Introduction

The Top Drawings Series of books, has been going for some time now and covers many aspects of the military from military vehicles, aircraft and the big boys on the block, Military ships. This offering looks at the Japanese Battleship Kongo 1944.

Review

This offering from Kagero, is part of their Top Drawings series - this offering being No 110 in the series. The author of this release, covering the Japanese Battleship Kongo 1944is Waldemar Goralski. This is a soft backed book with a glossy card cover protecting 24 pages of semi gloss paper. The introduction to the book is provided in a duel language format, with Polish on the left, and English on the right.

The line drawings provided inside this release, appear to cover every aspect of the vessel, but are not printed in any specific scale. The drawings themselves are three dimensional in presentation, enabling the modeller to move to a specific area of the ship they wish to work on, and gather the information they require. A nice aspect of the drawings in this release is that some elements of the interior are covered along the exterior, and in very large scale drawings, elements such as the ships steering. Magnetic compass, and capstans are covered alongside and given as much attention as the main gun turrets. Another attribute I was quite pleased to see, is that secondary vessels, such as motor launches are included among the drawings.

An A2 size fold out sheet is included, and this provides line drawings in an architectural format showing the vessel from both sides and above in 1/350th scale. On the opposite side of this sheet, the vessel is again shown in 1/350th scale, but this time in a 3 dimensional askew view and cut into segments. However architectural drawings showing the vessel from front and rear, plus a breakdown of hull shapes and dimensions is included here. 

Conclusion

For those modellers interested in building accurate representations of vessels that on many occasions no longer exist, life can prove difficult. This series of books from Kagero addresses most of the information, at least externally that the modeller would require for an accurate representation, and most importantly all in one place. Some areas of the vessel receive extra special close attention that will really enable the modeller to go as far as they wish detail wise. This book covering the Japanese Battleship Kongo 1944, is not particularly large having a small page count, but it packs a huge amount of information in those pages, and the fold out sheet is a particularly nice inclusion.