The new Kitty Hawk 1:48 MiG-25 is the first 1:48 tooling of this iconic Soviet aircraft since the Revell kit of the late 1970s. The kit has stirred up a lot of discussion around the modeling boards. Let''s take a deeper look at this great new kit.

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If you have comments or questions please post them here.

Thanks!

Please let me know if you have any question about the kit or if there's something that I may have missed in the review. Lots more to come on this awesome model!

Great review Paul.

Great review Paul! Looking forward to the build of this one.

Doug

I didn't see any mention in my quick read about the nose wheel FOD guard. The pictures I've seen online seem to show it as being a fair bit too large and not curved enough. Since it's pretty visible on the finished model, what's your take on the kit part? Can it be reworked, or is it another candidate for the aftermarket to address?

It's not awful... If anything it's too thick. It's actually part of the gear doors for the forward nose gear. It doubles as a FOD catcher, but is not as "refined" as the screen/bar types that you see on newer Russian types.

Here's a side picture of the real thing:

http://walkarounds.scalemodels.ru/v/walkarounds/avia/after_1950/mig-25pd/MiG-25PD_0716.jpg.html

The curves that follow the wheel are fairing closely approximated, as are the other shapes. Probably as much a case of being the best they can do with an injection molded part as anything.

I'm sure once we get some Eduard etch, or some resin gear doors as part of a Brassin set, we'll get a more refined part.

Certainly wasn't anything that lept out at me like some other stuff I found.

HTH

I noticed it from the various pictures of test shots that I've seen where the bottom edge seems to be ready to drag on the ground. In this image it looks much taller and less curved than the one in your picture. I'm hoping that it's just sloppy assembly.

Yep, that doesn't look right, and honestly, until you put the thing together, it'll be hard to tell. If it is over sized, it won't be hard to shave it a bit to scale it down. I can tell you, from comparison to the picture I linked, that it's much to thick, and will be a good candidate for photo-etch.

Nice and thorough review Paul! 'Knowing onions' as we say!

Alexei (NeOmega) Russiyan spotted the nose issue straight away as he started to test fit the NeOmega MiG-25 cockpit at Scale Modelworld, designed for the Revell kit BTW. It just took him 30 mins of fiddling and it fitted fine, although he is doing a Kittyhawk version as we speak.

To try to correct the nose may be a trickier job though - it requires modifying the front fuz as well as the radome. Maybe it will be addressed in subsequent versions of the kit? Lets hope so!

G

To fix the nose would require the entire forward fuselage to be retooled, as the shape starts behind the "start" of parts PD1 and PD2. The radome itself is pretty much spot on, it's the nose section behind the radome that's the issue.

Great work, nice review. Very useful review, especially for modelers that like to fix the shape problems of the plastic.

BTW, I did the same comparison, the plastic with the drawing, and found pretty good matching. The intakes, the horizontal tail planes, the vertical stabilizers, the wings are pretty well match. The wing with bug, but sizes are pretty good. The discrepancies are up to a half millimeter.