Jump to content

Su-57 from Zvezda, completely new!!!


Recommended Posts

2 hours ago, ya-gabor said:

The 72nd kit has all the strange kinks and breaks of the fuselage that the original Hind has.

 

I think that Zvezda is the only Hind kit manufacturer (in any scale) to get the correct offset rear fuselage so unique to the Hind family.

 

Ken

 

Link to post
Share on other sites

Well, now I am looking forward to it even more, thanks to that information! I find the Hind to be a "prehistoric" looking beast, something only a Mother (Russia) could love. But, therein lies its' appeal for me. And while I have two or three of the Revellogram Hinds in my stash, I have never actually built them yet. I always held out hope that Hasegawa would somehow put one out. But, I think this is even better news than Hasegawa doing it!

Link to post
Share on other sites

You must also have in mind that during 90ties in Russia are years of devastation of many companies, so it was not too hard to get original drawings. There were no such thing in USA, so probably it was easier to get tomcat parts (like guys that try to sold tomcat parts to Iran) than original drawings. So many defence companies were destroyed so probably it was easier to get original drawing. Like Ukraine get Flanker overhaul documentation from Belorussian company, on not usual ways... and then sold to Vietnam.

Link to post
Share on other sites
  • 3 weeks later...
 

Here are some last views of that Russian build on Zvezda fake book. Last views since the kit is finished. :))   Looks good.

 

Before you ask.

No. The masks for the digital camo are not included. I am sure soon some aftermarket company will produce them.

 

Best regards

Gabor

69937663_1888509974585131_2035352961118371840_n.jpg

New Ware Masks just released a set of digital camouflage masks for this scheme 👍🏻
https://mek.kosmo.cz/newware/nwmasksnews028.pdf

Link to post
Share on other sites
  • 2 months later...
On 9/13/2019 at 12:19 PM, ya-gabor said:

Here are some last views of that Russian build on Zvezda fake book. Last views since the kit is finished. :))   Looks good.

 

Before you ask.

No. The masks for the digital camo are not included. I am sure soon some aftermarket company will produce them.

 

Best regards

Gabor

69937663_1888509974585131_2035352961118371840_n.jpg

 

The exterior colors are beautiful! Anyone know roughly what paints were used? The official instructions (https://www.scalemates.com/products/img/5/2/0/1188520-27-instructions.pdf) claims Tamiya XF-8 (blue) and XF-18 (grey-light blue) but the shade of blue in this picture definitely looks much darker. Thanks!

Link to post
Share on other sites
  • 2 weeks later...

"Tooling for a 1/48th scale kit cost just "a little bit more" versus a tooling for a 1/72nd scale injected plastic kit".

I would say I disagree with that statement. The mold cavity for a 1/72nd scale injected plastic kit aircraft with say a dimension of 15 x 15 cm will have a superficy of 225 square cm (I'm using a very simple square shape just for the sake of the example), while the same model made at 1/48th scale will have a superficy of 22.5 x 22.5 cm = 506.25 square cm.

That's double the superficy of mold cavity for the 1/48th scale kit.

Research and design for a 1/48th scale injection molded kit also won't be the same as for a 1/72nd kit (unless you are doing a dumbed down enlarged copy of the 1/72nd scale kit) : the 1/48th scale kit will typically incorporate a lot more details than the 1/72nd kit does. The cut of parts will also be different (to accommodate those extra details/open panels, mobile surfaces, etc).

So that's double the amount of CNC milling time for the 1/48th kit, JUST for the extra amount of superficy, and then add some more milling time on top of that for all the extra details and options the 1/72nd kits often do not have. Plus double the amount of polishing the mold. Then there are usually more molds for a 1/48th kit due to those extra details and parts, the molds are heavier and more difficult to manipulate (takes more time to install/remove from the injection presses).

They require injection presses with more pressure, costing more per hour to rent time on (or to maintain if the plastic kit company owns them), & costing more electricity.

