History

This book covers the development of aircraft powerplants as they relate to the airline industry, going back to the beginnings of air transportation in the twenties. The author is especially well qualified to write in this area because (1) his father was an engineer who worked on jet engine development in Germany during World War II, and later France and the United States, and (2) the author grew up with this background, and competed a Doctorate in Aeronautical Engineering at MIT, after which he worked for AVCO-Everett Research Laboratory and the Boeing Corporation, later pursuing a career teaching and doing research at the University of Washington in Seattle.

As an avid figure modeler, I was given the opportunity to examine this new paint set by Ammo, which replicates the rather fiddly camouflage pattern often seen on modern Russian infantry. As an avowed enamel/oil paint aficionado, I thought it would be interesting to examine this acrylic set from my own jaundiced perspective.

To try out these paints, I elected to use a rather crude figure from my collection, the argument being it’s easy to make a good figure look good, but somewhat more challenging to get the same results from a poor figure. The uniform is not exactly right, but I was more interested in giving these paints a good test than in creating something to add to my collection.

To give the overlay paints some “tooth” I airbrushed a coat of light grey lacquer primer onto the figure first. This primer coat was allowed to dry for several days.

Roman imperial expansion over the entire Mediterranean basin was going full tilt in the first century BC. Nobody had been able to stop them and their inexorable legions, which were bound together by a discipline and unit cohesion seldom found anywhere else in the ancient world. They had rolled over the Punics, the Celts, the Macedonians and everyone else standing in their quest for global (as seen then) dominance. However, there was another people expanding out of the east who would finally confront the Romans in a way they had never encountered before.