By Olivier Cabourdin - images & text © 2005

Scale: 1/1450 - About 27cm long when completed (without the bow slicer)

Parts: 59 resin parts, 1 fiber optic wire, 1 photoetched sheet

Instructions: 3 color pages of building painting and decaling notes and diagrams, followed by 2 pages of reference materials

Decals: 1 sheet color waterslide decals

Molding Quality: 9

Detail: 10

Accuracy: 9.5

MSRP: $140 USD (~$174CAN / ~€ 110 EURO) available from Alex Creation

Overall Rating: 9 - see review

The Arcadia, highly reconizable with its galleon stern, is the space battleship of the famous Captain Harlock, also knowned respectively as Atlantis and Albator in French speaking countries.

Three injection kits of this ship were produced by Takara at the time of the show in different scale : a tiny one, like the Bandai Yamato/Starblazers mini-mecha kits; a mid size one in 1/1500 scale, and a bigger one in 1/1100. From these three kits, the mid-size is the more accurate, the bigger kit being too toyish. Only limited quantities of these products were distributed in western countries, so they are now very dfficult to find and very expensive.

Another kit was produced by Atlantic, an Italian brand who usually focused on tiny plastic soldiers. Aside from being inaccurate, the plastic used for this kit was the same as for the soldiers, too soft and ungluable, which made it more a buildable toy than a model!

Curiously, despite its notoriety, the Arcadia was not really treated by the garage kit makers: I am only aware of a resin recast of the Atlantic kit and a recast of a toy. A few years ago, Jesnet provided us with painted resin kits that were nice but rather bulky in the details. So, there was nothing really interesting to put under the teeth of a modeler ... until this new Alex Creation kit.

First Impressions

The kit arrived well wrapped in a sturdy box with the parts grouped in three ziplock bags well protected by foam peanuts.

There are lots of parts, with sharp details. The molding seems of good quality, with some complicated parts, particularly the front hull. A dry test shows that the accuraccy seems also very good. Take care to not miss the photoetched board that is secured with adhesive tape in the instructions. As the reviewed kit is a first run, the instructions are not complete as Alexandre would complete it during the construction of its first kit. Later kits will include the complete instruction.

The Kit

The kit is based upon a heavily modified version of the Takara 1/1500 kit. There are so many major modifications that the scale became 1/1450th ! Anyway, as usual in most anime subjects, the scale is always something difficult to verify; the accuracy to the shape you see on screen is there the main subject to check.

Alexandre has once again progressed in his molding skills. The parts are clean and smooth. Few (<10) little bubbles (<2mm) were noticed in viewable faces. There are some bigger ones, but they will be completely hidden once the kit is built. Most mold seams are visable, but there are no mis-alignments for the majority of them, so only a light sanding is required. The hull's two parts will require more sanding, particularly on the port side of nose in front of the "ear" (front intake).

Three parts leap immediatly to your attention (front hull, back hull and upper desk), not only because they figure the shape of the ship itself, but by the casting quality. They present important undercuts without any bubbles. The quality is here equal to some well-known Japan resin brand (Yellow Submarine, Wave, Club-M...). Some little parts (the antennas particularly) are a little less well-cast than the big parts and will required more work to clean, but once again, no mis-alignment here.

The most difficult point on the building of this kit will certainly to glue the front and back hull parts together. They fit rather correctly, and the cut is intelligently placed where a panel line runs, so the puttying and sanding stage will be quick here. The trick is to keep them aligned while gluing.