Milling molds for 1/48th scale models will also require cutting bits being replaced more often with new ones (high speed cutting bits don't last forever and we are cutting double the superficy of the 1/72nd scale mold here, so they will need to be replaced twice more often).

Boxes, decals, printing, cost more due to size, material qty.

I doubt very much plastic pellets cost "just a little bit more". Polystyrene and in particular the higher quality blend HIPS are notoriously high cost plastics versus popular stuff like low density polyethylene (very heavily used in food packaging & consumer products). There isn't a lot of demand for polystyrene around here for example so that mean much higher cost to acquire the raw material or find a source that is willing to sell it to you in quantities that are not astronomical. I don't know about Russia/Eastern Europe, but in China it's a different story : they have huge shortages of new/virgin plastic pellets material because all factories there are churning out products red hot all the time. So there is a lot of recycled plastic going on, and I have personally seen dirty molded parts recently in costly injected plastic model kits made in China for US companies : you can see dark dirt/particles of whatever inside the pale colored plastic parts. Companies in China are battling for the raw material to feed their factories. You even hear of cargo ships transporting raw material going missing from the Strait of Malacca and then mysteriously showing up beached, abandoned on the coast of China, their cargo gone. Victim of the raw material shortage affecting manufacturing in China.

So, plastic is not cheap, particularly polystyrene/HIPS/crystal styrene. You also want to use it rapidly because styrene absorbs humidity in the air and release bubbles in the moldings if it's not dry. If you ever saw what happens when you use old styrene for vacforming, you get the idea.

If you are using recycled plastic, it's got to be squeaky clean, because unless you are molding something all black (in which case, easy-peasy : you just add some black pigments and roto-mix the material) otherwise with pale grey/medium grey you risk having some problems... (dust is the enemy of styrene plastics. Did I mention that styrene get statically charged & attract dust like crazy ?).

China now refuse recycled plastic from Quebec because it was not clean enough for them. The whole thing all ended up in a land fill... when people thought that all their efforts to get plastic materials recycled were for a good cause while in reality it was all in vain because the company buying and selling the collected plastics for recycling is too damn cheap to clean up the material themselves and prefers to just bury it in landfills when the client now refuse to buy it. It made a scandal here.

But I slightly digress, all that to say that making at 1/48th scale the same model that was made at 1/72nd scale does not cost "just a little more". It cost a lot more. And styrene does not cost just a little more either. The cost of plastic does not magically go down, unless you buy astronomical quantities or unless you have a relative married to a boss at the plastic company, it won't happen.

The cost of plastic also tend to go up, not down (except those few times when Saudi Arabia starts a price war to try to put competitor oil producers overseas out of business or for whatever reason). There used to be a huge styrene manufacturer here in Montreal, NOVA Plastics. Guess what happened ? They could not sell the darn thing because the cost of the material is so high. They completely remodeled the production line inside the factory (not a small feat) to transform it into a plant that produce polyethylene : the new norm for consumer product manufacturers, because it's cheap and because manufacturers have constantly been cutting down on the quality of plastics in consumer products since the past few decades to increase their profits and to combat the rise of the cost of plastics. There were entire case studies published about German and American coffee machine manufacturers a few decades ago when (oh, sacrilege !) they switched from quality plastic materials such as ABS and others to cheapo polyethylene... Long story short, they had to go through marvels of mold making engineering/industrial design cosmetic appearance to try to make the cheap plastic survive the heat and at the same time not look cheap, etc (because they were a big brand name renowned for quality, but their competition was killing them with very low cost coffee machines made with cheapo plastics). Today even most of the latest laptop computers use the cheapest low quality polyethylene plastic for their casing... The same crap used for 500-750 gram yogurt pots that flex & wobble when you grab them (by the way very small yogurt pots are still made of styrene but they are now paper thin : again, rising cost of styrene). Computers used to be made of ABS, or fiberglass filled plastic or HIPS. Try finding one made with those plastic now in 2020... Again : the cost of plastics. ABS contains some styrene (acrylo-butyl-styrene), so it's not cheap.

