Small scale Saturns

[Adam Poultney]

Are there any kits available of Saturn Is and Saturn Vs in smaller scales than 1/144? Ideally no taller than 30cm for the V. Even in 1/144 Saturn V models are huge... Never built anything space before, would be a nice change.

[Arild Moland]

ScaleMates are your ... eh... mates when it comes to answering this kind of question. Looks like there are some kits in smaller scales. No idea about availability though, but eBay have some?

 

https://www.scalemates.com/search.php?fkSECTION[]=All&q=Saturn+V&fkSCALE[]="1:200"&fkSCALE[]="1:400"&fkSCALE[]="1:396"

[Adam Poultney]

7 hours ago, Arild Moland said:

ScaleMates are your ... eh... mates when it comes to answering this kind of question. Looks like there are some kits in smaller scales. No idea about availability though, but eBay have some?

 

https://www.scalemates.com/search.php?fkSECTION[]=All&q=Saturn+V&fkSCALE[]="1:200"&fkSCALE[]="1:400"&fkSCALE[]="1:396"

Airfix Saturn Ib looks tempting. There's a 1/400 Saturn v but it's a 60s tooling

[Eric Mc]

The Airfix kits can turn out nicely. They are not 100% accurate (few Saturn kits are) but they were updated in 2009 so some of the more glaring errors have now been corrected - 

 

[Adam Poultney]

What kit and scale is that shuttle? I'd love to do one of those and a Buran, which I saw there is a new kit of (but it's it released?)

[Eric Mc]

With the exception of the Jupiter C model (which is 1/120 approximately) all the other models are 1/144 scale - so the collection does provide a realistic size comparison.

 

The Shuttle kit is from Minicraft. There are three 1/144 Shuttle kits available, Airfix, Revell and Minicraft. None of them are 100% accurate but of the three, the Minicraft one is the poorest with some shape issues around the nose area of the Orbiter. The External Tank also lacks some important details, such as the corrugations around the inter-tank section. I had to make my own using plastic strip. The reason I used the Minicraft kit is because it was the only one available at the time I bought it (about ten years ago).

 

The Ark 1/144 Buran orbiter has been out for a few months and there was a build featured in a recent Airfix magazine.

Hopefully they will bring out an Energia launcher to go with it at some point.

Edited November 28, 2019 by Eric Mc

[general melchett]

There’s always the old 1/200th AMT Saturn V, also available in the ‘Man in Space’ set, but that’s still relatively large at roughly 18 inches.

 

Eric, I built the Ark Buran (along with several others) for the Airfix Real Space special recently and must say it’s a great little kit, especially when bundled with the excellent Begemot decal set, which thankfully includes most of the thermal tiles, something noticeably lacking from the initial release. One slight disappointment was the lack of a payload in the rather empty bay, although it wouldn’t be difficult to scratch a 37KB module or SO Mir-2 docking module.

As for Energia, I’d also like to see ARK release one, apart from the little 1/288th Start kits, Rho Models resin (re-engineered by RealSpace) or the monstrous 1/72 Amodel kit, the more readily available option is the 1/144th Anigrand resin, which isn’t exactly cheap. I’ve been toying with the idea of getting one along along with a Revell issue An-225 and a couple more Burans to build as stacked packages, (along with Anigrand’s Polyus orbital weapons platform) as they’d make for an interesting  display ....so many options.

[Eric Mc]

To many options and not enough time.