Scale: 1/48 - about 8 7/8"/ 225mm long when built

Parts: 34 resin

Instructions: 1 page general instructions

Decals: ALPS-printed waterslide - 2 sets of markings

MSRP: $95.00 USD (~$101.40 CAN/ € 71.40 EUR) available from MMI

Overall Rating: See review

Reference

My best reference page was a german fansite with a lot of pictures, data sheets and other stuff. So much so that it gave me a real headache to pick a scheme I wanted to do.

In the Box

Some of the parts were molded very good; some others were not. I think there was some problem in the product series because one of the wings did not appear to be made from resin but from poly urethane. 95 % of the model was realy high detailed with really sharp details, but the underside of the principal body part had some real real ugly things. Also, I discovered the back side where the mold was filled was another strange gigantic resin piece.

There was a instruction sheet but it contained only some images of how to glue it. There wasn't more detail than that.

As far as the accuracy, the kit's fidelity to the "original" is high and close to the real thing, which I saw for real in 1997 while on my holidays. It's really good for a so poor molded kit.

Building

I used my electric hand hand drill to make all the parts fit perfect. I worked for 12 hours to rebuild of the bad molded parts. After that, I had a lot of fun with this kit and I finished it in 4 hours so it takes me 16 hours in all to build it and paint it. I used a lot of Citadel's green stuff (putty) to fill all the gaps.

I used citadel acrylic paints (fortress grey, codex grey, chaos black, blood red and regal blue) and TAMIYA smoke (X-19) to finish the model. The decals appeared to be high quality and nicely detailed, but when I used them they shattered. I've never seen that before. I was forced to repaint some parts and points as a result.

Overall

I had both lot of fun and depression with this kit. It's not for beginners or short tempered people - it takes some skill to refine the parts. Even so, all the work I did helped to improve my building skills - and I like to have so much work to do.

Editor's Note: This kit is was originally marketed by SMT. The resin parts and decals in the MMI kit are the same as in the SMT issue.

Click here to read an in-box review of this kit.