Ever wondered why you pay 50 to 100$ or more for a 1/48th scale model kit ? Apart from the obvious cost of tooling and its complexity (it costs a LOT more to design molds for scale models than for yogurt pots or hair dryers), it's the cost of plastic material and the very small quantities produced that drive price (just a few thousands, versus millions for mass market consumer products or for food packaging), plus how greedy (some) manufacturers & distributors might be (I know that if the cost of designing molds in certain countries is Asia is less than half the cost of doing so in America or Western Europe yet the kits from some countries in Asia cost practically the same as if the we're made in the US, there is something going on because I am pretty much sure the salary of a mold engineer in China and CNC milling molds there is not ad expensive as in North America) 

And both go hand in hand : small qty production mean you buy plastic raw material in smaller quantities than everyone else, meaning the model kit manufacturer pays a lot more to buy the raw plastic pellets than the industries that churn out products by the millions.

I am sure there are some companies that go around that and produce refrigerators or whatever as their main business as it is much more profitable & make model kits on the side (more as a personal passion than for the revenue) (I've heard one one such example, I don't remember in Czech Republic or elsewhere), but I doubt Tamiya or Hasegawa do that, so, cost of kits remain high, because of material cost, salaries, purchase of industrial building, municipal taxes on industrial property, income taxes, machinery, electricity & mostly because of the cost of injection tooling used for small production (anyone in the injection plastic industry will tell you that injecting just a few thousands to barely more than 10000 parts is very small production, because typically metal molds are good for making millions of parts.

Another thing, if you have been buying airplane injected plastic kits from certain companies in Ukraine and Russia in recent years you may have noticed the following sad tendancy : although the shape accuracy/detail accuracy of the product as well as quality of milling/molding of a few of these companies is good, they are definitely cutting down on the quality and cost of material because instead of buying quality, more expensive and more rigid HIPS, they are now using lower cost, lower quality soft styrene which bend like rubber when you grab longer parts like the wings... thus rendering their efforts to design an accurate, detailed kit with fine engraved panel lines and good tool making technology useless. When you grab a fully assembled & painted model made from that lower quality plastic, the wings & horizontal stabilizers bend so much that you are almost certain to crack the glue seams, & if you don't crack these right away it's goingto be the paint & then the filler that will crack and ruin the paint job and the model, followed eventually by the glue seams. It find it appalling that after attracting you with finally accurate various Sukhoi's and MiG's they ruin it by injecting their product with the cheapo wobbly rubber like soft styrene plastic they now use instead of using the more expensive quality HIPS that larger 1/72 and 1/48th kits need from a structural point if view. Because it's not like a scale model of a larger, modern, relatively flat blended wing/fuselage aircraft will hold by itself when it's made only with basic soft styrene plastic. There aren't any structural reinforcement walls inside these kits to stop them from collapsing under the pressure of just grabbing them off the table with your hand.

At least kits made in China (and Japan) use the higher quality and more expensive HIPS material, which add much needed rigidity to the models and insure they won't heavily deform even when you lightly grab them and lift them off a shelf.

Although I believe that cheaper soft styrene plastic may be appropriate for smaller 1/144th scale models that don't have long wings, based on what I have seen in recent kits these past few years I consider it is wholly inappropriate and a very poor choice for most 1/72 and nearly all 1/48 scale model kits and up, because the plastic is just too flexible and weak for that use.

In my opinion it's clear the manufacturers who use this plastic decide to prioritize their profit margin, because, although a scale model kit is not a functional object, it is still an object that will get manipulated by the buyers after it's been assembled, and because of the complex nature of the work and efforts involved to assemble and paint and finish such models, and their fragile nature, wilfully choosing to make them out of a cheaper, very bendable plastic material rather than the better quality rigid one is a shame, because it may ruin all the efforts the modelers invested in their (already expensive at purchase) models when we all know modelers may spend tens of hours, and up to months on a single model to make it a worthy showpiece.

