Revell 1/144 Armageddon Russian Space Center Kit First Look

By Michael Benolkin

First Look

In 1998, Touchstone Pictures released the movie 'Armageddon' that puts together an unlikely team of oil drillers and astronauts who attempt to intercept an asteroid on a collision course with Earth and neutralize the threat. This follows another Earth extinction movie 'Deep Impact' released two months earlier with a similar plot. Meanwhile, Revell (USA) released two kits from the movie 'Armageddon' that year, the X-71 (tarted-up) Space Shuttle and this Russian Space Center, both in 1/144 scale. The Russian Space Center is a notional, super-sized version of the Mir Space Station kit that Revell AG released the following year.

The kit is molded in white styrene and presented on four parts trees. The surface detailing is reasonable and assembly is very straightforward. The instructions identify each of the modules, many of which are Mir modules (hence the Revell/Germany kit) and provide a basic painting guide. The kit provides a movie title stand for the completed model though some modelers may opt to hang this from the ceiling. While the kit is an easy enough build for the younger modeler, the AMS space modeler will want to spend more time tweaking the modules and painting the details to make this kit stand out.

By some coincidence, the various cable/satellite channels are playing frequent reruns of both Armageddon and Deep Impact. Since I didn't pay much attention to these kits when they were first released, I was pleasantly surprised to see these are still available at bargain prices if you know where to look. I also acquired the X-71 Space Shuttle but that is a topic for another day. Out of curiosity, I looked to see if anyone had ever produced the Messiah spacecraft from 'Deep Impact' and Fantastic Plastic recently released a 1/200 scale Messiah (27 inches long) consisting of over 200 resin parts (so brace yourself for the price).

I love it when a plan comes together. I'd recently obtained some blue metallic paint that I thought would work well for solar panels. Now that I've acquired this bionic Mir space station kit, I've got a variety of solar panels to experiment with, and thanks to some great online photography, the bland gray space station can be enhanced with real-world colors from the Mir.