I've had no luck finding the old Lindberg kit at any dealer's website. I do remember it, though - with the large caveat that my 54-year-old memory is less than a hundred percent reliable.
Lindberg issued two kits in same-sized boxes, sometime in the mid-sixties. (I can't cite the exact date, but I remember building them in about 1964.) One was the
Bismarck; the other was H.M.S.
Hood. I don't know whether they appeared simultaneously; the
Bismarck may have come out a little earlier.
The
Hood was on about 1/400 scale, and is now generally regarded as one of the awfullest warship kits ever produced. It bore scarcely any resemblance to the real ship. Some of the inaccuracies in it were really gross, and incomprehensible. (It featured, for instance, a mysterious three-barreled gun turret on one side of the boat deck. The real ship never carried such a weapon - and having such a thing on only one side would have made the ship list.) My memory of the
Bismarck kit is shakier. I suspect it followed the general outlines of the real ship, but it didn't have much detail. I also don't know the scale. I suspect Lindberg didn't care much about stuff like that; it was more important to make the thing fit in a box that matched the
Hood's. Both of them, though, were about two feet long - or a little less.
What made them really cool kits (in the minds of kids like I was at the time) were the operating features. They borrowed, on a somewhat less ambitious level, the incredible mechanisms of the notorious "Blue Devil Destroyer," which came out at about the same time. They had motors (with, if I remember right, single, direct-drive, non-scale screws, rather than the twin screws and gears of the destroyer), and cam mechanisms connected to the rudders. ("Ship Follows A Pattern Preset By You!") Another linkage connected the motor, via reduction gears, to a series of cranks that turned the main turrets. Their gun barrels had pins on the bottoms of their breech ends, which traveled in curved grooves in such a way that when the turret neared the end of its traverse the barrels lifted. The turrets went back and forth, and the barrels went up and down, constantly while the motor was running. Hardly rational, but cool.
If I remember right, I got my
Bismarck to run around my cousin's swimming pool pretty impressively with its guns wiggling appropriately, but I was never able to get the cams on the rudder to work right. (In my defense, I was twelve or thirteen years old at the time.)
The kits were reissued many times in different boxes. I don't recall that they ever appeared without the motors - but it's possible. (I'm inclined to doubt it, though. The motors and mechanical features were about the only things that made the kits attractive.) I think the
Hood, at least, is currently available; I don't know about the
Bismarck.
As scale models, both these kits are, by the standards of 2005, pretty bad. But they do make great father-and-son projects - and provide idiots like me with nostalgia trips.