Now I have no idea if the SU-57 kit is made of the same soft flexible styrene that they have used in the past as I don't have one yet, but I'd like to know from those who already have bought one if that's the case.

Stephane

Edited by Stratospheremodels
Link to post
Share on other sites

Whatever the superficy factor, the Su-57 kit is on its way regardless. Many of us will buy both the Zvezda and Kitty Hawk offerings as they come out, just like many of us have the Kinetic Su-33 Sea Flanker and will buy the Model Art edition. 

 

Part of the process of dry-fitting parts is "feeling" if some beef-up is necessary using plasticard and scrap, and restrained use of solvents on softer plastic is recommended. Yes, I'd love every kit to be made from top-drawer plastic the way HKM, WnW, Hasegawa and Tamiya do, but, alas, in the real world...

Would I pay more for that? Yes! And I'd pay more for two sets of canopy parts in every kit. I mean every kit.

 

Variable plastic quality and/or scale parts is also why quality metal landing gear is popular: Aerocraft brass, Brassin bronze and G-Factor being the top-drawer stuff. The Aerocraft landing gear sets are arguably essential, not mere luxuries, for the Ukrainian ICM 1/32 I-16 & -153 kits. I like the way Trumpeter include hard metal LG parts in its 1/32 kits.

 

I hope the Su-57 sells well and encourages further larger scale, and accurate, jet offerings. I'm still hoping Zvezda, ICM or another firm makes an accurate Su-15 Flagon — even Great Wall Hobby would do nicely.

 

Tony 

Link to post
Share on other sites

I have built a lot of Zvezda kits - some of the older ones as well as many of the newer generation kits. I can honestly say I never had a problem with the plastic, despite the fact that many of their newer kits include some very fine and small parts. Maybe I'm not building Tamiya kits regularly enough to compare with properly, but I simply never had an issue to the extent that I noticed.

Link to post
Share on other sites
1 hour ago, tony.t said:

Whatever the superficy factor, the Su-57 kit is on its way regardless. Many of us will buy both the Zvezda and Kitty Hawk offerings as they come out, just like many of us have the Kinetic Su-33 Sea Flanker and will buy the Model Art edition. 

 

Part of the process of dry-fitting parts is "feeling" if some beef-up is necessary using plasticard and scrap, and restrained use of solvents on softer plastic is recommended. Yes, I'd love every kit to be made from top-drawer plastic the way HKM, WnW, Hasegawa and Tamiya do, but, alas, in the real world...

Would I pay more for that? Yes! And I'd pay more for two sets of canopy parts in every kit. I mean every kit.

 

Variable plastic quality and/or scale parts is also why quality metal landing gear is popular: Aerocraft brass, Brassin bronze and G-Factor being the top-drawer stuff. The Aerocraft landing gear sets are arguably essential, not mere luxuries, for the Ukrainian ICM 1/32 I-16 & -153 kits. I like the way Trumpeter include hard metal LG parts in its 1/32 kits.

 

I hope the Su-57 sells well and encourages further larger scale, and accurate, jet offerings. I'm still hoping Zvezda, ICM or another firm makes an accurate Su-15 Flagon — even Great Wall Hobby would do nicely.

 

Tony 

Word. 

Link to post
Share on other sites
1 hour ago, tony.t said:

... and will buy the Model Art edition.

Model Art is japanese a scale modeling magazine. I guess you intended to say Aviation Art but the brand under which the Su-33 "V2.0" is to be sold is not publically known.

Link to post
Share on other sites
On 1/19/2020 at 9:45 PM, Stratospheremodels said:

I would say I disagree with that statement .......

 

...... same soft flexible styrene that they have used in the past as I don't have one yet, but I'd like to know from those who already have bought one if that's the case.

Stephane

 

Just chiming in to say I read this full post Stephane.  Given the amount of time you must have spent writing it, I thought that you may like to hear that.  It grabbed and held my attention - thank you.

 

By the way, how do you rate the light bluish plastic Airfix is using for their current kit production?

 

Link to post
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...