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-six years. They also release many special releases during the year, as is the case of this issue.

This issue covers IJN Heavy Cruisers that were produced from 1922 - 1945. During this time period there were eighteen heavy cruisers built and these fell into six different classes. The classes being the Furutaka, Aoba, Myoko, Takao, Mogami and Tone.

The magazine is broken down into nine sections. Section one covers all eighteen of these cruisers. There are thirty-six pages devoted to them with black and white period photos and line drawings showing the updates and changes that took place through the cruisers life.

Thanks very much to Masterbox (MB) and Dragon USA for providing IPMS USA this review kit and to the IPMS Review corps leadership for sending this item my direction!

OK, I’m not a figure guru. I tend to just build aircraft, but every once in a while, I get the urge to try my hand. Some day I may improve, sez I…

This set is intended as a small vignette to show two allied Armor operators passing out Snickers ® candy bars to local kids, under the ever watchful eye of their mother. Hence the name of the kit… Depending on your experience if you have deployed overseas, this is either fanciful (Most of the time we were told to avoid any dealings with Middle Eastern families) or reality, depending on where you were sent.

With that in mind, I take this build at face value; kids are kids worldwide, and the opportunity for free candy is never turned down… read on.

The Shuttle Carrier Aircraft

NASA’s Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA) fleet consisted of two modified Boeing 747s. The iconic N905NA, a retired American Airlines 747-100, conducted the Approach and Landing Tests with the Space Shuttle Enterprise in the late 70s, still sporting its natural metal finish with an American Airlines red, white, and blue cheatline. N905NA had a long second career with NASA, finishing its service in fall of 2012 after ferrying Discovery, Enterprise, and Endeavor to their final display locations, and ultimately arriving in Houston, TX, to start a third career as a museum display, eternally ferrying the Space Shuttle replica Independence.