Monogram's 1/48th scale Lunar Module, believed by many people (all of them smarter than I am) to be one of the best mass-market plastic spacecraft models ever made. It models (somewhat inaccurately) an LM from an early mission, perhaps Apollo 11 or Apollo 12, and would need extensive modification to represent later and (to my mind anyway) more interesting missions.
I built it straight out of the box with only one exception - I replaced the kit-supplied foil with a bunch of gold foil taken from Rollo chocolate candies. At first I used gold foil from a subspecies of Hershey's Kisses, but before I got very far into it I found that the Rollo foil had a somewhat deeper and more coppery color.
The kit isn't hard to build, though the legs and thruster blast shields in particular take a bit of patience. The hard part is putting on all the foil (which always reminds me of Slapshot). I attached the foil using Alleene's Tacky Glue (I think that's what it's called; it amounts to sticky and thick white glue), and tore the foil rather than cut it so when small pieces overlapped nobody would be able to spot a straight trim line. It took a long time, probably longer than building and painting the rest of the kit in its entirety, but the foil is such a characteristic feature of the LM it seems a shame to not try.
Of note are the recessed areas in the base. These are meant to be painted flat black and would reproduce the stark, deep-black shadows seen in lunar photography. Under the right lighting conditions (especially when "real" shadows don't cross the "false" shadows) it can be quite convincing, though I found jet black too stark and drybrushed it with light grey to relieve the Stygian darkness just a little. In this picture the shadows don't look very dark, but it's mostly an artifact of the photograph; on my shelf they look plenty dark, but on my workbench (where the photograph was taken) there are enough halogen candlepower to make even black velvet look grey.
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