IN A NUTSHELL:  Easygoing build.  Fun to weather.  Get the right glue!

Like many other movies of the period with a spaceship, the Space Ark's design owes a lot to the German V-2 rocket, which was considered state-of-the-art in rocket technology at the time. Famed space artist Chesley Bonestell is credited with design of the ship and other artwork in the movie.

For decades, fans of George Pal's sci-fi movies who wanted models of the spacecraft depicted had to cough up big bucks for hard-to-build garage-kits. Pegasus' entry for When Worlds Collide includes a nicely sized ship; at 1/350 scale, it measures twelve inches in length. Also included is a launch rail to display the rocket, and a
substantial vacuum-formed styrene base with nameplate.

The very first thing that purchasers of the kit need to know is that the plastic for rocket and launch rail is ABS, not styrene. This means that common tube glue will not work. I found that Testors liquid cement worked well. Other glues labeled for use with ABS plastic should work as well.

A large base and nameplate are excellent features of this kit.

Parts fit overall is pretty good. The rocket has a few shallow sink marks that might benefit from a swipe of putty. Since the ABS plastic is very smooth, I'd recommend roughing up the surface where the putty will go to be sure it sticks in place. I made some scratches in the very shallow sinkholes with the tip of my hobby knife and had no problems with putty adhering correctly.

No need to buy a resin aftermarket nameplate for this kit!

Black "decal dots" provide depth to the rocket motors

There will be some small gaps at wing and tail joints that may need filling. The launch rail has a mold parting line across the supports that may need to be scraped away and sanded smooth if one is trying to do a contest-quality build.
 
I would recommend replacing the fragile-looking nose probe with a section of a paper clip that is the same diameter. This will be far less likely to break off while handling the model during final finishing. The kit is very easy to build and younger or less experienced builders should have no problems provided they use the correct glue.

Masking this rocket sled might be the hardest part of the project

The model was painted with glossy dark-gray enamel as primer, and puttied-sanded-repainted during several cycles until all blemishes were gone to my satisfaction. I left the small wing rockets off until after spraying a final coat of Alclad aluminum finish.
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Perhaps the trickiest part of the build was tedious masking required to accurately depict the launch rocket sled. The tanks are silver, and the ribs are red.  It has to be painted as one piece. There's quite a few ribs and quite a few rockets. It took me longer to do all this masking than one run through the movie!  An alternative is to pick either red or silver and spray the whole thing with one or the other color. However, I thought the extra effort adds to the realism of the model.

​​Weathering the base was probably the most fun. I sprayed it an overall gray “rock” color, then carefully sprayed the bushes or trees  green with no masking.  I knew that my weathering would hide any overspray.  I really enjoyed applying washes and dry-brushing to finish off these features. The rail was weathered with pastels and both rail and base were final-coated with some Testors flat clear gloss lacquer.

​One quirk is that the holes for the rail pylons in the base are a little too big for the pylons. It was an easy matter to de-emphasize the gaps by shading the area of pylons and the holes gradually to black so the gaps were not noticeable.
 
To paint the nameplate, I gently sanded the lettering tops to be sure there was a uniform flat surface. Then, I sprayed a thick coat of white paint. Over that, I airbrushed red and yellow stripes suggesting a flame radiating out from the center. I overcoated this with a thick coat of clear paint, then overcoated everything with the thinnest possible coat of black paint. Carefully sanding off the black paint over the tops of the lettering produced letters with perfectly straight edges after a little touch-up on some small areas where too much color was sanded off.

"Shadows" courtesy of airbrushing some black paint around the bases of the pylons hide a considerable gap at the joints there.  I followed the contours of the rocks around the pylons with the paint.

​I made some black "decal dots" to add depth to the wing rocket and main rocket nozzle exhausts. I chose a hole size in a hole template just smaller than the nozzles, masked it off from the others, and shot some flat-black paint through the template on some leftover clear decal film. I cut out the dots as close as I could to the edges with a pair of scissors, and they fit perfectly inside the exhausts. I made a few extras to compensate for inevitable "goofs."
 
Overall, it was a very quick, straightforward, satisfying build to produce a contest-quality model and I can recommend this to any modeler with the only caveat to pay attention to the type of glue used.

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