Ahoy Shipmates!!!

Our friends at White Ensign Models have sent along word of their newest release of the USS Independence detail set in 1/350.

Link to Item

If you have comments or questions please post them here.

Thanks!

Looks like they got carried away with the carriers. And that means all long promised subjects like Tone and Fuso are not going to materialise. It's just too many flattops to go through...

What--you mean you know better than we do as to what is or is not going to be produced by WEM?

I think it is a bit more of him venting frustration, which may be as much perception than reality, and - to be fair - should not be limited to/against WEM alone.

Although it might be perception, for every flat-top there seems to be a PE-set produced within weeks.

Yet for the (IJN) gun-ships - with the completely understandable exception of the 1/200 Arizona - it seems to take forever. And admittedly there might be more work involved to get them produced but perception is that flat-tops jump ahead of the line consistently.

There has been a great series of releases of IJN vessels - battleships, carriers, cruisers etc. - yet for some of the releases (Mogami all-gun, Fuso, Ise, Myoko, Tone) the PE manufacturers seem to have lagged behind.

One is forced to choose between manufacturer PE, which in the case of Fujimi and Aoshima allegedly/supposedly are not as good as those of main stream manufacturers, apart from the price one has to pay for them, and their PE sets might be incomplete.

The other solution is to combine numerous sets originally meant for resin kits (like the YMW sets for the Tone), or combine numerous sets originally meant for other vessels.

WEM (like GMM) usually offers PE sets that offer a considerable amount of bang for buck, without immediately (almost) doubling the money invested in the kits (which the all-in-one sets of Lion Roar and Flyhawk tend to do).

And at that point it becomes as a model-builder very frustrating to see all the flat-top PE (or PE for vessels for which already PE sets exist) being announced or produced while you have a bunch of IJN vessels in the stash for which there is no PE option available that most modelers can afford.

I understand that as a PE manufacturer you have to take all kinds of considerations into account - from availability of the original kit to what type of sets will be see the greatest demand; but if you do not go for the main-stream, this can become pretty frustrating.

Just my euro 0.02

Before I forget,

at least my frustration(s) are to some extent of course the result from the relative wealth of materials to us modellers today, and in general the good job done by the (after market) industry as a whole in providing us with basic kits and the stuff to upgrade them, almost to our heart's content.

So yeah, I think that some of the complaining is the result of what one could call 'spoiled brat-sydrome.'

Cheers,

Harm

Fair enough--but remember we have only one poor overworked Peter Hall doing our PE design work. We have to prioritize his time, and to do that we base our forthcoming PE on the number of pre-orders we have for our announced sets. If the pre-orders aren't there for those IJN PE sets, they keep getting passed over by later releases. I CAN tell you that the 1/350 Fuso is close to the top of the list, but that there is every chance that the new 1/350 Dreadnought will generate enough pre-orders to move ahead of it. Watch our News page for announcements of the top 5 PE sets in the design queue.

And remember, if your desired PE set isn't at the top of the list--get out there and generate some pre-orders!