What You Get

Largish box, some nice artwork, really dramatic painting of the '19 by Hidetaka Tenjin. Opening it reveals 7 sprues of tan styrene and one in clear. The first thing that came to mind was "wow - that big". The fuslage halves are some 364mm (14.33 inches) long. That kind of big.

As with Hasegawa's 1/72 kits there is no ability to transform or even easily convert it to a transforming kit. But hey, if you want that you can get a Yamato toy.

As usual with Hasegawa, the casting and detail are beautiful. There are finely engraved panel lines, beefy and detailed landing gear, fantastic cockpit and for an extra bonus, the engine trunks in the legs can be opened to show even more detail. The wings can be positioned either swept forward or swept back with no in-between (largely due to the need for a virtual pivot to do so).

Now, one of the interesting things is the two seats in the cockpit. The rear seat gets covered up by an equipment panel. So I'm guessing that if you want a 2 seater just leave off part F20 and find another pilot. I could be wrong though, since I am not sure what happens in the show.

While the directions are as nicely laid out as usual for Hasegawa, they do miss in a few areas. In step 15, part F1 is shown but no placement for it. It should be the neck cover for the head, which was placed back in step 4. The head also includes part E7, the face, but there is no placement as the head is face down in the fuselage. I'd guess it was included so that when some poor soul makes a transformation kit for this model they don't have to sculpt the head.

The decal sheet is packed with stripes, stencils, insignia and huge swathes of black. I'm still not sure why Hasegawa continues to insist we don't know how to mask for paint; the YF-19 sheet not only has black but bright red panels. You do get the choice of red and white or gray Macross insignia. I'd still love to have low viz stencils and markings instead of the big black and red markings.

Conclusions

This is such a cool looking kit I'm half tempted to panel over the head area and make it look like a non-transforming aircraft. Blasphemy, I'm sure, but it's such a sweet looking model. With any luck we'll get the other variants of the YF-19 in 1/48 sometime soon and a spiffy PE set (I hope).

Many thanks to Robb's wallet for providing the review samples. Manufacturers and retailers, interested in getting your wares reviewed and publicized on a site averaging 6000+ readers a day? Contact us!