by Kieran Griffith
1/350 K-19 SSBN (Zvezda)
The K-19 Kit from Zvezda is a great kit and I bult it in one night with ease. I recommend this kit to anyone who likes to build modern submarines. Everything fits together perfectly and on top of that the decals are great except for the decals for the sonar sensors which should be white. The biggest problem is a small one in that the painting instructions are completely wrong, but thats just an excuse to have some fun researching online. Maybe my model can help some people paint this kit properly, though I did perhaps make it look a little too rusty.
K-19 was a Hotel class submarine which suffered various severe accidents. It was the first Soviet nuclear submarine equipped with ballistic nuclear missiles.
Construction of K-19 began on 17 October 1958. The submarine was christened on 8 April 1959. Traditionally, vessels are christened by women, but K-19 was christened by a man. The bottle of champagne bounced off the boat without breaking, which the crew took as a bad omen. The boat was completed on 12 November 1960 and commissioned on 30 April 1961.
During its completion, commissioning, and preparations to get underway for its maiden voyage, many lost their lives.
