So erm, a lot have happened with me, not anything bad but for whatever reason I didn't build much for the past few years. That aside...
Quite a while ago I ordered half a dozen kits from GPM (and am still to start on any of them), and when opening the box I found this little critter lying among the dark Halinski covers, apparently as a gift from the GPM online shop. I believe it is by Supermodel but there was no way to find out as whoever published the kit stuck their advert on top of the cover and I'm not well-versed in Polish. If someone could shed some light on the origin of this kit that would be very helpful. Also if anybody has built this kit, any comments would be great as well.
As to the subject itself, the Me P.1101 is a light experimental Nazi jet fighter that didn't make it to production before the war's end. However the prototype was captured and tested by the US, and later lent its design philosophy to the successful F-86 and Mig-15.
The kit is 3 1/2 pages of not-quite-A3 (I think) with mostly big parts, so building out-of-the-box would not be overtly complicated. I chose it to be a small and light-hearted build, but soon found the lack of detail is likely to make it not very interesting. Especially in places like the cockpit and landing gear bays where most surface textures are printed and not very well rendered. To make things worse, it seemed to have dated from 1998 and looked like a hand-designed kit, despite a Modelik-style digital makeover. I'm expecting everything to not fit unless proven wrong. (addendum: fitting the first piece to the first bulkhead proved me right
)
On the bright side, when giving the kit a digital makeover, the designer also made it so that the engine cover can be removed, and the jet engine completely exposed. (the jet engine parts also seemed to be added after the original kit was designed, with a different numbering system). It seemed that it's common to display the P.1101 in such a state to add a visual focal point to the model, as a number of plastic kits did the same.
So the plan of attack, is to add detail to cockpit, landing gears and engine. The engine cover will be removable and I plan to use a combination of locks and magnets to make it work. The build starts here, and as I'm making modifications this time I will approach it slowly - not with my usual rush. Stay tuned/