I am going to show you all the progress as I dig my way through this massive kit. It has no less than 1137 parts over no fewer than 31 Sprues. On top of this we have a fret of 40 PE parts and of course the major hull sections.
I have made a very small start on the kit so far as I am currently buried in the beautiful Thunder models Scammell Tank Transporter.
Here we can see the very fiddly PE mesh which goes around the plastic 2 piece frame for catching shell cases from the 20mm tower mounted gun. If you are following Skipper Teds build on You Tube you'll see how much fun he had with this part.

The secret to getting this right is to anneal the brass. To do this I remove the part from the fret and simply heat it over a gas cooker flame. It needs to be cherry red all over so a lighter will not do all but the tiniest of parts. Once the part is cherry red, IMMEDIATELY immerse in cold water. You will find your part will have lost all springiness and will form like lead.
There are videos and tutorials around that are simply wrong. To anneal Brass you MUST quench it in cold water. yes I know, this is how you harden steel, but Brass is non ferrous..
Here we have the rest of the parts from the 20mm gun. a little simple in my opinion, but I have the Eduard BigEd set to help with this situation..

I have also built all 12 torpedoes, why.. I don't know.. we don't need them all!! These took forever cleaning up the seams. I need to remove the noses on the ones for stowage under the torpedo compartment. They were not loaded to the ship or stored with the fuse mechanisms fitted.

There are some errors with the kit. It would appear Trumpeter copied the Revell kit as they have made the same mistakes!!
The Torpedo doors are too long, the holes around the torpedo doors are misrepresented as a result. The free flooding hole patterns are incorrect for the type being modelled. There are no free flooding holes around the rear of the ballast tanks. The central drainage areas are incorrect in length and the anchor is too far astern. The small holes in a row on the upper Bow are incorrectly spaced and the three holes per side at the stem are too big, incorrectly spaced and there should only be two on the starboard side.
This is what I have picked up on so far and will correct all of it. I am no Submarine expert, just an interested modeller, so please advise any more errors if you know of them.
Here we can see the start of the mods. I have filled the flooding holes on the top of the Bow and partially filled the three off free flooding holes at the stem. There should be three on the port and two on starboard.

It's a shame they used clear plastic for the starboard half.. it's horrible to work with and so reflective it needs to be cut away to give a really clear vision of whats inside anyway!!
I'll add some interesting stuff to this thread later....