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Long overdue, new molding for the 1/700 scale IJN Katori training cruiser as she appeared at the beginning of WW2 (August 1942). Excellent detail, excellent fit, accurate appearance. Vast improvement over the previous molds.
Fans of the Imperial Japanese Navy have something new to put on their wish lists – a new, beautifully illustrated reference book! Kagero, based in Lublin, Poland, has published a new addition to their illustrated 3D series of historic warships. They have previously published 3D books on the Heavy Cruisers Takao and Aoba.
Using computerized graphics, the authors have created detailed 3-D illustrations of the Tone’s exterior from stem to stern from nearly every possible angle, in what appears to be her appearance after her last refit in the summer of 1944. It also comes with a bonus foldout that provides a profile of the ship rendered in black and white and some additional illustrations.
This is my fourth egg plane. The first was an F-4 Phantom, probably 20 years ago. Since then I’ve done two F-16s, and now the F-22. The original Phantom was very much an egg with wings and stabilizers added. This “aircraft” looks pretty un-egglike. Either that or it’s a very weird chicken.
The kit is pretty simple and goes together quite nicely. The fuselage is two pieces, separated top and bottom. The vertical stabilizers are separate parts, the landing gear is 7 parts, including the doors, and the canopy finishes the parts inventory.
I put the fuselage halves together without glue. They include the wings and horizontal stabs. Then I painted the whole thing. I used Neutral Gray for the main color, with Euro 1 Gray for the dark patches and Dark Ghost Gray for the leading and trailing edges. This looks very tactical.
Kagero has published a series known as “Mini-Topcolors” oriented toward modelers. Each book includes color profiles and decals in several scales.
“Barbarossa 1941,” the 25th title in the series, concentrates on armor involved in the invasion of Russia. As such, most of the profiles are of German tanks, but there are a couple of T-34/76 and a KV-2. There are a total of 18 color profiles in the book.
A very neat detail is that, accompanying most of the profiles, there is a black and white picture which was used by the artist to create the profiles. Each profile also includes a small paragraph in English and Polish describing some details on the specific location or time that the reference picture was taken.
History Brief:
After the Winter War with Finland, the M-72 motorcycle was built in the Soviet Union as a replacement for the two outdated heavy types already in service with the Red Army. As an odd twist of fate would have it, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact provided the necessary legal, political, and economic environments that allowed the Soviets to build the BMW R-71 that had been rejected by the Wehrmacht as the M-72. The short-lived pact agreement included that BMW provide the design, tooling and training to build the motorcycle and military sidecar. Proposed manufacture was to be in three factories located in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kharkov. Only Moscow produced any M-72s prior to the German invasion.
