Is there a Revell kit more expensive than this ?

[Tom Geiger]

I lived in Pirmasens, on the US Army Post that was originally built by the German Army way before WWII.  It was captured and turned into an American facility during the war.  Pirmasens was bombed heavily because it was the shoe capital of the country, so those factories were producing boots for the German army at that time.  I was amazed at how many of the original buildings on an obvious military post were not affected and remain to this day.   Also, as a kid we spent a lot of time in the woods, which were pockmarked with deep indents where bombs had landed.  These had since filled with trees but were very evident, and they were far from any legit target showing how unscientific bombing was in those days!

[Art Anderson]

That Royal Navy Flower Class Corvette was an expensive kit when Matchbox first released it back in the late 1970's.  It's huge, at 1/72nd scale, required several injection-molding operations to produce, due to its size (the hull itself is in 4 sections, divided down the center (like many plastic ship model hulls) and across amidship.  In addition, there's a ton of smaller parts as well.  The market for such a large kit (more than 4' long when built) was, and still is, limited due to this--not all that many modelers have the room to build, let alone display a model that big.  The same thing has been true of the equally large, highly detailed plastic model warship kits that the Japanese model companies (even a couple of Chinese model kit mfrs as well) have brought to market over the past 35-40 years or so.

Almost as important from a cost standpoint, model kits of ships, of any size/scale, have always had a much smaller market, almost a "sub-set" of the plastic modeling hobby if you will. This alone means that tooling/production costs have to be spread across a smaller volume of sales, which again raises the price that has to be charged, if whomever runs the kit is to come out in the black on a production run.  With the sheer magnitude of this particular model kit, it's little wonder that it has always been high-priced, and even more important, it was part of Lesney's downfall, at trying to go head-to-head with the much bigger hobby/toy companies worldwide (remember, Lesney went bankrupt in the late winter of 1982, much of that company's product line literally disappearing into the mists of time, with Mattel picking up Matchbox Toys for peanuts, Ertl snagging all the AMT model kit tooling for a song as well.

Even today, this model kit generates a lot of wishful interest, but every time it's been reissued by whomever, it's pretty much always been a rather small production run, due to its size and complexity--coupled with the still-rather-narrow market for model kits of ships.

Art

[Roadrunner]

When I was a kid in the 1969-72 period I lived in Germany and there were loads of WWII bunkers still around.  Not those huge condo ones you pictured in this thread, but small ones.  They were an eye sore and since they were heavily fortified, they were impossible to knock over with bulldozers and normal means.  Then the Germans discovered something.... if they sealed the bunkers and filled them with water, the winter ice would force them apart!  Brilliant!

I think that many of them should be left standing as a tribute to the struggles that took place all along the Atlantic wall area of France. I suspect that's why many of them are still standing to this day.

[bismarck]

When I was a kid in the 1969-72 period I lived in Germany and there were loads of WWII bunkers still around.  Not those huge condo ones you pictured in this thread, but small ones.  They were an eye sore and since they were heavily fortified, they were impossible to knock over with bulldozers and normal means.  Then the Germans discovered something.... if they sealed the bunkers and filled them with water, the winter ice would force them apart!  Brilliant!

I think that many of them should be left standing as a tribute to the struggles that took place all along the Atlantic wall area of France. I suspect that's why many of them are still standing to this day.

That and most of them were so strongly built, they'll never collapse . The Greatest Generation is passing away at an ever quickening pace, and its important that following generations can connect tangible places with the history they read about. These battles were REAL. These people were REAL. Not just movies or books.

[Roadrunner]

That and most of them were so strongly built, they'll never collapse . The Greatest Generation is passing away at an ever quickening pace, and its important that following generations can connect tangible places with the history they read about. These battles were REAL. These people were REAL. Not just movies or books.

I'm a firm believer in the notion that whatever man creates, he can also destroy. I think there's a good reason that the french haven't seen fit to remove them after 70 some odd years.

[bismarck]

Very true.