Imperial Japanese Navy Super Type A cruiser Zao: Building a l:350-scale model

摘要

One of my best customers (we will call him Mike) dropped a very long box into my hot little hands and asked me if I could build it. (Figure 1) I said to myself: "This is a ship model.. .1 can build it." I cracked open the big box-this is no mere plastic ship model. This thing is a 3D-printed monster, some 26 inches long, with a huge pile of photoetch brass detail part sheets, many other 3D-printed parts, and a set of instructions in Chinese with a lot of part numbers labeled on it. This thing is something I have never, ever seen before. (Figure 2) This kit's subject is an Imperial Japanese Navy warship that was planned but never actually built: the Design B-65 super Type A cruiser. I have never before heard of the manufacturer, the Chuanyu Ship Model Company, but if this is what we can expect, we definitely will hear more from them, and they will hear from my wallet. The Imperial Japanese Navy planned six of these big monsters as the spearhead of their night-fighting force, in accordance with their pre-war doctrine of the decisive battle. At over 20,000 tons, the length of a fleet carrier, with nine 12-inch guns, and a speed in excess of 35 knots, they would have been fast, fearsome ships, very similar to Germany's battlecruisers Gneisnau and Scharnhorst but with a much deadlier night-fighting torpedo capability. As the Nihon Kaigun was well aware of the United States Navy's plans for the Alaska-class large cruisers, these ships were conceived as a countermeasure, but none of them actually made it to the slipways. Other ships...mainly aircraft carriers...took up the available construction efforts, and the B-65's never got past the drawing board. Much like the Alaska-class, they would have been the penultimate gunnery ships, but already obsolescent the moment they were launched in an aircraft-dominated war.