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First, thank you to the wonderful folks at KittyHawk Model for providing a welcome addition to early US Navy jet modelers, the TF-9J Cougar. This new release from KittyHawk fills a long-standing gap in 1/48 scale USN jets. KittyHawk subjects are starting to fill out my collection more and more!
Thanks very much to Ross at SAC for providing IPMS USA this review accessory, and to the IPMS Review corps leadership for entrusting me to use it.
Here is the latest in SAC’s line of gear to improve the kits we build. Consisting of two main gear, two retraction arms, two gear braces, and a replacement tail gear, it is a simple set with vastly improved strength.
How do I know this? During my marathon building session over the Columbus Day holiday weekend, I was able to build the Hobbyboss BV 141 kit. And dropped it twice after installing the SAC gear. It stayed on, bent, but was bent back into shape. Resilience personified.
Designed to fulfill a requirement by the United States Army and Marine Corps for a main battle tank to replace the M4 Shermans and M46 Pershings of the 1940’s, the M48 Patton tank found its place America’s armor hall of fame as the United States’ main battle tank from the early 1950’s through the early 1970’s. Originally fitted with gasoline engines, early M48’s were limited in range and were prone to erupt in flames when struck by hostile fire, thus necessitating the need for an improved version with increase range and less susceptible to secondary explosions and fire when impacted by enemy rounds. Enter the M48A3 variant, equipped with a new diesel engine and improved drive train and fire control system. In addition to production of new M48A3’s, earlier M48 variants were retrofitted to the M48A3 standard, and became the primary US tank during the Vietnam era.
This follow-up review of Eduard’s detail set covers pretty much “everything else” in the set since the cockpit was covered in Part One. I won’t summarize that section here, but have provided the link to it if you’re interested in reading and referencing that one to get the complete picture of this detail set.
A drawback of this entire build had nothing to do with the Eduard set---the Airfix A-4B kit I purchased was damaged---it came out of the box with three of the six tiny little slat tracks broken off, and worse yet, missing from the poly bag to boot. This further complicated the project and caused me lots more heartburn and delay than if I’d had a complete kit.
There have been several accounts of the operation to kill Osama bin Laden, including one by a former Navy seal, one by a Navy seal who participated in the raid, as well as the movie Zero Dark Thirty.
In this new book Killing bin Laden - Operation Neptune Spear 2011, author Peter F. Panzeri Jr. has developed another highly detailed account of the hunt leading up to the raid on the bin Laden's compound in Abottabad, Pakistan, and his ultimate death.
As stated in the book “The most dominant influences on this account are those of the 880+ page Pakistani Abottabad Commission Report for its inclusion of candid raw data, the personal account in interviews of former US Navy SEAL “Mark Owen,” and the abundance of detailed information on Operation Neptune Spear released in 2011 to the producers and screenwriters of the film Zero Dark Thirty.
Sections of the book include:
