Maybe its just me, but I’ve notice a curious abundance (perhaps overabundance) of Trumpeter related material in FSM over the past while.
Don’t get me wrong, from what I’ve seen Trumpeter is worthy of recognition as a manufacturer of quality kits, but when you see a single FSM with a feature article/review of a Trumpeter kit, then find two more of their kits in the same issue’s Workbench Reviews section, isn’t that almost pushing one company’s kits over another’s?
This month’s issue is still, I would consider, hot on the heels of the very comprehensive article/review of the Trumpeter 1/32 F-105 and a kit review comparing Trumpeter’s WWII German rail gun kit to Dragon’s.
There’s plenty of good manufacturers out there that deserve to see their products seen and reviewed or otherwise reported on, I think its unfair that one company, as good as they are, should be able to take up such a notable amount of space in the magazine with such frequency.
If it keeps up like this, its going to start looking like Trumpeter has a controlling intrest in FSM.
I did enjoy the articles of the Limited run Su-152 tank and EMB 312 plane though, so hopefully they’ll do more articles in the future with obscure companies and kits!!
I think it is more a reflection of what the modellers out there at the moment are building.
At the moment Trumpeter and Dragon seem to be very much on everybodies mind and workbench, I think that is all.
All magazines have to gather to the current trends and wishes of their curstomers.
Give it some time and people will get tired of them and the hype will start to disappear and with it you will see more reviews and builds by other makers.
I think it’s because Trumpeter is putting out so many good kits that quite a few people have been waiting to see faster than anyone else. I agree that theTrumpeter name has been heard alot more than any other company but look at the number of new releases. It’s mind blowing. The ship modelers like myself are going nuts over the new carrier offerings. And I know the flyboys have been salivating over the new 1/32 kits. Like they say, squeaky wheel gets the grease. And Trumpeter has been squeaking pretty loud lately.
Our new kit reviews focus on brand-new–i.e., new-tooling, never-before issued–kits. Trumpeter is the company that’s issuing new kits right now, many of them subjects or scales that modelers have wanted to see for quite some time. When a company comes out with a new 1/32 scale Corsair or Thunderchief, we just have to cover it. The 1/32 Hasegawa Fw 190 and Academy F/A-18 were also important releases, and we devoted “FSM Builds” features to them too.
Given the prices the trumpeter kits go for, I don’t like the fact that most of them need some sort of aftermarket correction pieces. Surely they could have gotten it right in the first place?
Pete
Alright, point taken. It was one of those things that was just gnawing at me enough to voice it.
I do understand its in FSMs intrest to report on the latest new things to hit the hobby and I did appreciate the reviews on the 1/32 Academy Hornet and the more recent Aconcagua 1/48 Tucano kits. I do certainly concede that Trumpeter deserves to get attention for their kits, perhaps its just that I’m hearing their name so often these days that its wearing a bit thin on me personally.
I will agree totally with what Pete said above, at the prices Trumpeter kits come at there’s certain things you’d expect. Case in point is a couple of drawbacks noted in the article about the 1/32 F-105 kit: the hinges for the wing controls are problematic and the landing gear are barely strong enough to hold the finished kit up.
That kit is somewhere between 150 and 200 dollars Canadian in most hobby shops I’ve seen it in. For that price i’d at least like to have seen evidence that they’d thought far enough ahead before releasing it to correct the landing gear deficiency by including either white metal gear legs or doing as Academy did with their Hornet and including metal cores to built the gear legs around.
I know no kit is perfect, but at the price Trumpeter often commands, a little closer to perfect from them would be nice sometimes.