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Cold War accuracy?


Bonehammer

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Hello there,

I have an idea brewing... Do you know of Cold War kits of Eastern bloc aircraft that are visibly inaccurate due to lack of information? Of course the reply, from a modeller's point of view, is "all of them", but the kit that started this idea was the Pioneer "Su-21" with its boxy intakes and delta wings.

 

Off the top of my head I can think of: Italeri Mi-28 Havoc (kit no. 176)

Revell Yak-25, vintage kit

Revell Su-25 (Tsukuda mould)

Esci Mig-29

 

(The Aurora Mig-19, basically the Huckebein with red stars and a radar, is in a different league. Educated guess, hearsay, or just "if you can prove me wrong you're a Communist spy"?)

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1 hour ago, Bonehammer said:

Pioneer "Su-21" with its boxy intakes and delta wings.

Not sure, but the only major thing wrong with this kit is its designation... should be labeled Su-15  and you are pretty fine!

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1 hour ago, exdraken said:

Not sure, but the only major thing wrong with this kit is its designation... should be labeled Su-15  and you are pretty fine!

I remember a booklet in which Ken Duffey built the then-available Soviet jet kits. IIRC he ended modifying pretty much everything. For example, the jet intakes are parallel, when they ought to converge lower down... 

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Not just Eastern Bloc kits.  The ESCI 1/48 Tornado main undercarriage is a total guess.  Not to mention the ones based on pre-production prototypes dressed as operational jets

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4 hours ago, Sabrejet said:

Well there's "a little off" and then there's...

 

download

Mercy sakes! I actually remember seeing that kit! Us old cusses does that.  😄

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Weren't Esci's 1/48 Floggers and 1/72 Blinder and Backfires basically bodged together from photographs?  The bombers were poor but I didn't think the fighters were too awful.

 

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not sure if the MiG-37 from 1988 was supposed to be a joke...

https://www.scalemates.com/kits/italeri-162-mig-37b-ferret-e--144271

144271-80245-35-pristine.jpg

or the F-19

https://www.scalemates.com/kits/monogram-1128-stealth-f-19-fighter--145094

145094-11185-pristine.jpg

 

or an alternative redition:

https://www.scalemates.com/kits/italeri-155-f-19-stealth--157609

157609-11185-pristine.jpg

 

on th emore serious efforts, 

Revell's MIG-25 in 1/48 was for long the only kit in this scale... and wrong in nearly every dimension... apart from being enormous!

 

https://www.scalemates.com/kits/revell-h-290-mig-25-foxbat--157812

157812-11991-pristine.jpg

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Thanks for the suggestions. Yikes, there are things on the list that I actually built... but forgot... old age is sneaking up on me!

 

Remembering another one, the Foxhound was also vilified in early kits, one was reboxed by Revell but I don't know who made the moulds, and then there are the 1/48 Migs by Lindberg - 21, 25, 31 - which have always been rare and now have probably been consigned to the landfills.

 

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56 minutes ago, Procopius said:

The Esci Tu-22, is, I believe, only similar to the real aircraft by sheer coincidence.

:D

As bad as it is, I'd say though that you also cannot mistake it for anything else if you have some idea of Soviet, Cold War bombers.... ;)

 

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For quite a long time kits of Eastern Bloc subjects virtually all fell into the "passing resemblance at best" category where accuracy was concerned. I think the early offerings from KP were one of the few early exceptions, largely by virtue of having better access to the types as a Czechoslovakian firm (detail and finesse were still well off state-of-the-art, but general shapes were usually a vast improvement over western efforts - if the subjects were offered at all).

 

As the Cold War wound down and enough photos appeared to make kits feasible for an increasing number of Soviet types, there was a minor boom in WARPAC subjects but the accuracy varied wildly depending largely on how often and how closely the types made public appearances (If the type was only seen in spotter or fuzzy surveillance photos, it was rare to see anything more than a vacform of dubious accuracy).

 

I'm almost exclusively a 1/72 modeller so this is a partial list of "Cold War Approximations" in that scale:

 

MiG-21: Hasegawa and Airfix both provided decidedly mediocre renditions of the "1st generation" MiG-21F,   I beleive Academy also did a recessed-panel line clone of the Hasegawa kit.

 

Matchbox's original MiG-21 seems to have been a result of poor grasp of the differences between variants, most closely resembling a 2nd generation airframe. The kit was later retooled into a 3rd generation approximating the MF.

 

MiG-25s got widespread press from the Belenko defection. Hasegawa's kit isn't accurate by modern standards, but for a Cold War era kit it gets the general shapes and the brutish "look and feel" down pretty well for a late-70s tooling.

 

Kits of the MiG-29 can generally be catgorized as "Pre-Farnborough" or "Post-Farnborough," after the appearance of a 9.12 MiG-29 and 9.51 MiG-29UB trainer at the 1988 airshow.  Most of the Pre-Farnborough toolings seem to have been derived from photos that made the public rounds from an earlier visit to Finland - allowing kits to be made, but with varying degrees of distortion..The pre-Farnborough kits incude ESCI/AMT/Ertl, Hobbycraft, Hasegawa, Fujimi (also reboxed by Testors), and Tsukuda/Ace (reboxed by Revell). As noted earlier in this thread, Hasegawa and Fujimi continue to sell their woefully inaccurate kits.

 

The Tsukuda/Ace/Revell lineage as also shared by kits of the Su-27, MiG-31, Yak-38, and Su-25.  The first two lean toward the Aurora MiG-19 end of the accuracy scale, while the Forger and Frogfoot are vaguely passable replicas.

 

The ESCI/AMT/Ertl Tu-22 Blinder and Tu-22M Backfire have some obvious accuracy issues when compared to the references currently available, but for the late 1980s when they were produced they were fairly impressive.

 

One other wildly inaccurate kit from the late Cold War era is the ESCI/AMT/Ertl Kamov "Hokum." Similar to the Italeri/Testors Mi-28 Havoc, the kit seems to represent an artist's impression of the Ka-50 rather than the genuine article.

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8 hours ago, exdraken said:

not sure if the MiG-37 from 1988 was supposed to be a joke...

https://www.scalemates.com/kits/italeri-162-mig-37b-ferret-e--144271

144271-80245-35-pristine.jpg

or the F-19

https://www.scalemates.com/kits/monogram-1128-stealth-f-19-fighter--145094

145094-11185-pristine.jpg

 

or an alternative redition:

https://www.scalemates.com/kits/italeri-155-f-19-stealth--157609

157609-11185-pristine.jpg

 

on th emore serious efforts, 

Revell's MIG-25 in 1/48 was for long the only kit in this scale... and wrong in nearly every dimension... apart from being enormous!

 

https://www.scalemates.com/kits/revell-h-290-mig-25-foxbat--157812

157812-11991-pristine.jpg

 

I think I've read somewhere that italeri F-19 was based off some sightings of F-117 (I remember building one as kid in 90th and thinking that F-19 was a real airplane and F-117 model was a "lego toy for little kids" :facepalm: ....)

 

On a note of the fake models I always wondered what is Zvezda's Ka-58 based off? At that time the issues with Ka-50 were already understood and Ka-52 was at least in tests as well as Mi-28N.... So where did Zvezda got this guy from?

128924-11185-pristine.jpg

Edited by Doom3r
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5 hours ago, CT7567 said:

detail and finesse were still well off state-of-the-art

Well, the age of the KP kits should be taken into account. Their MiG-21MF was first released in the early 80s, for instance. 

 

Cheers,

 

Andre

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