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Trumpeter F-35A 1/32
F-35A Lightning II is slowly, but steadily taking the military aviation World. For many, fascinated by its technology this is good news, while for others, it is a slow but painful death of the sleek and sexy in the sky. Whatever your case might be, F-35A represents the future of many modern Air Forces for decades to come. And with that, comes the inevitable future for modelers – we are about to see more and more toolings of this jet in all the scales.
Trumpeter F-35A was an expected announcement. Even though Italeri made that jump few years ago, Trumpeter released F-35C just recently and was unlikely that they will decide to stop there. They probably won’t stop at the A model either, but that is another story. F-35C from Trumpeter is a good and wanted release, however it is hard to say that it is at the best possible level. It is going there, but not yet. Another thing difficult to do is compare it with Italeri, which contains the vital information about this release. There is simply no other reference to conclude from.
Italeri F-35A in 32nd scale is decent kit, with many aftermarket goodies available, but with exaggerated RAM Panels and some questionable thickness here and there. Therefore, the questions that one might ask is – how well Trumpeter will cope with those and of course: how complex their new tooling will be. Because after all, we would all expect improvement over the previous and already widely spread kit on the market. Because most likely we will get higher price for many reasons known.
The next best thing to do /as mentioned above/ is to compare F-35C from Trumpeter with F-35A from Italeri. Somewhat unfair from size-perspective, but still. On both, the surfaces are truly different and it seems that in the end it will be all a matter of preference of each individual modeler. Both are not accurate enough surface-wise, especially with the RAM Panels thickness, nor they are fine enough considering the 32nd scale sizes. Shape-wise it is also unlikely that Trumpeter /from China!/, had their chance to get close and personal to the real thing.
But for the moment Trumpeter and Italeri are all we got and we are better off to the bench then to wonder or complain about it. Because no matter what we’ll get, in the end we will have competitor to Italeri’s tooling, which means more options and more happy modelers. Now, what is left is for someone to dare and go for the F-35B in 32nd. And the first one will most likely take the prize.
