Dear Fiona,

Welcome to the frustrating enterprise of locating, and then building, a quality replica of a German u-boat. Believe, the struggle will be a protracted one. In any event, Ehobbies.com had Revell's U-99 in stock as of last Thursday, when I placed my order. It arrived today, and I am pleased to say that it seems to be of sufficient quality to allow for a museum quality kit, if one exercises adequate dilligence in the modification and research process. Model Expo also has Gunther Prien's u-47. I opted to order u-99 because, while the interror details are cool, I would desire a removable panel that would allow it to look like a u-boat at sea. Not certain that I could ever successfully engineer such a feature, I chose not to risk it.
If Ehobbies has ran out of stock, there are a couple of Monogram XI kits, now long out of production, available on e-bay. However, as my prior post indicates, I cannot vouch for the quality. Finally, you might try Nichimo's IX B and C kits. As I have been warned of various inaccuracies, and as I concluded that 1-200 is too small for my ambitious purposes, I opted to choose u-99 over Nichimo. However, while my sources maintain that Nichimo suffers from some inaccuracies, other sources say that the discrepancies are merely a result of the constantly shifting wintergarden and conning tower figurations that varied throughout the course of the war. I suppose no one may ever conclusively resolve this issue. As my prior postings may indicate, above all, stay the f*** away from the academy kit. Not only are the keel and prop gear ridiculous at best, and offensive at worst, the kit suffers from fairly drastic fitting problems. Happily, in lieu of those fitting problems, I was able to persuade ehobbies to issue a refund. In all events, I hope this helps. As a closing note, I might advise you that you ought to learn how to scratch-build the railings; the railings provided are, in my opinion, egregiously out of scale. Also, I have made a couple of friends who are going to send me two articles on how to rehab Revell's u-99 to historically correct satisfactions. One of those articles is written by Ken Hart, featured in Fine Scale Modeler of OCt 95. You might want to make arrangements of your own to acquire this article.

Warm Regards,

Einsamer Wolf