Well, that’s interesting. I compared those photos to pictures of the real model, and they’re surprisingly close. There are quite a few random areas where the panels are wrong, where greeblies are simplified and missing detail, and so on. But the areas I looked at weren’t bad. Compared to the awful mistakes all over the EVA pod, this is a real improvement! I think having access to photos of the real model must have made a real difference.
The main thing I noticed was it looks like it was produced at the same Chinese factory as the pod, and there’s a lot of similar issues. Namely soft lines, really pronounced weird angles to panel edges (massive amounts of draft have been added for simplified production, so raised panel edges are angled instead of being 90 degrees to the surface of the sphere, especially towards the edges) and so on.
The decision to make the interior ceiling solid with recesses for the lighting panels, plus transparent lamp pieces to be glued into the recesses, is really strange though. Why not make holes into the ceiling for frosted clear pieces? Also the bottom rocket cones in clear is another bizarre decision when they should be solid with deeper holes. Oh well. A mystery.
I don’t think I’ll be getting this one, since I have enough large unbuilt models and nowhere to put them. But this one isn’t bad. I might be more likely to get the spaceplane now, though, even though they clearly based some of the details on the spaceplane after fan replicas, not the real thing…
