IJN Taiho Aircraft Carrier (Japan) model


	IJN Taiho Aircraft Carrier (Japan) by Anthony Kochevar


	Taiho was an aircraft carrier of the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II."Taiho" means "Great Phoenix".Built by Kawasaki, she was laid down on 10 July 1941 and launched almost two years later, on 7 April 1943, and was commissioned on 7 March 1944. Taiho was the first Japanese aircraft carrier of a new design which incorporated a heavily armored flight deck and 2 hangar decks, making her analogous to the Royal Navy's Illustrious class. She was also the first Japanese carrier to incorporate a hurricane bow. On 19 June 1944, she was flagship of Vice-Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa's carrier force in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. As Taihō turned into the wind and launched an air strike, she was herself attacked by a spread of six torpedoes from the US submarine USS Albacore (SS-218)Template:WP Ships USS instances. One of the Taihō's strike pilots, Sakio Komatsu, had just taken off when he saw the torpedo wakes and deliberately dived his plane into the path of a torpedo; the weapon detonated short of its target, and four of the remaining five missed.The explosion of the torpedo that hit jammed the ship's forward aircraft elevator; its pit filled with gasoline, water, and fuel. However, no fire erupted, and the flight deck was unharmed. -- Wikipedia

I built this model in May of 2007 at the time, it was the first model I’d done in about 20 years and the tooling is probably that old as well. After doing a few other IJN ships I decided to redo her, adding photoetch and scratchbuilt details. The model took over a month to redo and I was glad to get it finished. It was a lesson to me that it is best to do a model right the first time instead of redoing it. Tom’s IJN carrier photoetch was used(love this stuff!), along with styrene, wire and stretched sprue. There are a few aspects of the model I’m not completely happy with. The deck for one, I don’t think is very good. I also tried to do camouflage netting on the sides of the bridge and fire control turrets, I don’t know if I completely like the look.

I do however like the smoke funnel, it was shaved of detail and everything completely scratchbuilt back on, and boat being launched on the rear cranes has also been enjoyed by others who have seen the model. I’m very pleased with the “Tony” aircraft on the back of the flight deck. I’ve wanted to do this plane for a long time but could never get the camouflage paint to look good. I finally decided to try painting the base color of the plane with Testors Flat Gull Gray then drawing the camo on with a sharp Olive Green watercolor pencil. I do the same thing for wear lines on my planes, but use a silver pencil. I’m very pleased with the look of these planes.


				This model has not been used in any story yet

IJN Taiho Aircraft Carrier (Japan) Scale model Tamiya WW2 Pacific War Modelsstory Photoshop




	"MODEL STORY" is the first comic story with new concepts indepentently produced by modelsstory.com. The story, on which great amount of energy and funding is spent, will bring you into a fancy world you have never seen and start your adventure there!		The unique art works by modelsstory.com, which combines various scale models and Photoshop techniques to realize a series of epic historical stories. This form of art in modelsstory.com is the first ever created!