Book excerpt: 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, highlighting differences between ships and changes in their appearance over their careers. This includes paint schemes and camouflage, featuring color 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 subjects, 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. This volume covers the many variations of Royal Navy wartime escort destroyers, both the purpose-built ‘Hunt’ class and the conversions from older fleet destroyers. The ‘Hunts’ were built in four groups (Types I to IV), while the old ‘V&W’ classes were modified to Long Range Escort, Short Range Escort and ‘Wair’ (anti-aircraft) variants. Also included are the fifty ex-US ‘flush-deckers’ that became the ‘Town’ class. With its unparalleled level of visual information – paint schemes, models, line drawings and photographs – this book is simply the best reference for any modelmaker setting out to build any of these numerous escort types.