Comes with pre-painted PE, regular PE, and a crew of 4.
It looks pretty good. Hopefully it is more than just the Panda kit with some updates, but that would be welcome as well. The PE and decal options look great too. Wonder how the crew will be, probably their Vietnam Helo crew set. Hopefully it will have 2 M23 door gun mounts.
Listed as available in June '07. We shall see.
Dragon has also announced a UH-1N in 1/35, but it was suspected to just be a re-boxing of the Panda UH-1N. Panda is somehow related to Dragon anyways. We shall see.
OOHHH YEAH, about time we see another D, hopefully some new tooling though. The decals look to be similar to the ones out of the 1993 release from Revell’s 1/32 UH-1H “Gunship” ( I know U.S never used H’s as gunships ).
Anyway i still we be getting a few ( maybe 5 or 10 ) cause i just love the D model Huey.
Looks like it will be the Panda kit. Dragon supplied more pics to Armorama for a news story I posted there. They are pics of the Panda UH-1D/H and the Vietnam Helo Crew. You can see them here. I hope they include 2 M23 mounts though. We shall see.
As we suspected, it looks like they will only give you one M23 doorgun mount. What UH-1D/H ever had only one doorgun!! Why don’t they do a little research when releasing then updating kits? [%-)]
It really would have been nice if this reissue had some thought behind it, instead of slapping in a half-assed fix, making it a true exercise in “turd polishing.” Are we really doomed to the Panda-quality molds for all of our future 1/35 Huey D/H/N builds?
Makes me want to see if I can find the old Panda release (without accessories) for cheaper now, since I will end up buying Cobra Company’s doorgun set either way.
Yup, I will probably end up getting the CC doorguns too. The PE does look nice though. Maybe they will hear our pleas and throw in the other M23 mount. It is already a separate sprue and would be easy to do. Keep your fingers crossed.
Polishing turds is the easy way to make some money on a less than stellar release. They’re doing their best to keep from doing what really needs to be done. At the very least, correct the rotor system and get rid of the bumps and trenches. But that means cutting metal which is costly. So, we get a turd that we can polish ourselves and get a better looking model in the end.
I notice the Panda/Dragon D model has the vertical air vents on the engine cowling. That means it could only be correctly built as a D model without major surgery. As far as I know, only early D models had the vertical air vents. By the way, the box art is very interesting, it shows a D/H with horizontal air vents and pitot tubes on the nose AND roof! What up with that!
The Panda/Dragon kit comes with both horizontal or vertical air intake vent parts, so it can be built as an early or late D, or an H model, whichever you choose. I used the horizontal ones on a customer’s UH-1H Dust-Off model:
The kit also includes part to build a D, H, or late H depending on which pieces you use. It doesn’t tell you which to use for each version though. You have to know which were on each one. The box art and build pics are a bit confusing too, they show the model with all the options installed; such as: both types of pitot tubes, roof mounted blade and towel bar antenna, nose mounted antennas, side antennas behind the pilots doors (?), zig-zag antennas along the tail boom, wire cutters, etc., etc., etc…
I was just going on the photos that you guys had posted of the new Dragon kit. I haven’t been able to find one in the price range that the original was worth (i.e. not much based on all the negative comments about it). I’ll eventually get the kit, though to round out my UH-1 cllection. thanks for clearing up the parts questions. Nice build by the way. I’ve looked at it several times and I am amazed at what you did with the Panda kit!
