Originally published in 2009 as a single volume, this book has now been republished as Volume 1 of a multi-volume set. The author has had access to previously unpublished information regarding Japanese Army and Navy aircraft designs during World War II and has put together a very interesting look at what could have been.

The book is a hardbound volume with a nice dust jacket cover that has color illustrations of several of the designs discussed in the book. The book is printed on glossy paper which helps the many illustrations and color photographs to stand out. It includes not only color illustrations of the each design, often in hypothetical squadron markings, based on squadrons that actually existed during the war, but also includes numerous color photographs of surviving airframes, many of which are in a sad state of repairs while awaiting restoration.

Master-Model offers modelers three different sets of turned metal parts that can be used in place of the Special Hobby kit’s plastic parts to add extra detail to models of the Fairey Firefly. These sets are available in both 1:72 and 1:48 scale. This set (AM-48-097) provides parts to assemble crisply detailed 1:48 scale Hispano 20mm cannon in short fairings for the Fairey Firefly.

The Master-Model parts are designed to replace the injection molded ones in Special Hobby kits without significant surgery. Since the kits already have holes on the wings’ leading edge to install the injection-molded parts, the Master-Model barrels should literally drop in place instead. (Although the size of the holes may need to be increased to 1.5mm diameter to accept the plug on the end of the fairings).

The MiG-19 and Chinese version of it, the J-6/F-6, are essentially the same aircraft. The Chinese version had an additional wing hard point on each wing. One thing about early MiGs is that they had long pitot tubes. In plastic they are fragile and easily bendable. The clean up of the plastic part is difficult to ensure that you keep a round cross section. Then if you are like me I ALWAYS break them off, either on the way to a show or just in handling the model.