The Nagatos and Tosas - IJN Battleship project is complete

Here are the last four battleships of the Imperial Japanese Navy that I will be ever finishing - this leaves the Yamato-class only anyway, and still a better statistic than the historical IJN. On the left, the two Tosa-class ships, one of which saw service as an aircraft carrier, and the other was broken up before completion, and on the right, the Nagato-class, which were actually used, albeit only in the Second World War. 

I have a fascination towards warship projects that never came to be, this is why I have the Borodino-class Russian battlecruisers, and will be completing some more things like the Austro-Hungarian superdreadnoughts and battlecruisers etc. 

Technically the Tosas are interwar designs, so they are out of my preferred period of WW1, but I thought they looked very nice, and fit the imaginary Island Kingdoms strategy of building huge, high quality capital units. I still have the Amagi-class battlecruisers to build, which would have been even larger than the Tosas, but currently these are the largest ships in my fleet. 

The most challenging part of this build was the heptapodal main mast, On the Nagatos I chose to do it only partially, and there might be a large inaccuracy in the spread of the supporting pieces. On the Tosas I was smarter, and chose a combined technique: I made the masthead and the center piece out of wood, and drilled a hole for it in the hull. I used wood glue to fix this in place, and when the glue set, I added the supports using superglue (the supports are brush bristles, and PVA does not work with them). The two platforms I installed inside were cut to a horseshoe shape and inserted from the forward opening above the conning tower, where the inside of the horseshoe could be attached to the center piece.

I might be doing some pagoda mast versions of the Fusos and have them serve as designated squadron/fleet flagships, and I still have to do the Kuramas and Amagis to have an up to date cruiser fleet, but I am satisfied that I have all the battleships ready to fight now.

There's another project I'm working on, which is the Klagimir Republic's fleet programme in the same period as these were completed, but it's mostly pre-dreadnoughts purchased from all over the globe to counter pirates and raiders; as they are potential opponents with the Island Kingdoms, it is an interesting thought experiment what a 16" shell could do to an early 1900's pre-dread...