| I was of course at first very excited to hear about a new large scale Nimitz Class carrier hitting the market. I immediately ordered one. A friend of mine in Atlanta received his before I did, and called me and told me to cancel my order if I still could. I did. Then Hobby Lobby had a sale, and I saw it on the shelf for $16, so I figured how could I go wrong? Then later I was given one as a gift. So, with 2 carriers now in hand, I feel like I've been shorted about $15.95! | ||
| The kit is as disappointing as everybody says. I think it would make a great toy, it even comes with a motor pre installed. But for a serious looking model, it falls short. Here are my initial impressions. The overall hull looks right in its basic shape. Detail is very minimal, but it could actually be fixed up without too much trouble. The molded on anchors are a joke, replacements are mandatory. The deck is ok in basic shape, too. | Click Thumbnails
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| If I were to build it, I would totally sand off all of the raised deck detail and rescribe or simply paint where appropriate. Then I would fill in all the engraved lines, and rescribe those. | ||
| The detail parts of the kit are it's true shortcoming. The Phalanx gun system has to be seen to be believed, the dome housing would scale out at nearly 40 feet tall! The bridge area isn't too bad, or at least I feel it is workable. There is no hangar deck provided, but these are easily scratchbuilt. |  |
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| The kits biggest disappointment is the airwing. They are 100%
unusable. Even if you went through all the trouble to fix up the
kit, the aircraft would ruin it.
1/700 scale aircraft look better, much better. The worst is the A-7 Corsair, it looks pregnant to me. The decals provided for the airwing are completely wrong, all you get is the blue and white stars and bars. |
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| The decal sheet is mostly wrong, the biggest problem being the rounded style of lettering for the bow numbers. |  |
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| For anyone willing to take on this mighty project (and I might.....someday....) I wouldn't want to do it without a dedicated photo etch set, and a whole new resin airwing. On a scale of 1-10, this one gets a 3. Build it for your son and let him play with it in the pool. I'd much rather spend my time on a 1/700 kit, or even going through the almost impossible task of changing the Tamiya Enterprise into a Nimitz class. | ||
