Our friend Mitsuoki Kubota has done a comparison of the new Aoshima HMS Illustrious kit with resized (1/700) scale plans from the Anatomy of the Ship HMS Victorious on Twitter (Illustrious and Victorious were, for all practical purposes, near-identical sisters).
His Twitter feed can be found here:
https://twitter.com/fake_johnbull Check out his feed from between December 25-27, 2016. In short, he concludes that the kit is very accurate in dimensions and shape, except for the placement of one of the searchlight platforms which is off by a few millimeters--which will be quite acceptable for most modelers.
I have the kit, and I will say that except for the treatment of the open port and starboard galleries, which are depicted as deep cubby-holes, it is a very, very nice kit. The knuckle is nicely rendered, as is the hull plating, armor belt, etc. The slightly raised catapult platform on the flight deck is missing (though the catapult is there), and the island is very nicely done. The enclosed cable deck and quarterdeck are either lacking in detail (the former) or have inaccurate details (the latter) and purists will want to rectify this, though both are nearly impossible to see once installed, so this is not a major drawback.
However, I believe that the fit for Illustrious combines several features that were never present at the same time (the submarine observation stations on her forward sponsons--which come with the Victorious kit--are missing, but were present during the early phases of Illustrious's career, when her compass platform did not yet wrap around the face of the island). This, however, can be corrected by using the appropriate parts from the Victorious kit, which also includes the version of the compass platform which wraps around the front of the island. Aoshima also made some bone-headed mistakes--they molded the draft lines on one side of the hull in relief (really?!) and a representation of the accommodation ladder as well, which will have to be removed--this is a pain in the neck (I was able to do so without removing the plating lines that run through them--though it was not easy). Fake Johnbull highlights these gaffs in his Twitter review. I have not had time to look at the aft round-down to see if it is accurate for both ships. I believe that the kit of HMS Victorious is accurate out of the box.
The main weakness of both kits is that the secondary armament and antiaircraft guns, searchlights, and boats are all pretty crude and will need to be replaced to be convincing. I think all are available as aftermarket items. But the basic kit is very nice, and very sound. Overall, the Illustrious and Victorious kits will build into very nice models.
Here are some build threads for the new Aoshima HMS Illustrious kit from some Japanese Twitter feeds:
Warfare's (@i_hate_liar) Twitter feed from April 14-27, 2017):
https://twitter.com/i_hate_liar Harukano Sugano's (@EnjakuHaruzono) Twitter feed from March through May of 2017:
https://twitter.com/EnjakuHaruzono As you can see, with some work, and the dedicated PE set that Aoshima has produced, it builds ups very nicely.
HTH
Mike E.
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