged but the Admiralty instructed the dockyard staff (Liverpool) do it anyway hence the note in the administration that Leamington Spa should prepare a design, and following this dockyard visit the ship put to sea with the decks camouflaged (and indeed some horizontal camouflage carried over the turret tops). I believe this lasted a matter of weeks or a small number of months before it was scrubbed away though, and with the decks restored to bare timber the turret tops appear to have been repainted in dark grey. As to terminology, as the Admiralty Disruptive designs were first to delay sighting and reduce the range at which the ship would be seen, with a secondary function of potentially confusing the observer, I would say it was not a dazzle scheme. Dazzle was purely concerned with confusion and indeed usually made the ship stick out like a proverbial sore thumb. Norman Wilkinson who invented dazzle's thinking was that it was impossible to conceal a ship, so paint it black, white, pink, yellow and blue and rely on confusion to avoid hitting the ship. Unfortunately, Wilkinson's ideas turned out to be useful only against U-boats and were counter productive against air observation reconnaisance or aerial attack. If it helps to illustrate the principle, I've used my HMS Jamaica profile which @dickrd had previously asked me to calculate the average Reflectivity Factor (or Light Reflectance Value) of the camouflage pattern based upon the RFs of the paints used and the relative proportions of the overall surface area of the side of the ship covered by them. Perhaps obviously, a scheme with more MS1 in it will have a darker average RF than a scheme with more 507C or MS4a in it... For HMS Jamaica, the average is slightly different for port and starboard sides by a couple of percentage points, but it's about 20% - the same as Mountbatten Pink, or MS3, later G20, or even later B20 or the equal parts 507A & 507C emergency mix grey. The theory was that since perceived colour is accepted to desaturate with distance due to atmospheric haze and effects of light diffusion, what an observer sees at a distance is the average RF of the ship rather than the constituent colours and their contrasts. At a long distance, there is no difference between painting a camouflage pattern and just painting it a uniform shade of grey as you'll see the same thing either way. Image A shows a Fiji class cruiser notionally painted in emergency mix grey with 20% RF. I've added a hazy filter and borrowed a suitably cloudy photograph from Google Images to serve as a background, since the text above makes it clear that paint is effectively useless for camouflaging a ship on a bright sunny day. Image B shows the same ship wearing Jamaica's camouflage, but I've applied a partly transparent filter over the paintwork the same colour of grey as the haze I added to mimic the desaturation you'd see in real life. As you can see, one is hard pressed to tell the difference at a glance whether there's a camouflage pattern there or not, so at long ranges the pattern and colour has little effect, providing the average tone (RF) of the chosen paint(s) is approximately the same as the typical atmospheric background you'd want to hide against. Against a darker background / sky you'd want a darker average tone of paint. Image C and D perhaps illustrate the secondary purpose of the Admiralty Disruptive scheme. You have the pleasure of taking as long as you like to pick out detail and study the ship, which may or may not be afforded to a sea-going observer. Up close, you probably are going to spot the ship fairly easily, and this is where the non-geometric natural-feeling shapes of contrasting colour were hoped to buy some advantage in either hiding against e.g. a cloudy backdrop of also-natural curvy shapes or at least force the observer to have to spend longer and work harder at discerning the structural details of the ship to identify the class, its range and its heading. In short though, Dazzle screamed "Here I am, but good luck guessing which way I'm going". Admiralty Disruptive pattern schemes were about minimising the range at which the ship will be seen, then adding inconvenience in determining the details needed to attack.

