Mushroom Model Publication has released the second volume of the Finnish Fighter Color series. You can find a review of Volume 1 here on the reviews site.

This book, as Volume 1, is structured by aircraft type. Each aircraft type has two chapters. The first one is devoted to the historical introduction on each type including how it was procured and how it did perform in Finnish service. In many cases there are plenty of historical details on different missions including date, location, number of airplanes involved and mission kills/losses. There are no first-hand narratives of pilots involved in the action, so I suppose the information is coming from squadron records.

Introduction

Since late in the Korean war, into the Vietnam War, and even more importantly today, one of the most important missions within the United States Air Force and Navy is the suppression of enemy air defense systems. Blinding the enemy air defenses was and still is crucial to clearing the road for massive bombing campaigns and air superiority. In the United States Air Force, this mission went to a group aptly named the wild weasels. Much like a weasel, the job of these aircraft is to stick their head up and get the enemy air defense systems to see and lock their radar on the aircraft. When the electronic systems in the weasel aircraft indicate the enemy is locked on you, you would launch your anti-radiation missile to ride the enemy radar beam back to the antenna it was broadcasting from. Once in proximity of the antenna, the missile would detonate releasing thousands of bits of steel shrapnel, shredding the enemy radar antenna thus blinding the enemy.

Adding to their line of detail parts for military models, Hauler has recently released a resin and photo-etched parts set for the Tamiya 1/48 scale German Motorcycle & Sidecar (Tamiya kit 32578). The set is comprised of seven resin and seventy photo-etched items. I would highly recommend the small photo-etched parts for experienced modelers, as removing the parts from the fret is a delicate process in itself, and maintaining control of these items through installation can be a challenge. In the end however, the results can certainly be worth the effort.