Laurent

Well even if it has some inaccuracies we now have a 1/48 injected plastic Su-17/22UM3.

I'm not sure I still have the old HPM tooling in my stash. If you have the old-new or the new-new tool, perhaps you could compare ?

Here are some. The "Cyrano nose" (IIIC, IIIE, IIIO, IIIEBR, IIIEE, etc) has two shapes. The base of nose (the electronics area) is a truncated ogive, the top of the nose (the radome) is conical. Because of that there's a kink, a curvature discontinuity where the shapes meet. http://data3.primeportal.net/hangar/isaac_gershman/mirage_iiic/images/mirage_iiic_03_of_63.jpg http://fanakit.free.fr/mirage3_walkaround/mirageIIIE_derniere_vp2.jpg The ATAR 9C nozzle is cylindrical when the plane is on the ground also http://pedro23.fotki.com/aviation_airports_planes/fighter_world/atar_9c_turbo_jet-4.html Now look at the HPM kit here for example: http://airliner-civil-aircraft-modeller.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=953 You can see that there's no kink in the radome. It's probably because the diameter at the base of the radome is too small and it give an ogival profile to the whole nose. You can see also that the nozzle petals (which seem too narrow) form a truncated cone, not a cylinder. The end of the fuselage looks too tapered also.

I don't consider this good kit to be the definitive IIIE. It inherits a some errors of the initial kit and the retail price is too high considering the size and parts count.

My guess is that there won't be any update until June 15th which corresponds to the end of the Indiegogo sales.

... also. Perhaps there's an engineering limitation on what KH can achieve. And it's likely that quite a few modellers will represent their model with the doors opened so in this case the area of concern won't be very visible.

Source: http://www.primeportal.net/hangar/azrael_raven/uh-1d_huey_gunship/

Final implementation may differ but... ... suggests (same assembling flow) it's the same as in the Su-17M3/M4 so an early K-36.

Similar situation with Martin Baker seats. Take a Mk.4 used in a Mirage III and a Mk.4 used in a Mirage F1... they are significantly different.

Radar but no intake trunking. Again.

Yes they don't know what they're doing. Yes the person has no knowledge of the subject. Now how could a project manager that jumps from French to American then Soviet aircrafts could have expertise on all type of subjects ? It's not possible. The job of a project manager is to identify contributors, agregate reference material provided and in the process hopefully learn about the subject. Contributors are just used to provide material while they should also provide feedback during design of everything (CAD, decals, instructions, box art, everything); it may be because the project manager doesn't provide material for review or because the contributors cannot communicate in an intelligible manner with the project manager what's wrong. Also the project manager may not be able to control the work of all his ressources (CAD designer, technical writer, decal designer, toolshop). Just google "Su-22 Vietnam". You'll see plenty of M4 pics

From a photo made by Stenka: http://sternlaurent.free.fr/stenka_hbVsKhCrossSection.jpg

Tr/HB/KH use CAD model to design the direction sheets so most of the time the shapes in these correspond to the shapes of the kit parts. Overlaying kit parts to drawings doesn't work because of optical distortion (parallax, short focal distance, etc) on kit parts.

Do you have links ? The Scalemodels.ru HB Su-17 topic has not been updated since beginning of April.

HB fuselage is shorter and its cross-section is squarish apparently.