As an aside, and about terminology and specifically about dazzle versus Admiralty Disruptive, the following are some selected quotes from Confidential Book 3098(R) "The Camouflage of Ships at Sea" promulgated May 1943 within the fleet which differentiate the type of camouflage the Royal Navy used from dazzle: " The purpose of camouflage is to nullify, diminish or change the impression made on the eye by some detail or details of a scene – in the present case by a ship at sea. Any discussion of the subject must be based on the consideration of the principles governing visual perception and must employ some terms that are unfamiliar, and others that are in daily use but with various or indeterminate meanings. It will therefore be as well at the outset to make a list of such terms and to give a definition of the meaning of each as used in the following pages: - 1. Sea-going Camouflage - Control of the amount and quality of light transmitted to the eye from the surfaces of a ship at sea, effected by the use of appropriate tones and colours of paint or by other means. Note: Camouflage is here differentiated from disguise – the latter being defined as alteration of a ship's appearance with the intention of deceiving an enemy as to her type." "2. Concealment - Reduction of the range at which a ship can first be sighted in given conditions of light." "20. Dazzle Painting - A method of hindering visual comprehension of a ship's identity and inclination by painting onto it a pattern of very strongly contrasting shapes and tones – the lines of the pattern conflicting with and confusing the characteristic lines of the ship. The tones used need not be related to background." "(a) Concealment of a ship at sea can be achieved when the tone – that is, the lightness or darkness – of the ship's paint matches the tone of her background. In good visibility, by-day concealment can only be achieved at long range, and therefore only from aerial observation; it can be achieved at shorter ranges in poor visibility by day and at night." "21. During the latter years of the last war, a system of dazzle painting originated by Norman Wilkinson was widely used on merchant ships and was tried experimentally on ships of the Tenth Cruiser Squadron. Wilkinson's designs consisted of elaborate and vigorous patterns using very strong contrast, the tones ranging from white to black. A ship so painted might appear not dissimilar from one painted in accordance with Graham Kerr's proposals, and confusion of the two systems is possible. Their purposes, however, were entirely different – for whereas Graham Kerr aimed at concealment, Wilkinson maintained that a ship could not be concealed; that effort should therefore be concentrated on so confusing the eye that estimation of type, inclination and speed would become difficult or impossible; and that it was immaterial whether the ship were made more conspicuous in the process. 22. A statistical survey of attacks and sinkings by U-boats showed that, on the whole, the dazzle-painted ships fared slightly better than the others. The advantage, however, was so uncertain that a committee appointed by the First Lord in 1918 to report on the value of dazzle painting recommended that its application to merchant ships should be continued, not because the committee itself had any confidence in its efficacy, but because the crews of merchant ships believed in it and the confidence and morale of the crew of a vessel so painted were increased. An order was therefore issued to the Fleet in October, 1918, that merchant ships – except those sailing in the Scandinavian convoys, which would thus be made too easily recognisable – should be dazzle-painted. This order continued to stand until 1937, when it was decided that future policy for merchant ships should be to paint them "in the normal way" in time of war." "28. The following conclusions on the uses of sea-going camouflage and the principles on which it should be designed are based on surface and aerial observations of ships at sea. Their validity has been checked by laboratory experiments on model scale under lighting conditions controlled so as to correspond accurately with natural conditions at sea, and has been further confirmed by theoretical analysis of the principles of illumination involved. The results of observations at sea and in the laboratory have corresponded so closely with each other, that any major revision of the statement of the principles of camouflage for concealment at sea is unlikely to be necessary. It is to be remarked, however, that in the laboratory experiments and in the theoretical investigations, unlimited opportunities for scanning have been allowed, and that no investigation has so far been conducted to determine the principles governing the conspicuousness of ships when they are within the range of visibility. That is to say, the means of reducing the maximum range at which it is possible for a ship to be sighted have been studied, but no study has as yet been made of the factors that determine the likelihood of a ship being sighted when she is within her range of visibility, but when she may nevertheless be missed because the opportunities for scanning are restricted. In the absence of any such investigation, it has been assumed that, under operational conditions, the likelihood of a ship being sighted when within her range of visibility is proportional to her range of visibility. From the close correspondence between reports from sea and laboratory and theoretical investigations, it is clear that this assumption must in general be very near the truth; there may, however, be exceptional cases in which it does not apply. 29. Sea-going camouflage can achieve two objects in a limited but useful degree: (a) Concealment: i.e., reduction of the range at which ships can first be sighted. (b) Temporary confusion of a ships apparent inclination and identity. The present policy is to design camouflage primarily for concealment. Confusion is taken as a secondary object, since it is considered more valuable to hide a ship than to delay recognition of her course and identity."