[bus man]

Amazing job, sir. I hate to be a nitpicker, but neither Enterprise nor Hornet were attacked at Midway.

Enterprise is one of my two favorite ships from World War II (the other being the Japanese battleship Haruna). I think it's an absolute travesty that she wasn't preserved as a museum ship. If someone ever builds a replica of her, I will certainly pay her a visit.

How would you rank the difficulty of building the Merit International kit? I used to build models when I was a teenager, but they were the Revell kits that you could slap together in a couple of hours. In modern times, I've only done the Fujimi 1/350 Haruna and the Academy 1/400 Titanic. The Haruna took me maybe 100 hours and was rather challenging for me, and that's even though I decided I wasn't skilled enough to paint her. I would love to have the 1/350 Enterprise to keep an eye on her, but I'm not sure I'm up to another build of that magnitude.

[Jeff Head]

It was a lot of fun...but took a lot of time to do right. Particularly if you want to detail it out with the photo etch metal parts...the railing, sensors, etc. Then the aircraft builds.

Doing all of the small .50 caliber machine guns and putting the armor plate protection on each was pretty tedious and time consuming.

But I enjoy it. I probably have 200-300 hours in that kit. I had about 1000 hours in my:

USS Ronald Reagan

...and

USS IWo Jima, LHD-7

Both of which have fully lit hanger decks.