Its got be difficult to find balance in designing a kit which has to be sturdy enough and simple to build to be a game piece , as well as detailed enough to appeal to modellers , not to mention trying to get a couple of variations included on the sprues . I must admit , some of the choices and simplification or separate detail parts in both Rubicon's and Warlord / Italeri's kit have me baffled sometimes . Some parts are molded in crisp relief and others are barely there , some are separate pieces when they could be molded as one piece . But I know nothing of designing kit , I just build them . Both companies have gotten better with their kits , separate tow cables , options for guns , exhausts , open crew hatches , etc . Sometimes they do make big screw ups , missing 2 pistol ports on the KV II , wrong hatch detail /size on the KV I ( Italeri ) . That kind of stuff has been around forever in both vehicles for war games and scale models ( various resin kits of numerous scales ), you think the Italeri stuff is bad now , you should have built their kits in the 70s
. When you have a dozen companies producing the tank you want , you can pick and chose ( ease of build / price / detail to the nth degree ) , when you have one company releasing it in a off beat scale ( 1/56 ) , you take what you get and you make the best of it . I'm thinking if there was big money to be had in 1/56 , a whole lot of the regular model companies would be jumping on the band wagon .........so let's be thankful for what we have now . Personally if the kit is so-so I'll build just one , but if the kit is awesome , or has the basics to make it awesome with a little kit bashing / modelling skill , I'll get 3 or 9
