Hi John,
my impression is that second sheet is by much more complete, but I wonder if many details can reasonably be replaced by a thin sheet of metal.
Massimo
Hi Massimo! You're right - unfortunately, photoetched brass is kind of like "bling" (cheap jewellery) for modelbuilders - it's shiney and pretty-looking but sometimes not very practical. Some detail parts, like landing gear doors, can be quite useful, but other parts, like throttle controls or landing gear retraction linkages, are either too small for the average builder to use, or unrealistic because they are only two-dimensional, not three-dimensional. The amount of work building up these parts with white glue or some other material to give them more thickness is probably no less trouble than making the parts from scratch. Sometimes it seems that the person designing the parts is not very familiar with the aircraft the parts are designed for - I keep thinking that some things which would be welcome and would be easy to use are never included. Examples of this are wing slats on the La-5 and late LaGG-3, and the metal panels behind the exhaust outlets on the early LaGG-3.
(It's possible to make these slats and panels from
thick decal film (if you can find any) or from the self-adhesive
aluminum (not silver fabric) tape used on heating system ductwork - this interesting method is very often seen on Scalemodels.ru, but so far it doesn't seem to have caught on anywhere else.)
John