Yep, it's dead....
I'll post up the pics I've taken because there are some interesting things about this "modern" kit.
First up, the intake splitters. Good that they're actually there, less good that they're about a scale foot thick at the leading edge. Left hand is how they come, right hand is after a bit of filing:
Next, the trailing edges. The kit moulds the entire wing and fuselage in one piece, in contrast to Airfix's multi-piece jigsaw, but unfortunately it has the
whole upper and lower wing in one piece, instead of a recessed lower that would give you a thin, one-piece trailing edge. At best, this was always going to give a thick leading edge, but on this kit, the trailling edges don't even meet! No amount of sanding seemed able to get this out, so in the end, I decided to leave it on the split flaps, and fill it inboard and outboard of that. The pic shows the filled aileron to the left and the original trailing edge on the flaps to the right:
And lastly, the rear fuselage. This is a separate component with a left/right split instead of the top/bottom split of the rest of the fuselage. It's separate in order to allow for the different fin on the German versions, but the position of the split seems to be determined by mould size rather than logic.
Instead of being at the thinnest point, just in front of the fin, they've put the split right across the complicated exhaust "pen nib" area. To make matters worse, they've then made the middle bit of the pen-nib a separate and none-too-well-fitting insert, which means you have THREE joint lines crossing this concave, difficult-to-sand area. You have to install the jet pipes before closing up the fuselage, which make sanding this area even more difficult and complicates paint masking too:
Few more things that I didn't get pics of:
The canopy is oversize in order to let you display it open. Unfortuantely this means that you HAVE to display it open since if you have it closed, it doesn't mate up with the solid hump behind it, leaving a very conspicuous step.
Although the box goes out of it's way to state that the kit makes both the Mk.100 and Mk.101 Marineflieger Sea Hawks, it doesn't include the radar pod for the Mk.101, which makes it a bit of an empty claim.
Real Sea Hawks had five rocket hardpoints under the outer wing which could carry up to three 3" RPs each. The kit has five sets of blank holes on the inside of the wing moulding, but only includes eight single rockets. I suspect that again, this is an issue with mould size. However, if they hadn't pointlessly moulded each rocket in two pieces there'd have been room on the sprue for at least two more, and the "option" sprue with the German rear fuselage and tailplanes was much smaller than the rest; if it had been the same size as the others, it could have included extra rockets and/or the radar pod.
At the end of the day, you can build it into a nice model, but it's not the shake-the-box exercise it looks like on first inspection: