The kit that I will be using for this build is the highly detailed Dragon offering. I got this one at a silent auction for about half the price of retail one when you factor in the after-market wooden deck.
The Nautilus wooden deck:
There are some 1300 parts that come on 55 individual sprues that are nicely grouped and wrapped in individual bags
8 Hellcat and 8 Avenger aircraft are include on clear sprues so that you can mask off the canopies and paint the rest of the planes. You get folded as well as unfolded wings. The downside to these aircraft is that panel lines are molded in and, at such a small scale, these look to be very exaggerated.
The decals include the shark-mouths for the VF-27 Hellcats that were aboard the Princeton in the fall of 1944 plus many individual aircraft numbers.
Though the kit includes 3 frets of PE parts, I decided to supplement the details with a further 2 large after-market frets by White Ensign. Though these are for the USS Independence, they should be usable for this sister ship.
For a much more in-depth description of the kit contents and an informative review, see the following links:
Dragon USS Independence CVL-22 Review
Dragon 1/350 USS Princeton (CVL-23), previewed by Scott Van Aken
Now, I'm going to need a pile of help on this kit as it's my first ship model. Those of you who know me will appreciate that I like to depict my models as historically accurate so I'd appreciate as much advice and as many detail pics as you guys can spare. I will want to depict the correct squadrons of Hellcats and Avengers consistent with the chosen paint scheme. I'm leaing toward the colourful Measure 33/7A dazzle scheme as shown in the profile above and have yet to determine the date on which this was applied. The kit only says that it was in 1944 whereas the blue/grey Measure 21 scheme was carried in 1943. I'll continue to research this as I've book marked a number of informative sights.
Here are the detail pics I've managed to collect from the net to date. None of these are from the Princeton but from its sister ships CVL-22 and 26.