Well it's in the paint shop. First coat of primer reveals that the fit isn't quite as perfect as I first thought. I suppose that's a penalty of dark-coloured plastic: you can't see the shadows of imperfect joints so well...
Decals are getting trickier. I was about to buy the Xtradecal "13 Sea Hawks" set, when I noticed something significant: the Panther is a less generous canvas than the Sea Hawk. The problem is this: the Sea Hawk has room for two large "things" ahead of the wing and two behind it, the usual arrangement being buzz number and a big squadron badge at the front, roundel and "ROYAL NAVY" at the back. On the Panther however, the rear fuselage is cut back and the wing root fairing extends nearly to the back of what's left, so the only thing that can go in that area is really the "ROYAL NAVY" lettering. The roundel will have to go in front of the wing and the buzz number can't be lost, so that leaves no room for the squadron badge.
You can see the roundel migrate forwards on real FAA aircraft (Scimitar, Sea Vixen, Buccaneer), but all of those have unobstructed fins, so the squadron badge moves there and often changes shape to match. However, you can't do this on the Panther, because it's tailplane is halfway up the fin, just like the Sea Hawk, and so effectively cuts it in half. There's just room for the serial below it and the ship/base letter above it.
Two things might save the day:
1. One thing the Panther does have that the Sea Hawk doesn't is a triangular area of fin
in front of the tailplanes, so it might be possible to put some of the smaller unit badges there.
2. The "ROYAL NAVY" lettering appears to have varied in size quite a bit, so by only choosing the smaller ones, it might be possible to make room for the squadron badge on the front of the tail (see above), either by having the lettering in the same place OR by putting it
on the tip tank. The latter might seem a radical move, but the tip tanks on the Panther were non-jettisonable, so they're as much a part of the airframe as anything else. The only aircraft with tip tanks that the FAA has ever actually operated is the Sea Venom, and since that had it's booms available for the lettering, the issue never arose.