The Hawker Tempest, like the Typhoon before it, was a brute of an aircraft, which is befitting of its immensely powerful 24-cylinder liquid cooled Napier Sabre powerplant. It is this powerplant that sets the Hi Tech version apart from the standard release.
Although I took the photos for it, I don't think I'll do a full sprue tour on this kit. There are plenty of online reviews that highlight the kit contents better than I so I'll simply list a few of the better reviews if you are interested...
http://www.hyperscale.com/2017/reviews/ ... ewjh_1.htm
https://www.largescaleplanes.com/review ... p?rid=1928
https://forum.largescalemodeller.com/to ... %E2%80%9D/
A few notes about the kit plastic... the exterior of the Tempest is fully riveted. I don't know if I'm happy about that or not.
Although I like my builds to be riveted, I don't necessarily like it when the rivets come as part of the molding. The rivets made manually using a circular rivet tool produce very fine holes and result in an effect that is subtle and not distracting. Molded rivets are commonly too large and only a few companies can produce rivet detail that I think is great right out of the box (Tamiya and Eduard for example). I don't know enough about this kit to make a firm declaration but it is something that I am looking at.
Outside of the rivets, the molding quality on this kit looks very good. One of the places that manufacturers commonly sacrifice on mold definition is the interior side of the fuselage, wings and landing gear covers. Special Hobby has done an excellent job of not skimping in these areas.
I like how Special Hobby treated the fabric-covered control surfaces.. the stitching detail isn't overly exaggerated.
Given the amount of included resin and photoetch, it is somewhat surprising that Special Hobby does not give the modeler a choice when it comes to the instrument panel. But, it looks like a good result can be obtained by using the plastic instrument panels with the instrument faces represented by decals.
The clear parts exhibit some scratching (maybe not the manufacturer's fault since I bought this kit secondhand) and some distortion as well. I can fix the scratches but not the distortion, unfortunately.
Back to that Napier Sabre engine... the highlight of the kit for me is the beautiful representation of the Napier Sabre engine in resin. The resin components come in their own little box.
Inside the box, I found four separate baggies of resin parts, including this bad boy...
It is not a complete engine but nevertheless an impressive representation of the upper half of the Napier Sabre from the exhaust stacks on up. I don't normally like to model my aircraft with open panels but I'm going to make an exception for this one. This resin is just too beautiful to ignore.
Here are the contents of the next baggie full of resin. I'm not familiar with all of the parts yet but I think this bag contains mostly engine components including impressively long and complex lengths of hydraulic tubing. I believe the small block in the front are the four gun barrel tips.
This next bag contains some exterior components like the engine cover panels and resin versions of the wheels and pilot seat. Although the cover panels are very thin, I don't think they are meant to placed over the engine, which is actually fine by me.
The last baggy holds mostly cockpit components, by the look of it. I see foot pedals, a couple of different gun sights, the handle for the control stick, among other things. There has been breakage of a few delicate parts but nothing that will be noticeable or significant, I don't think.
