The AA gun chest rests are vertical and do go up to your shoulders, but the 8.8cm gun chest rests are horizontal and go to either side of your torso. There are four of them around the gun.
According to the bible on the subject, Thomas Graham’s Remembering Revell Model Kits, this kit originally appeared in 1975 - a rough time for Revell. The company had almost given up producing serious scale models. This one, as I remember, was pretty crude. It sounds like Albert_sy2 is virtually re-doing the interior - for good reason.
The kit has an interesting and checkered history. I especially remember an ad for it that ran in several of the hobby magazines at the time. The model comes with a stand incorporating a nameplate that’s shaped like a torpedo. (The nameplate is about a third as long as the sub.) For this ad some artist had done a painting of the actual U-boat charging, submerged, through the North Atlantic - with a gigantic torpedo hanging underneath. Apparently he’d worked from a photo of the completed model, and hadn’t realized he was looking at a decoration rather than a replica of an actual piece of U-boat. And nobody at Revell caught it. John Steel, Jack Leynwood, and the other artists of Revell’s golden age must have turned in their graves.
The kit made news a couple of years later when Revell reissued it under the name “U-505.” U-505, of course, is the one that was captured by Admiral Gallery’s task force and is now on exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Revell was trying to capitalize on the fame of that boat. The only problem was that the kit represented a Type VII U-boat, and U-505 is a Type IX. (I suspect the people running Revell at that time - the ones who didn’t notice the giant torpedo - genuinely didn’t know there was a difference.) The scheme backfired spectacularly: when the museum started selling the kit in its gift shop, so many customers raised [censored] that the museum lodged a complaint. Revell took the “U-505” kit off the market. That’s the only instance I know of in which a falsely-advertised ship model kit has been discontinued due to public pressure. (Now, if the folks who run the Cutty Sark had risen up in protest against the Revell “Thermopylae”…Or the descendants of Charles Darwin had gotten a whiff of Revell’s alleged “H.M.S. Beagle”…Well, fantasies are good for the soul.)
The new Revell 1/72 Type VII U-boat provides vivid evidence that the company - at least in its German branch - has risen from the ashes of those days. By the way - I took a look at the Revell Germany website yesterday. Among the new releases scheduled for this year is a box of 1/72 scale Kriegsmarine figures, specially designed for use on the E-boat and U-boat kits. They’ll presumably be cast in soft plastic, but a whole lot cheaper than the metal and resin crewmen now available.
Wow! You sure know your Revell kits. Me, I was just playing Silent Hunter II and on a whim bought the kit at my local hobby store, not knowing I was in for some major modifications.
I am actually quite thankful that the kit is so bad. Haha. Yeah, right. I’ve learned so much from my research about U-47, and u-boats in general. And of course, by experience learning more about our hobby. This is the first time I will be doing this kind of work. Usually my modern fighter planes are of better newer molds and usually go together more or less with not much fuss.
Well what can I say but you get what you pay for. Paid US$23 for mine; it was on sale. The Revell 1:72 Type VII is just too expensive for me for now (US$86). I have a wife, a daughter, and another on the way!
Ironically, I am using the Silent Hunter II plans for my u-boat! Some of my other information tells me the plans are close enough accurate to be useful.
There may well be a resin Royal Oak out there somewhere; the place to look would be Pacific Front Hobbies. On the plastic front, a long time ago Frog released a kit for one of her sister ships, H.M.S. Revenge, on 1/500 scale. It’s turned up under various other labels (Novo, for example) as the old Frog molds have moved around. It’s a fifties or early sixties kit, and quite basic. I’m not familiar with the differences between the R-class battleships, but I suspect if one wanted to bring that old kit up to 21st-century standards the additional work to convert it to the Royal Oak would be minimal.
I built one about twenty yeas ago. Not the most detailed thing in thing in the world, but made an attractive diplay on the bookshelf. As far as the interior, I didn’t waste my time with it and displayed it starboard side out.
On the other hand if you are into research and scratch-building, here’s some inspiration.
![http://www.steelnavy.com/_borders/sub04.jpg[/image]](http://www.steelnavy.com/_borders/sub04.jpg%5B/image%5D){kind=link}