Introduction

Kagero have a good number of books available that would appeal to the modeller. One of these series is called Topdrawings and covers military vehicles, aircraft and ships, in a way that makes them extremely valuable to the modeller who wishes to take accuracy to the level that meets their approval. The book we are looking at here covers HMS Invincible and so as you can see will covers very large subjects.

Review

This offerings from Kagero is soft backed book, with a card cover protecting 28 glossy pages, two fold out sheets. The text in the books is limited, which is printed in both English and Polish with English on the left, and Polish on the right. The author of this offering is Witold Koszela. Now, we all appreciate ships are very large as a general rule of thumb, and so as the purpose of these books is to provide the viewer with scale drawings of the subject matter and so is a difficult subject to tackle vis this method. So, Kagero has broken the ship up into bite size chunks and provided portions of the vessel in scales of 1/200th to 1/300th , and has covered everything from the superstructures, the island, and arrays in these scales. Areas such as weapons and flight control devices have been covered in 1/100th scale with the odd excursion to as large as 1/50th and as small as 1/200th. 

The aircraft that were housed on HMS Invincible have not been forgotten, and both the fixed wing and rotary wing aircraft have been tackled. In this case in 1/144th scale, which is a good choice as this scale is readily available.

The fold out sheets included in this release cover HMS Invincible in a complete form looking at the vessel from both sides and above. They have even removed the island in some images to enable the viewer to more readily see what’s what. The scale chosen for this purpose is 1/350th, which is again a good choice due to models of these vessels being readily available in this scale. One of the sheets is of a much thicker and sturdier paper, and this covers MHS Invincible at a different time in her service, and on the reverse of this you are presented with the vessel from both sides and above that has been coloured in and if you can get rid of the creases, would look quite good in a frame.

Conclusion

Due to the size of these vessels, books such as this will be a God send to the modeller. It enables them to scan and print in any scale they wish, it provides them highly detailed line drawings against which to check their models, and enables them to take detailing to the level of their choice.