RMS Titanic (PS-008) 1:700

[Mike]

RMS Titanic (PS-008)

1:700 MENG via Creative Models Ltd

 

 

There can’t be many people that haven’t heard of the appalling and unnecessary loss of life that happened when the Titanic’s maiden voyage route intersected with an iceberg, causing huge rips down the ship’s side and overwhelming the safety measures that led many to believe that she was unsinkable.  At the end of the day on 14th April 1912 she hit that fateful iceberg and began taking on substantial quantities of water.  Less than three hours later she broke up and slipped beneath the surface with many of the passengers still aboard, and many more forced to jump into the almost freezing water.  Over 1,500 souls were lost that day thanks to the hubris of the designers and impatience of the supervising crew, but many lessons were learned from this tragedy that are still applicable today, and many lives have subsequently been saved as a result.

 

The 1997 blockbuster release of the film The Titanic brought the story to the public consciousness again after the wreck had been found over 13 miles from her expected location some years earlier.  She was found lying upright and in two major parts, both of which had hit the sea bed at a considerable speed, badly buckling the underside.  She has since been thoroughly inspected, and some of the knowledge gleaned from those expeditions was incorporated into the fictionalised plot of the James Cameron helmed film. Which itself has become part of modern vernacular, with phrases such as “paint me like one of your French girls” raising the occasional titter.

 

 

The Kit

This is a new tool from MENG, and it’s quite an interesting and unusual proposition, as it is moulded in pre-coloured styrene, comes with a wood-effect plinth and gold-painted ferrules to stand the model on, and what’s more fun is that it also has a lighting system included with a battery box hidden in the base, plus a touch-sensitive button out of sight to turn the lights on and off.  Neato!  The kit arrives in a slender box in MENG’s usual style with a painting of the titular ship on the front, overhead and side views on the sides, and a number of QR code links to their social media sites for good measure.  Inside the box are four loose white parts plus a sprue in white styrene, a tan sprue, a brown sprue, an orange/brown sprue, a small brick red sprue and lower hull part, a black sprue and upper hull part, and the afore mentioned wood effect base and brass/gold painted supports on a sprue that was originally moulded in brown.  In addition, there is a black and silver name plate for the plinth, a length of flexible LED strip with a lead and socket on one end, plus a battery box with circular PCB holding the touch switch and terminated with a socket for the plug.  The instructions are quite unusual in their layout, taking the form of three concertina sheets that extend to 90cm once unfolded.  The first sheet is single-sided and has the history of the Titanic in four languages including English, plus a short advisory section in the same four languages.  The second and third sheets contain the instructions and optional painting guide, including the electronics.  Detail is excellent for the scale as we expect from MENG, and although the “proper” modeller will want to throw some paint at the kit, you don’t have to, or if you’ve bought the model for a child, everything should go together without glue or paint and still look good, especially when you tap the invisible switch and the lights come on!

 

 

 

 

 

Construction begins with the decks fore and aft (pointy and blunt ends if you’re uninitiated), which are moulded in tan and have a black insert and the white tops of the hull that have a representation of the railings moulded-in.  The main superstructure has tan decking inserts added at both ends, and has another upstand and walls in white, on top of which more tan decking parts are fitted, then some white superstructure parts and another partial layer of decking.  The hull is next, and begins with adding the three props, which are moulded in tan and insert into brick red fairings that slot in under the stern on three pegs each, with the centre prop fitting in front of the sole rudder, which made turning the ship a slow process.  The black upper hull has the LED strip stuck between two raised grooves using the self-adhesive tape on the back of it, threading the wires through a hole in the rear before adding the bow and stern decks over it.  The main superstructure is pushed into the upper hull, and the upper hull is pushed into the lower hull to make it look more like a ship.  On the bow deck a number of black and brown inserts are pushed into holes in the deck, including cranes, a task that is repeated at the stern with more cranes, and a helpful purple arrow advising you where the bow is.

