KenR : 1/700 WW2 Prince of Wales (120 pts)

 

Round 2 of the Italian Wars failure is a bit bigger than the first, its 20 cm longer and 4 cm wider in the base for a start ! Its a continuation of my build of the ships I need to run a Bismarck chase campaign, and looking at that picture of the ship charging towards you with a 4 gun main turret it could be no other than HMS Prince of Wales.

Sailing out to meet the Bismarck with HMS Hood, Prince of Wales was not fully worked up and mechanical failures would prevent her performing to maximum capability when in combat with the German Battleship and sadly the Hood was sunk in that engagement.

POW was to take part in the chase of the Bismark and then see active service escorting a convoy into Malta before being despatched to Malaya where she met her end along with HMS Repulse, when attacked by Japanese aircraft.

I have painted the ship in her Denmark Strait colour scheme of overall dark Admiralty Grey with wooden decks. A bit drab compared to the dazzle scheme in Malaya but I wanted to keep the ship in sympathy with the Hood model I had done before the Challenge began.

The kit is from Tamiya and was first released in 1975, I have to say that its showing its age, especially when compared with newer manufacturers like Trumpeter and Flyhawk. I was pretty disappointed with the overall level of detail on a ship of this size. I'll definitely go for other manufacturers for big ships in the future. Its painted up nicely and the subtle weathering has come out nicely but there could have been so much more on it (there's no door to get into the main superstructure and stuff like that drives my tiny engineering brain mad. In the future I might get another KGV with a mad load of photo etch on.

The ship is mounted on a 42 cm x 10 cm base which will be the standard size for all Capital ships for my rules system. Points wise I've stuck with 120 as for the Bismarck, the ships are pretty much the same size.

I'll finish off the pictures with a snap of Hood and POW together.

I'm going to try and stick with one small ship per week until the end of the challenge, I also have Prinz Eugen built but found when I got to the bottom of the box there was no decals, so I've had to order some, which meant that got put to one side and in the meantime I've built HMS Ark Royal so I'm hoping to get them finished as well before Challenge End.

Oh and some Italian Wars.

HMS PoW certainly had an eventful if short and tragic service history but you've done her (him?) proud.  I have always wondered about her name, as she's not actually named for a person but an empty title. Apparently she was laid down as Edward VIII, but he'd abdicated before launch and she was christened as Prince of Wales (Eddy Eight's former title).  There wouldn't be another Prince of Wales until Chuck in the 1970s, and you'd think they'd pick a name that didn't bring to mind the royal family's most embarrassing skeleton.

After all the troubles you've had it's great to see a second ship this week Ken.  I agree that rationing these out one per week is a good idea, it also means you might ACTUALLY PAINT SOME ITALIAN WARS STUFF YOU GREAT LUMMOX.  But I also want to see the Ark shortly.

Lovely work on this venerable kit (I can remember 1975....), on table top no one is going to notice the missing small details that drive your engineer's mindset batty.  Wasn't it just last week that you were kvetching over fiddling photo etched details and now your bewailing that there aren't any.