Ark Models 1/400 Aurora cruiser

Well, this ship is known for everyone who grew up in post-Soviet countries until the ’80s; every year on the 7th of November you were listening to the heroic role she played to free the suffering working class from the clutches of the bourgeoise. The history of ship is interesting, and she is essentially the symbol of the Communist revolution, so there’s that for you.

Well, I built this kit when I was a kid -more precisely, an older version of it (I still remember the box… I might still have it somewhere.)

I even remember the instructions; I have to find out if I still have them. (I will get the actual model I built to do a comparison.) The model has been in circulation forever; however, this one from Ark Models offers you some extra goodies. The new box art is not as great; in fact the box is about 4 times as big as necessary, and I am quite confused about the Terminator, Terminator 2 quotes on the box.

Maybe they think it is relevant to the upcoming Communist revolution as well.

The attraction of this kit for me was the fact that they provide some serious update for the old model -lots of resin replacement, PE… but no wooden deck. (The nose of the deck is replaced by a resin piece, but the rest of the wooden pattern is the original one. If nothing else I would suggest getting the extra decking.)

There is an in-box review of it on youtube (I really dislike these unboxing videos, but at least they give an idea what is in the box), and you may go a different route and get your update from elsewhere. (Honestly, the set looks much better than what’s in this model.) Since I am not a big fan of PE, I feel this offering represents a healthy compromise for me.

The model’s instructions are less-than-ideal – they only deal with the replacement parts, and leave you quite in the dark about how the original kit is built. For this I would refer you to the original kit’s instructions which I linked.

I dug out my old model from the attic (made in the late ’80s…), and the bow part is definitely different. I guess this was the reason for replacing them with resin replacements.

The resin parts are relatively easy to work with, and the pouring blocks are not difficult to remove, BUT the main bridge is warped. A lot. The other big issue is the funnels – they are glued together in a way that the seam appears on the sides, rather than being hid by the ridges running along on both sides of the funnels. In reality these are thin rods (not sure what their function is) which are attached to both ends (front and end) of the funnel. I did not check my references -unfortunately- before gluing the funnels in place, but they are oversized on the model’s original funnel, and molded as simple ridges on the replacement one. Neither solution is ideal. What I should have done -and may attempt to do- is to change the thick plastic molded-on part to a thinner one – an operation that is made more difficult by the already attached ventilation funnels and walkway.

I did install the walkway that goes along the mid-section of the ship, but it does look a bit chunky – a suitable resin/PE replacement would have been nice. There are inaccuracies in the ship (the hawsehole is in a completely wrong position, and I am not going to reposition it…), and I managed to break a 153mm gun tube while applying the primer. Beh.

Also, as trigger warning for warship modelers following this build: I am not planning to install the rigging… It is an aspect of ship modelling that -to me- I enjoy less than assembling workable individual track links from 5 piece per link and usually end up gluing the rigging to the tweezer and my fingers anyhow. Overall the building went fine – it took me a week of evening sessions while I was watching the original Batman animated series, because I completely missed them when they came out in the ’90s.