 

Fixtures and fittings are inserted into the decks on the main superstructure next, including the lifeboats, of which there were too few of course.  The four funnels are each made out of two orange halves with moulded-in raised riveting, a black top, and an insert that slips into the top of each stack, the rearmost one having a different insert, as it was mostly used to vent exhaust from the galleys, machinery and ventilation, rather than belching smoke and steam from the boilers.  The masts are found on the brown sprue, with one each placed fore and aft.

 

 

 

 

The plinth has a very believable wooden texture painted over the brown styrene, with a raised frame ready to receive the self-adhesive nameplate, and two holes for the hull supports, which have been painted gold at the factory.  Flipping the stand over, the battery pack sticks inside a marked area on its self-adhesive tape, and the switch is similarly stuck into a raised circular bracket shape near one of the supports, with the wire fed through the hollow centre of the support.  The box takes two AAA batteries that aren’t included, the ones shown in the photos being from my battery drawer.  The lower hull has two holes to receive the supports, and the wire dangling from one of them mates with the socket sticking out of the plinth, allowing you to turn the lights on and off by tapping on the plastic over where the switch resides.  The rest of the instructions are taken up with a colour chart that gives you codes for MENG’s collaboration with AK Interactive, and Gunze’s new(ish) Acrysion paint system, which is starting to be more readily available in the UK.

 

 

Markings

The Titanic only wore one paint scheme during her short life, and as the styrene is pre-coloured already, it’s not strictly necessary to put any paint on the model once complete.  In case you want to however, there are two views of the ship from the side and overhead with the colours called out in MENG/AK Interactive and Gunze Acrysion codes.

 

 

Conclusion

This is a very well-detailed model regardless of whether you want to treat it as a true model or snap it together for a nice table model over the course of the afternoon.  Detail is excellent, and the addition of the lights gives it extra appeal.

 

Very highly recommended.

 

 

Review sample courtesy of

[Paul H]

Interesting - I've built a few of their battleships from the same series so expect parts fit & engineering to be very good.  The kit itself seems very similar to the Academy 1:700 Titanic (which also has a variant with a lighting kit) complete with the solid moulded in guard rails on the fore and poop decks, although re-engineered to be clip together in a very similar way to Revell's recent 1:600 one (strange scale choice from Revell there!).  I'm surprised that Meng didn't slide mould the funnels though, as Academy did.

[VMA131Marine]

A couple of points of correction:

1) The iceberg did not cause huge gashes in the ship’s side. The impact popped some of the rivetted seams opening up a total area of only 12-13 square feet (1 square meter) to the sea. It was barely enough to sink the ship being as it was distributed across the first 6 compartments.

2) White Star never marketed the ship as unsinkable. There was a quote from one of the shipbuilding magazines of the day that said she was “practically unsinkable” because she could float with any two compartments flooded and even with all of the first 4 flooded. The thought being that the worst case would be a collision that opened up two adjacent compartments.

3)Because the Marconi company employed the radio operators and not the White Star line there was confusion about how to deal with radio messages to the ship’s captain which resulted in some iceberg warnings not getting to the bridge. The ship had taken a more southerly route than normal to avoid ice but there enough information reached Captain Smith during the last Sunday that it should have been obvious he was heading into an ice field.

4) Once the iceberg had been struck and it was obvious the ship was going to sink the command structure of the ship broke down so that there was no consistency in filling the lifeboats. The boats had been test lowered in Belfast at full capacity (64 or more people) and yet at least one left the ship with no more than 12 (the one with Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff-Gordon). Had the boats been filled to capacity a total of 1,224 people could have been saved (93% of the passengers on board at the time) and probably more accounting for small children (128 under age 14) who would weigh less and take up less space than adults. Thus more than half of the people on the ship could have survived but for a horrendous failure of leadership. Captain Smith barely appears in the story of the sinking after the damage assessment is made by builder Thomas Andrews.

5) More could have been done to delay the sinking. For example, had they released the anchors and chains it would have removed nearly 400 tons of weight from the extreme bow of the ship causing it to sink less rapidly.

 

On the kit itself, even if you paint the exterior there will still be a fair amount of light bleed through where you don’t want it. You can eliminate this by lining the inside surfaces with aluminium foil or painting with silver paint. You may also want to use a liquid glazing agent or sheet clear plastic to simulate glazed windows where appropriate.