1/350 Hyuga, volumes 76-80 & finish

After the ship, display stand, and remote control box wrapped up in Volume 75, Hachette gave everyone the option of buying five more volumes that each contained aircraft to build out a fleet for Hyuga to carry. Of course I opted in like any psycho fan would. There was a delay of about a month, then they started rolling out. Subscribers like me received them all in a single package.

Vol. 76 offered a Cosmo Zero Blackbird and white Czvarke fighter.

Vol. 77 came with a Cosmo Seagull and another Blackbird.

Vol. 78 gave us a Ki-8 Stork and Type 100 Scout Plane in blue and white.

Vol. 79 contained a Type 100 Scout Plane in red and white, and a silver Cosmo Zero.

And finally, Vol. 80 had an irresistible warp booster.

There were a lot of parts for this one, but they came together to form a simple structure.

All I had to do was slide a finished Cosmo Tiger into the front (the one I put together years ago with Hachette’s Yamato model) and I was at the finish line.

There was still that big set of Tigers and Pythons in Vol. 75, but I decided to save them for a later occasion since these would easily fill up the available space.

The big finish

With everything now completed, it’s time to take a walk around and assess the final product.

The first impression is, naturally, the sheer size and mass of the thing. It’s 33″ long and 8″ wide with all the hull attachments. Despite “diecut” being the first word in the name, there isn’t as much metal as you might think. Just the flanks. But that’s okay, since it keeps the weight down. It’s substantially lighter than Yamato and Andromeda.

The main guns swivel, rise, and lower with enough tension to keep them in place, which you couldn’t do with Andromeda.

Just in front of the guns is a storage hatch big enough to take a Cosmo Seagull.

As we approach the point where the front deck meets the rear deck, you can see a problem approaching.

That problem is that they don’t match up. The rear deck plate is warped upward. I ordered a replacement part to see if I had better luck. When it arrived, it had exactly the same warp, which means it’s probably a manufacturing artifact. Maybe it happened when the color was rolled on. Another builder told me it will settle with time, so I’ll just keep watching it.

Just below the flight deck are two hatches that pivot open. Neither is deep enough to accommodate a fighter, though.

Just behind them is the rear door that swings out and the elevator platform that pivots down. You can slide it up to the flight deck, but it’s a little cranky. Not really built for play.

You can see here there’s plenty of room for everyone inside. The Tigers and Pythons on the palettes came with Vol. 74 and can be removed any time. There are others on the bottom of the palettes for a total of 16.

The warp booster, though, is a hog. It can fit in the airlock space, but then everything else has to move. So it can sit outside and be amazing.

Here you can see all the fiddly detail in the hangar. Not sure this was the best way to construct it, but it’s holding together. The bars holding the fighter palettes are representative of a complete circular structure like the barrel inside Yamato. With that kit, you built half a barrel that was also representative of a full circle.

The rear hatch above the engine nacelles has a flip-down hatch and it’s big enough to store a craft of its own.

It’s not evident from the photos, but those rear doors don’t actually close all the way. They just swing and stop without clicking or snapping into place. This means they are loose and rattle with movement unless you tape them down. I wish more thought had been given to that.

That’s our first visual inspection. Now let’s find out if all the wiring and lighting paid off.

In go the batteries. Four C cells slide into the display base.

The power button comes on with a touch. That’s a good sighn. We lower the room lights aaaaand…

FABULOUS. This is the moment I waited for and didn’t get with Andromeda. It’s an enormous relief. There are multiple buttons on the control box, each of which activates a different set of lights. Some of them are steady, others blink. You can turn them on and off individually, or turn them all on together. Some have accompanying sound effects.

There are also strong interior hangar lights. Unfortunately, they REALLY call attention to the warping on the flight deck.

On the first walkaround, the side shields were lowered. Now they’re raised. The lights inside them are strong enough to bleed through the back, which is unfortunate.

If I’d know they would be that strong, I would have lined the interior surface with aluminum foil. Nothing to be done about it now.

On the other hand, the interior looks great, both with and without aircraft.

Another nice touch is that each of the identifying marks on the hull has its own lighting, like the name Hyuga on the stern hatch.

Lots of engine nacelles on this. They flicker and have accompanying sound effects. When you activate them, they have a long startup sound. When you deactivate them, they have a power-down sound.

The sub-guns on both flanks light up when you hit their button. There’s a firing sound, and then they fade out.

The main guns also light up nicely with a blast sound of their own, then they fade down. And what about the BIG gun?

Well…that one was a fail. When you activate the Wave-Motion Gun there’s a long sequence of sound effects with some cool modifications on top of the classic sound, but the light didn’t come on. No idea why. I gave it an independent battery test and it didn’t light up, so it must have gone belly-up at some point.

Fortunately, I quickly found a replacement for that parts volume (7) and it came a couple weeks later. The replacement LED tested out fine, so I removed the WMG module (it was super easy) and put the new unit in place. When I tested it again…nothing. It turned out that tightening it all the way down to its metal plate somehow interfered with the power flow. I loosened it just slightly, reinstalled the module into the bow, and it worked fine. Whew. If I’d known this was a problem way back when I put Vol. 7 together, I could have avoided it. Maybe there was a text note that I couldn’t read. Oh well.

The last step was to plant Hyuga in its display position, right next to Yamato on my coffee table. Despite being five inches shorter, Hyuga‘s greater width seems to give it equal mass.

Here’s an interesting discovery. I got this polystone Falcon a while back, and comparing it to the fightercraft convinces me that it’s just about the right scale (1/350) to interact.

Fun fact: if you collect spaceship models and miniatures long enough, eventually you might find some surprise dream teams that just happen to scale correctly with each other.

Another interesting discovery: that orange Cosmo Tiger didn’t come from Hachette. It was a rubber toy made in 1978 by a totally different company, and yet it’s so perfectly scaled that it even fits into the warp booster. How’s that for coincidence?