Dragon 1/72 Arado Ar 234P

DRAGON 1:72 ARADO AR-234P
'INBOX Review'

Reviewer: Simon Skinner (rec.models.scale)

Kit Details: Arado Ar 234P (Prototype only) - Dragon 1/72 (based on Ar 234C-3)

Another concept aircraft that I believe was only laid out on paper in prototype form that was recovered at the end of WW2. This aircraft is based heavily on the Ar 234C-3, which is backed up by the fact that the parts inside the box from what I can work out (as I have both kits) are identical but an additional sprue is supplied for this kit. My kit did not come with boxart or in a box for that matter, as I picked up at a recent swap meet with someone's "Dragon Ar 234P" tag on it.

Five sprues inside the box, with around 80 or so parts in light grey and good surface detail. The main difference in this kit is the inclusion of the new sprue (as mentioned above) containing clear parts that cover the nose radar dome, cabin area, gondola and antenna fairings. There's also a PE brass set of parts covering mainly antenna and cockpit parts. Quality of the parts is quite good although some sink mark and ejector pin marks can be found in some areas, particularly the insides of landing doors and on the edges of the landing gear.

The instructions are exactly the same as the C-3 kit, except that there is an additional errata sheet covering the new sprue. There is a new decal sheet and this covers four aircraft, all of which will be there for fans of Luft'46 as these are only speculative finishes. They are all a mixture of dark coloured and night time operation late war Luftwaffe schemes.

The apparent build up of the kit looks pretty straight forward with only just over half a dozen steps in the instructions to follow, and standard breakdown for fuselage etc. As is often the case with Dragon, test fitting of major components, particularly wing joins, nose cones and engine nacelles will need to be carried out to determine any fit problems along the way. My experience has found you get kits of varying fit quality. There is an abundance of stores in the kit, including bombs, cameras and drop tanks, all of which apparently are not for use in this kit. In spite of the instructions telling you otherwise, I would probably add the drop tanks for additional fuel capacity under the wings as my research suggests Luftwaffe night fighters nearly always carried these.

I am not able to comment specifically about accuracy so would suggest further research when building up this kit. I do recall reading elsewhere that the Ar 234C-3 kit is reasonably accurate with the main area of contention surrounding the tail fin so would gather that the Ar 234P would have similar comments. The main area of concern for this kit would be internal areas which differed from the C family and this kit doesn't appear to dwell on any significant changes.

As a concept aircraft for Luftwaffe '46 fans this kit looks very nice in the box. While I haven't built any of the Dragon Arado Ar 234 Blitz family of kits that I have purchased, I am pretty happy to have them all in my stash to build at another day. Yes, happy to recommend!

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