On the heels of Finnish Fighter Colours 1939-1945, Romanian Fighter Colours 1941-1945, Hungarian Fighter Colours 1930-1945, and Swedish Fighter Colours 1925-1954, comes MMP’s latest tome. This book, focused on the ‘Early Years’ is planned to be followed by at least four additional volumes on the ‘Great War’ (Volume 2), ‘Red Stars’ (Volume 3), and ‘Against Soviets’ (Volume 4). The authors leaned heavily on Russian private archives, as well as archives, libraries, and museums.

The book is a nice hardbound volume, with a nice glossy cover, and 176 pages on high-quality stock with a matt finish. Mainly black and white period photos are supplemented with modern day color photos, color period posters and postcards, colour side and top views, and colour unit emblems and personal markings. The text is in English and quite readable.

Model Art Magazine is a monthly magazine that covers aircraft, armor, ships and car modeling. Model Art started releasing magazines in 1966 and has evolved from there over the past forty eight years.

The December issue starts off with seven pages of models and modeling tools that were shown at the 2014 All Japan Plamodel Hobby Show

The main article this month is a feature using several model ship kits that were released in 2014. The article is composed of in progress shots of the kits, a diorama, line drawings and archive photos. Some of the kits used are the Fujimi 1/700 IJN Light Cruiser Kitakami 1945, Aoshima 1/700 IJN Seaplane tender Kimikawa-Maru and the Gallery 1/350 USS Intrepid.

Following the main article are several small monthly reoccurring articles. Some of these articles are Union Fleet Organized Course, Modeling JASDF and IJA/IJN Airplane Illustrated.

Master-Model provides modelers with exquisite miniature turned metal parts that can be used in place of kit parts to add extra detail to models. Their sets generally are available for builders in all popular scales. This set (AM-48-096) provides parts to assemble crisply detailed 1:48 scale Hispano 20mm cannon in long fairings for the Fairey Firefly.

The parts are designed to replace the injection molded ones in Special Hobby kits without significant surgery. The kits have holes on the wings’ leading edge to install injection molded parts so it is likely the Master-Model barrels will 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).