Trumpeter 1/35th SA-2 Missile

The SA-2 "Guideline" has been a staple of Warsaw Pact air defenses since the earliest days of the Cold War. The effectiveness of the missile is debated by experts, but it can be said that an example shot down Gary Powers's U-2, and another shot down an F-117 over Serbia, the two incidents separated by some forty years...

I really wanted the SA-2 missile mounted on the trailer with the ZiL prime mover, but my local hobby shop didn't have that kit. All he had was the SA-2 on the launcher, and he looked like he needed a sale, so I cowboyed up and bought the one I didn't really want. This was my first Trumpeter kit, and it reminded me quite a bit of Dragon - excellent detail coupled with a strong tendency to over-engineer. But with such a simple kit, the over-engineering never got too carried away, except for those molecule-sized knobs that were supposed to go on the access panels on the launcher. I can't see things that small, let alone handle them, so I declared them to be officially over the top and left them off.

Still, the missile didn't take but an hour to assemble, and the launcher not much more. Fit was excellent throughout, the missile requiring only a few desultory swipes with a sanding stick to erase the seams entirely, and the launcher's square-sided boxy nature made seams irrelevant. A couple of hours of assembly and we were on to the painting stage, which took about fifteen minutes - a coat of light grey on the missile and a coat of desert yellow on the launcher (Egyptian service, doncha know). The paint callouts were a bit amusing. Trumpeter has occasional problems with translation like the really old Tamiya and Bandai kits, and among other things the instructions called for the use of "Nary Grey" and "Stian White". I especially like nary grey, which to me suggests such a lack of grey it must be yellow...

The decal sheet contains about four evening's worth of stencil decals, a mixture of actual stencils and bands that wrap around the missile. Something went wrong with mine because the decals kept breaking into chunks, and as I attempted to maneuver them back together, they broke into sub-chunks. I was able to salvage most of the decals, but nevertheless the tedium of having to reassemble each and every decal out of three or four jagged hunks left an extremely sour taste in my mouth. Is this characteristic of Trumpeter decals, or did I just get a bad set?

Still, for all the pain and aggravation the decals caused, they really sell the model - the missile is plentifully covered with stencils in Cyrillic and they really look good. Missiles often end up looking like featureless painted telephone poles, but this one has some nice visual interest with the red and black stenciling. Curiously, one stencil is in English: there's a band at the top of the rocket, just below the radome, that reads "No Photography". Never one to disregard instructions, I elected to not take any photographs. (Actually, my camera battery is dead.)

In conclusion, it's an easy kit to assemble and it builds into a large, striking and nicely detailed model, but I found the decals tedious and annoying.