Russia Typhoon Class Cold War Era 1/350

Submarine in 1/350 scale done in acrylics and oils for weathering. The base for all my submarines I keep at the same size, hand cut hardwood and painted with a miniature slip for the sub to be displayed on. Thebase contains three things - the national flag of origin, a human for size comparison in 1/350 just above and to the right of the flag (look closely) and believe it or not you can scan the QR code to the right with your cellphone camera (use the side view photo) and get lots of information on the submarine in question!

The Russian Typhoon class submarines were the largest submarines ever produced by any country. They were designed to compete with the new US Ohio class of submarines. The name “Typhoon” was the given NATO name for her class though the Russian name was Project 941 Akula, Akula meaning “shark”. She had a submerged displacement of 48,000 tons and carried a total crew of 160. She featured a sauna, pool and recreational room for the crew. Of the 6 built 5 were scrapped as their operational costs exceeded their budget. One of them remains in limbo as plans are being hashed out for it to be a possible museum as of this posting. The model itself was a challenge, one was foreseen and the other wasn’t. Since the sub was finished with individual tiles of black it was a challenge to decide how to make it appear as such. I ended up airbrushing each tile individually and in the process varied my pressure, paint flow and distance in order to achieve the desired effect. The unforeseen challenge was coming back to the bench after 24 hours and discovering due to the massive mounts of mineral oil used in the weathering process it managed to eat away my Tamiya Extra Thin cement where the upper and lower hulls joined. This caused them to separated and slightly warp. So yeah, it was quite the job trying to reassemble so the joint line couldn’t be seen once again as it was originally and turned out to be impossible but I did the best I could. As in all the submarine builds I’ve done you can see a human shrunk to the same scale of 1/350 displayed just above and to the right of the national flag to get an idea as to her size.