Warships you cannot buy in plastic are the whole point of this part of the range. It covers armoured river gunboats of the American Civil War, single-turret monitors, British gun monitors, Soviet river craft, pre-dreadnoughts and battleships from the turn of the century, and Japanese units from the first half of the twentieth century. Nothing here is a mainstream subject, and that is deliberate.
These are small-run resin castings for modellers with some experience: parts are washed free of mould release, pour blocks are sawn off and assembly is done with cyanoacrylate. Choose by the scale your fleet is already in, because the two scales offered are not meant to be mixed on one shelf.
The selection aims at subjects the large manufacturers leave alone, and it does so from both ends of the timeline. At one end sit the armoured river and coastal vessels of the nineteenth century, whose shapes have nothing in common with later warships at all. At the other sit pre-dreadnoughts and early battleships, where you can follow how armament and superstructure arrangements changed over twenty years. British gun monitors and Soviet river craft fill in between.
1:350 is the larger format, where there is room to work on superstructure and armament. It is the right home for monitors and river craft, which at a smaller scale would be only a few centimetres long.
1:700 is the compact scale that puts a whole fleet on one shelf, which is why the battleship series is cast in it. Where 1:350 holds one ship, 1:700 holds several, and comparison becomes possible.
The hull usually comes as a single casting with a pour block on the bottom. Saw the block off and true the base on abrasive paper laid on a flat board, or the ship will never sit square; for a waterline model the underside is hidden anyway, so it need not be pretty. Fill air bubbles along the bilge before priming. Deck planking, linoleum and steel want separate treatments but similar values, otherwise the model reads as patchwork, and thinned model paints with restrained contrast suit small-scale ships far better than heavy shading.
Fortification models, figures and decals from the same association are listed under ŘOP.
