ShipCraft 17: Iowa class Battleships

The 'ShipCraft' series provides in-depth information about building and modifying model kits of famous warship types. Lavishly illustrated, each book takes the modeller 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 colour profiles and highly-detailed line drawings and scale plans. The modelling 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 Iowa class were the largest, fastest and most modern US battleships of the war, and the formal surrender of Japan was signed on the deck of one of them, USS Missouri. Modernised post-war, they served in Korea, Vietnam and as late as the first Gulf War. They are among the most popular subjects of all for model kits.