1/350 Imperial Russian battleship Sevastopol (Combrig)

The first Imperial Russian battleship *Sevastopol* was one of a three-ship class, laid down in St. Petersburg in 1892, launched in 1895 and commission in 1899.  She was transferred from the Baltic Fleet to the Russian Far East, participating in the Russo-Japanese War and eventually being scuttled following a torpedo hit that disabled her steering in December 1904 (thus, she never participated in the Tshushima debacle some 5 months later).  Most of the scuttled Russian warships in the Port Arthur area were raised and repaired by the Japanese, but the *Sevastopol* was in water too deep for the technology of the day to warrant recovery efforts, and her hulk lies there to this day in approximately 180 ft. of water

Combrig’s kit of this warship has most of the positive characteristics (good fit of upper and lower hulls, generally excellent casting of parts, even tiny ones for the 37 mm guns (whose mounts for the foremast fighting top must be considerably shortened in order to fit into this confined space) and all of the negative ones typical of their 1/350 models.  The assembly instructions give only approximate locations of most parts (on a single exploded diagram), although at least the small 37 mm and 47 mm guns are also depicted as assembled.  As usual, Combrig supplies a chart showing how many and what length the builder should provide for the masts, booms, and yardarms – but there is no indication from the assembly diagram as to which size piece goes where (except for a couple of very small top yardarms).   I used MasterModel brass yardarms and masts and adjusted their lengths to what the instructions seemed to represent, helped by online photos of the ship and its sisters.  Combrig’s kit is apparently interchangeable with those for the other two members of this class, the Poltava and Petropavlovsk, as there are extra parts, both resin and brass, that are not used for the Sevastopol.  I also used the brass gun barrels (12-in. and 6-in.) from a MasterModel Knyaz Suvorov class set, as the two classes of battleships had the same primary and secondary batteries.   Some 2-bar railing, the small boat oars and crane cargo blocks were from Northstar; I had plenty of additional two-bar railing and anchor chain from my spares stash (which now fills an entire desk drawer).  Rigging, based on both the instruction diagrams and a close analysis of online photos, is from stretched black plastic sprue.   The plastic display stand I used was left over from a previous Zvezda plastic kit.  Combrig provides, thankfully, a painting guide for the ship both prior to and after her Russo-Japanese war deployment, and I chose to depict her in the former scheme.