“The X class was a World War II midget submarine class built for the Royal Navy during 1943–44… the vessels were designed to be towed to their intended area of operations by a full-size mother submarine… Once the attack was over, the X-Craft would rendezvous with the towing submarine and then be towed home.” [1]

There is one remaining example of these – X24 – at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Portsmouth. I was there this summer:

As with the Mary Rose, I set about looking for a model of this exhibit once home. The one that seemed to fit was British HMS X-Craft Submarine by a company called ILOVEKIT [2].

The scale is 1:35 and was quite colossal looking in the box to my eyes! Anyway, it went together in a mostly pain free way, except for one point. That was the attachment points of the “side cargoes” – those detachable parts which contained the explosives – to the submarine. They are mostly absent from the model, apart from the eyelets and first bit of the bracket. I wondered what to do about this. They are a prominent feature of the boat and their absence would be obvious. In the end, I put together something with brass tubes which would look alright from a distance, but it is not remotely accurate. I struggled to find any decent close up pictures to help me – I had neglected to take any myself when I saw the above craft. It is extremely lazy – negligent – of the model company to not do these parts themselves. I had got hold of a small set of photo etched parts for this kit from Eduard, but, useful as that was, there was nothing there to help in this regard.

After that, I painted and weathered it as shown in the pictures below. I didn’t want it to appear as a uniform black or black-grey “blob”, but neither would it need extensive weathering (rust, other streaks etc), tempting as that was. The reason being that I didn’t think that these submarines would have had an extensive service lifetime, successful or otherwise. So, in the end I gave it a mottled grey appearance over a black under coat, followed by an all over working in of grey oil paint.

There are several figures available to accompany this kit by a company called Aerobonus. I selected one – item 350020 – to give a sense of scale to the boat.

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-class_submarine
2. http://www.ilovekit.com/index.php?g=home&m=product&a=show&id=41&l=en