Has anybody built Dragon’s 1/700 USS Pennsylvania BB-38 1944 before?
The other one is Tamiya’s USS Indianapolis Heavy Cruiser.
Which kit would be the best out of these two?
the dragon penn is an excellent kit imho, it has a lot of pe included, and a ton of spare trees from the essex and arizona. i don’t have any experience with the indy.
On terms of sheer detail, the Dragon Pennsy comes out the victor, but the foremast is way large out of scale, so study of pics of the real thing will reveal this and guide you in modification/scratch building of the correct scale part. The PE fret is awesome. Mine has a couple of sink marks in annoying places on the one piece hull/deck molding, but not bad though. I have no photos of it yet.
The Indy has far fewer parts, but is an absolute joy to build. No PE is included, and the mainmast is rather simplified. Again, studying photos you can add the pieces to the mainmast and make it look pretty good, mostly all it takes is some stretched sprue cross braces. I did mine OOB other than that.
I think you would like them both.[t$t]
As far as ease of construction, the Tamiya Indianapolis wins hands down. It does not come with the same level of extras as the Dragon kit. For detailing you will need to buy a Photo Etch set. While more inclusive of detail the Dragon Pennsylvania suffers from a few annoying quirks. The 20mm guns are vastly out of scale and will not fit in their assigned spots on the forward superstructure without trimming and careful placement. The foremast has problems with alignment as well as size so dry fit, dry fit, dry fit! The most annoying thing though is that the hull is completely devoid of any detail, not the least of which should be the rather prominent plated over portholes seen in photos of the ship and in the artwork on the box top! WS
review of the dragon Penn
U will not go wrong with Dragon kit. [Y]