Kit Info
Manufacturer: Hasegawa
Scale: 1/48
Media: Injection Plastic
Night-time chatting with buddies and we ended up deciding to do a groupbuild together on Plamo. This time it’s an Aggressor/Adversary aircraft groupbuild. We affectionately call it ‘SMLJ Aggressor?‘. 
So what’s my entry? It’s a Boeing F/A-18A flown by NSAWC (Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center) as ‘TOPGUN 42′ in 1995-1996. This will be Hasegawa’s F/A-18A kit with Fightertown Decals’ Ultimate Hornet Adversaries 1 decals. Hasegawa’s Hornets have the reputation as the definitive model kit for this aircraft. Let’s see…
First up, the cockpit as usual. This is given a gray color with the control panels in black gray. The buttons and switches were drybrushed with light gray. The MFDs were given a couple of drops of Future for gloss. Since I’m modeling the aircraft with the engine off, the MFDs are correctly ‘black’.
I decided to replace the kit ejection seat with the resin one from Legend Production. A definite improvement methinks. The resin seat’s slightly smaller but it looks fine in the cockpit.
The basic construction was quite straightforward.
Some interesting details of the kit include the (tiny) support struts for the intakes.
The ‘A’ variant has reinforcement plates at the base of the vertical tailfins.
Hasegawa provides white metal landing gear which are really nice. The nose gear required some work though. The catapult strut and the part of the structure is styrene. The nose gear also came bent but was easily corrected.
The wheels and part of the main landing gear struts are styrene.
There’s also a photo-etched detail for the nose gear bay. There’s only one for one side of the bay though.
Now for some problems. First up, the nose to fuselage fit isn’t perfect. It’s not too bad however.
There’s an injection pin mark right smack in the middle of the topside of the wing. Luckily it doesn’t get in the way of any of the fine details.
There’s a gap when the ladder is in the closed position.
The slimelights at the rear fuselage don’t line up properly. This is even after I’ve added plastic sheet on the inside as a guide for the joining of the upper and lower fuselage.
There’s some gaps inside the main landing gear bay which can’t be fixed easily.
This kit was originally meant for a combat-duty F/A-18A from VFA-97 but for Aggressor duties, aircraft tend to fly without pylons. So the holes for the pylons I have opened will need to be closed. Putty time! 
And now we come to the major problem with this kit. Besides the lack of full trunking for the intakes (you peek into the intake and it goes nowhere), the fit leaves much to be desired. Both sides left big steps between the intake lips and the engine compartment. Some major plastic manipulation will be needed here.
