The 'ShipCraft' series provides in-depth information about building and
modifying model kits of famous warship types. Lavishly illustrated, each
book takes the modeler through a brief history of the subject class,
highlighting differences between sister-ships and changes in their
appearance over their careers. This includes paint schemes and
camouflage, featuring color profiles and highly-detailed line drawings
and scale plans. The modeling section reviews the strengths and
weaknesses of available kits, lists commercial accessory sets for
super-detailing of the ships, and provides hints on modifying and
improving the basic kit. This is followed by an extensive photographic
gallery of selected high-quality models in a variety of scales, and the
book concludes with a section on research references - books,
monographs, large-scale plans and relevant websites.
The two German ships which form the subject of this volume were among
the first products of rearmament under Hitler. For political reasons
they were neither as large nor as well armed as foreign equivalents, but
they were very fast, which led them to be described as 'battlecruisers'
in some quarters. They enjoyed an adventurous war, both surviving heavy
damage, before Scharnhorst was sunk in an epic gun battle off the North
Cape, while Gneisenau succumbed to heavy air attack.
