New Hampshire
Lufbery:Yup! Airfix has a bunch of ships in 1:600: http://www.airfix.com/airfix-products/ships/warships/
That's pretty close to what you're looking for.
Regards,
I don't want to hijack this thread, but since it does sort of go with the subject at hand I do have a question. What are the quality of the Airfix 1/600 kits? I have only ever worked with one Airfix kit, an aircraft (1/72 Douglass Boston) and it was a miserable kit. I grant it is probably an old mold (it was a recent pop, just the mold itself I assume is an old one), but the fit was horrible (gaps you could sail a ship through, yuk yuk 
), the plastic soft, and the detail a bit clunky. I do have a couple old Airfix aircraft kits in my stash that are slightly better, but not by much, but they are old kits in every respect (mold and pop....I bought them off eBay as a lot only so I could get the 1/72 Kingfisher I wanted). Now, I want to be fair and not judge their 1/600 ship kits from a rather sparse exposure to their older aircraft kits. That is why I ask.
Brian
I think it's fair to say that the Airfix ship kits were always pretty close, if not equal, to the state of the art when they were originally issued. But that covers a long time.
The first Airfix warships (the Hood, Bismarck, Nelson, some destroyers, and, if memory serves, a couple of the cruisers) date from the late fifties and early sixties. To the typical model builder of that era, who, like me, was about twelve years old, they seemed great - and they compared pretty favorably with the competition (mainly Revell and Aurora). But I don't think any serious adult modeler today would regard them as much more than interesting museum pieces.
In the late sixties and the seventies, Airfix introduced some warship kits that were at least a generation ahead of the original batch. The Ark Royal is - well, good enough to provide a basis for a serious model; so is the Warspite. The Iron Duke is one of my old favorites - largely because it was, for many years, the only WWI battleship available in plastic kit form. (Come to think of it, unless we count the ICM 1/350 German kits, the Arizona, Pennsylvania, Warspite, Mikasa, and a few other Japanese ships that are represented in WWII configuration, it still is. There's a situation that really needs to be remedied.) It suffers from some proportional errors, and I've never figured out why there are enormous donuts on the ends of the barrels of its secondary armament, but it's certainly worth building (and I see Airfix has just reissued it).
Airfix's last hurrah in the late seventies, shortly before the company went into receivership, was a small group of British warships that really could stand comparison with what the Japanese manufacturers were producing at the time: the Belfast, Repulse, and King George V. Those, if you can find them, are definitely worth the trouble - not on the standard of the very latest from Dragon or Tamiya or Hasegawa, but certainly nice kits. And White Ensign makes some nice photo-etched detail sets that can turn them into first-rate finished models.
That most recent generation of Airfix 1/600 kits feature what I regard as the best solution to the great "waterline vs. full-hull" problem. The hulls are molded in port and starboard halves, complete with underwater sections. On the inside of each half a deep groove is molded at the waterline. To make a waterline model, the modeler runs a knife blade along he groove a couple of times and snaps the underwater hull off. No problems of fitting the upper and lower halves together.
I obviously have some affection for those old kits; as an American modeler who sort of grew up with them, I associate them with the sort of exotic, foreign products that could be bought at the hobby shop (rather than the drug store or department store). But I have to admit that the older Airfix warships (and older Airfix kits in general) are mainly of interest as exercises in nostalgia.
Now that Airfix seems to have risen from the ashes, maybe we'll see some really nice new British warships from that company. I certainly hope so.
Returning to the original subject of this thread - I'm something of a 1/700 fan, but that's largely for purely practical reasons. I recognize that the latest 1/350 kits are masterpieces, but my budget just can't handle most of them. And at age 59 my increasingly weak eyes and arthritic fingers are reminding me that 1/700 is awfully small. In retrospect, I'm inclined to wish the industry had standardized on a slightly larger scale. (Frankly I think Renwall and Frog had a good idea: 1/500. But to my knowledge those companies were the only ones that embraced that scale.) If Airfix does get back into the warship business, it will be interesting to see what scale it picks. (I know a 1/350 H.M.S. Illustrious and a 1/700 Titanic are in the pipeline - but the latter, as I understand it, is a reboxing of the Academy kit. Will Airfix commit to 1/350 and/or 1/700? Will it revive 1/600? My money is on the former.)
I'm inclined to think that, for those of us who can't handle the outlay of hundreds of dollars for 1/350 kits like the Hasegawa Akagi, 1/700 is firmly established as the scale of choice. And I must say I'm extremely impressed with the latest 1/700 products from companies like Tamiya, Trumpeter, and Dragon. Now if they could just all agree on what an Oerlikon gun looks like....