I was poking around the Hasegawa website the other night when I came across some shots of the new 1:72 Su-33 kit.







-YL

Looks nice, shame its not 1/48.

As a major part of the Russian airforce and equipping several others I would of thought that there would have been more kits of the Su-27 family around.

One would think so, but guessing from what I have read on other boards - mostly the ARC forums - there are a few issues:

- Apparently it is incredibly difficult to get the shape of the aircraft correct. Well known is the length issue (apparently almost all kits are short - they included the pitot tube in their length data, while it should not have been). The Academy kit is therefore 1/50 and not 1/48. The bulge of the nose, and the shape of the cockpit is also a notorious issue...

- Although the Flanker family is large, the differences between variants are apparently such that one has to retool major parts (unlike for the vast majority of Western aircraft produced) - or use many more subassemblies and mix and match sprues, which make assembly a nightmare- to get the shape of the aircraft correct. Things like wingroots (and subsequently curves of the fuselage itself) depending on whether there are canards or not, wing size (Su-33 has much bigger wings), shape of the tailboom, shape of vertical stabilizers... and the Platypus is obvious.

Put it this way, to adapt the Academy kit to the other variants, often major surgery is required - for the naval version, little of the original kit is actually left...

Some the Hasegawa Su-33 errors are nit-noid, but some are grave.

It was brought up as well on Zone 5, the spine is severely off; being too square and the aft sides do not have the proper contour to the fuselage.





While the Academy 48th Su-27 may be a little short in length, that alone does not render it "1/50th" scale, as the rest of the model scales out real close or dead onto to 48th. The entire model (or majority thereof) would need to be underscaled by the same degree in order to qualify as 1/50th. We're not talking Fujimi 1/50th F-4/A-4/F-5s here.

Mike V

After looking at pics of this bird online, I can see that the spine is way too square on the new kit, and does not blend into the fuselage prototypically, as you said. That's a pretty big mistake. Is something like that even correctable? Is it even worth it? I can imagine some enterprising AM company mastering a casting a new resin spine, but...really?

On a brand new kit, this kind of dimensional error is really disappointing, especially considering the amount of research material that's available.

-YL