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Introduction: The primary organization of the IPMS/USA Review website is by IPMS/USA National Contest Class. Within each Class there are sub-menus by kits, decals, books, etc. The Miscellaneous Class is for items that are not class specific or that cross two or more classes.

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Review Author
J.R. Sharp
Published on
Company
Eduard
Scale
1/32
MSRP
$29.99

Having never built anything but “out of the box”, I was intrigued when I saw the availability for PE cockpit details for the Trumpeter A-6A. Having had the kit for a year, I stalled out very badly due to some poor build decisions on top of questionable engineering. I thought that getting these sets would potentially light my fire, so to speak.

The stock A-6 cockpit as provided by the kit, is no slouch. It was fairly well detailed. Unfortunately for me, I had it completely assembled by the time I picked up the PE sets. This greatly increased the difficulty as there was no easy way to remove the detail on the existing. As nasty of a job as it was, it came through okay in my opinion.

Review Author
Phil Peterson
Published on
Company
Round 2 Models
Scale
1/2000
MSRP
$39.95

British sci-fi has always intrigued me and in 1975 Gerry Anderson released a TV series which we youngsters just had to watch, Space: 1999. We didn’t care about the improbability that the Moon could be blown out of Earth’s orbit and hurtled across the Galaxy finding a new planet each week and somehow not collide with anything. All we cared about were the cools ships, neat, futuristic sets and the characters and if you were in your mid teens like I was, especially the female characters.

MPC acquired the rights to the show and released several kits including the Alpha Moonbase. This was really 2 kits in one. Mounted on a 12 x 18 inch vacuformed base you had a smaller version of the moonbase (missing 2 of the Eagle pads) with the travel tubes molded into the base itself. You also got the Mission Control which was molded in a larger scale and included several figures. This was mounted to the right of the base.

Review Author
Tom Pope
Published on
Company
Polar Lights
Scale
1/25
MSRP
$32.99

Introduction

The “Back to the Future” (BTTF) movie franchise began in 1985 with the release of the first movie. The film series featured the adventures of Marty McFly as he traveled back and forth in time in a Time Machine built by wacky scientist Emmitt “Doc” Brown. That first plutonium-powered Time Machine creation had been built by Brown from a vintage DeLorean sports car. For the second movie, “Back To The Future Part II”, the DeLorean had been converted to a flying Time Machine. At the end of the second movie, just as order had been restored to the 1985 timeline (once again?), the Time Machine was struck by lightning which fried the time circuits and sent Doc Brown whirling back to 1885. A third iteration of the movie franchise was needed to rebuild the Time Machine using 1950s technology (is anyone else confused?) and to set the timeline straight one last time.

Review Author
Dick Montgomery
Published on
Company
Model Art
MSRP
$20.00

Model Art has, once again, produced another excellent publication, this particular product covering the Bf-109E/T. Entitled, “Bf-109E/T Mechanical Guide” one immediately sees the potential for detailed information and images regarding the Bf-109 from the viewpoint of a model builder who enjoys highlighting the existing detail to be found in kits, or enhancing those kits with added fiddly bits.

The publication offers a number of features which are as helpful in Japanese (the book is in Japanese) as it would be in English. No translation is required for the detail, color schemes, and markings to be understood and translated into one’s own “109” project.

Starting off with profile line drawings, the evolution of the “109” is illustrated with several pages of crisp, clean illustrations highlighting the different shapes and bumps that separated one “Mark” of the “109” from the next.

Book Author(s)
Colin A Owers, - Illustrators: Paul Monteagle, Ronny Bar, Martin Digmayer
Review Author
Roger Rasor
Published on
Company
Albatros Productions, Ltd.
MSRP
$21.95

In the years between WWI and WWII, moviegoers in America may have thought they were watching wartime footage of aerial dogfights between Fokker D.VIIs and Sopwith Camels in such films as Hell’s Angels and Dawn Patrol. They may have been watching some of the surviving Fokkers, but in all likelihood, the nimble fighters with roundels on their wings were aircraft that never made it into military service during the Great War…instead, they were the small single-seat S4 ‘Scout’ trainers built by The Thomas Morse Aircraft Corporation in 1917-1918 that were considered surplus after the war.