Whilst not an aircraft modeller, or not often, I stumbled across this within the Modelling News site; purportedly by Trumpeter with a very murky pic:
In 1/35 this would reflect its name for sure!
Does anyone else know anything about it? Modelling News acknowledge that April 1st is nigh - so perhaps a spoof?
Hmm the wingspan was 55 metres so at 1:35 that’s over 1.5 metres so….?
GPM makes a 1/33 scale Gigant card model. I have the 1/33 scale GPM B-29 Superfortress card model (not built).
I suppose it is possible given the slow proliferation of 1/200 scale battleships in plastic. In my opinion, a 1/35 scale C-130 would be a much better choice to produce in plastic. The Gigant did almost nothing. Some variant of C-130 flew in almost every conflict or intervention of the last 70 years.
Doug, I think in comparing the 2 - with a view clearly at variance with the kit manufacturers (if the release is verified) - you might be comparing apples with oranges.
Sure, the utility and service of the C-130 is remarkable, but one must also imagine that there is an attraction of the Gigant to Luftwaffe (and even AFV) modellers, and not just down to the size factor. Mind you, whoever expected a Dora?
Someone, if this is actually to happen, at Trumpeter, must have thought “Do you know what will sell? That massive German transport plane of WW2; we’ll be beating customers off with a shi**y stick!”
Hello!
Look at that GPM kit, it’s dirt cheap - it will only set you back about 40$. No telling how much Trumpeter will want for it. They also make 1:33 B-52D if anybody is interested. Thing is in case of models that big (about 1,5m or about 5 feet in span) displaying it is almost harder than building it - where are you going to put it so it’s not in the way, but can be viewed from different angles?
What I also wanted to write you is the Me-323 itself. Many years ago my mother took me to the library of the local university (Poznań) and we were browsing the catalog of its books about aircraft. At that time I was able to read Chuck Yeagers autobiography, but I also noted an interesting thing - our library also has on it’s catalog the operator’s manual for the Me-323! Not publicly available, but still there? Funny, eh?
Two years ago I signed up for a sightseeing tour of a village like 10km from where I live. Surprisingly our guide told us about two aviation accidents that took place there. One that he witnessed personally was a crash of a MiG-17/LiM-5, and the other was none other than Me-323 in 1944 or 1945. It turned out the airfield Bednary (where I made my parachute jumps!) was during WWII for a time home to a German unit flying the Me-323. That’s probably how that manual ended up in that library. One thing our guide told us was that when the Me-323s were flying in a formation one designated aircraft was the “Waffentraeger” - heavily armed with MGs instead of cargo to provide some form of protection to the formation.
Thanks for reading and let’s see how many FINISHED models of the Me-323 we can see on the ‘net. Have a nice day!
Paweł
I could make arguments both ways.
One interesting argument for this kind of kit (Gigant, C-130, whatever) involves unit sales. Let us say wholesale price for a model is half Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price. Let us say MSRP on the new Tamiya PaK 38 is $20 US. That yields a wholesale price of $10 US. In order to gross $100,000 in sales, Tamiya needs to sell 10,000 units.
Now let us say the MSRP of a 1/35 Gigant is $1,000 US. Wholesale price is $500 US. Trumpeter needs to sell 200 units to gross $100,000 US.
Stick in whatever numbers you like but the number of sales required to reach a given sales goal is way smaller for a huge kit. The luxury model has a place in the market!
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As an aside, card models are massively higher difficulty than plastic models. One or two magnitudes more difficult. Displaying them is easy. Building them is a very heavy lift.
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Anyway, I have nothing against a 1/35 Gigant. If it is not a joke, pretty neat the people at Trumpeter are even considering it. Kinda curious if anyone around here builds such gigantic models. My biggest are a 1/33 F-14 and a 1/33 F-4.
Either it’s too good to be True, Or They’re really going All Out
Trumpeter does the 1\35 Topol-M, which is 3 feet long. They do all of those 1\200 scale ships. So they have the engineering to make a 1\35 Gigant. I wouldn’t doubt that this is a real release. The Topol-M goes for about $200, so let’s say the Gigant releases at $300. Not outside most guy’s [saved up] budget…
