Anyone Else get the Hobby Master RA-5C Vigilante?
Posted: Mon Aug 17, 2015 9:39 pm
Did anyone else get the new Hobby Master RA-5C Vigilante? If so, what are your thoughts?
I picked one of these up at my local Hobbytown USA store last Thursday. Overall, I think Hobby Master did a good job. Lots of diecast in the construction - basically most of the fuselage, wings, and stabilizers with really only the tail being plastic. They really captured the fast look of the A-5 in my opinion. Its a simple tooling overall as the RA-5C was a reconnaissance aircraft and didn't typically carry external stores on the wings. Panel lines are detailed nicely and the paint applications are good on my example. The cockpits are nicely detailed with full instrument panels, controls, and ejection seats with painted handles. It comes with the two pilot figures and they're tough to squeeze in the small cockpits. Landing gear use the simple plug-in-place design like many of the other HM aircraft, avoiding the mess of using all separate pieces for the doors and struts (which I like!) Sitting on its gears, the raised nose wheel and "high sitting" stance of the plane is replicated.
My biggest beef is that the model only comes with the closed canopy pieces, which limits its display options. It could have easily been tooled with hinged canopies like on many of the earlier HM jets or come with the separate pieces to display them open/closed, but not on this release. Perhaps such features will be included on future releases of the plane. You can sort of stand the canopies open, but they don't really stay in place. Again, it sort of limits the display options if one has the plane on its gears. The canopy pieces to fit snugly to the plane, however, and blend well into the fuselage. My other complaint is lack of movable horizontal stabilizers. Again, that was a feature that could have been easily incorporated into the model and made it just that much more interesting to display.
Despite the canopies and stabilizers, I am rather happy with the model. I think the biggest draw for me is that it's a model of such an obscure US Navy aircraft and it has a beautiful, fast, streamlined look. Comparing it to other Navy planes I have in 1:72 diecast, you can really see just how large the A-5 was, significantly bigger than contemporary aircraft like the A-4, A-7, and even the F-4 Phantom. Actually, the A-5 was longer and had a greater wing area than even the F-14! So my kudos to Hobby Master for providing us with an interesting model of a unique Cold War-era jet!
I picked one of these up at my local Hobbytown USA store last Thursday. Overall, I think Hobby Master did a good job. Lots of diecast in the construction - basically most of the fuselage, wings, and stabilizers with really only the tail being plastic. They really captured the fast look of the A-5 in my opinion. Its a simple tooling overall as the RA-5C was a reconnaissance aircraft and didn't typically carry external stores on the wings. Panel lines are detailed nicely and the paint applications are good on my example. The cockpits are nicely detailed with full instrument panels, controls, and ejection seats with painted handles. It comes with the two pilot figures and they're tough to squeeze in the small cockpits. Landing gear use the simple plug-in-place design like many of the other HM aircraft, avoiding the mess of using all separate pieces for the doors and struts (which I like!) Sitting on its gears, the raised nose wheel and "high sitting" stance of the plane is replicated.
My biggest beef is that the model only comes with the closed canopy pieces, which limits its display options. It could have easily been tooled with hinged canopies like on many of the earlier HM jets or come with the separate pieces to display them open/closed, but not on this release. Perhaps such features will be included on future releases of the plane. You can sort of stand the canopies open, but they don't really stay in place. Again, it sort of limits the display options if one has the plane on its gears. The canopy pieces to fit snugly to the plane, however, and blend well into the fuselage. My other complaint is lack of movable horizontal stabilizers. Again, that was a feature that could have been easily incorporated into the model and made it just that much more interesting to display.
Despite the canopies and stabilizers, I am rather happy with the model. I think the biggest draw for me is that it's a model of such an obscure US Navy aircraft and it has a beautiful, fast, streamlined look. Comparing it to other Navy planes I have in 1:72 diecast, you can really see just how large the A-5 was, significantly bigger than contemporary aircraft like the A-4, A-7, and even the F-4 Phantom. Actually, the A-5 was longer and had a greater wing area than even the F-14! So my kudos to Hobby Master for providing us with an interesting model of a unique Cold War-era jet!
