Kagero Publishing, from Poland, is one of the major military history publishing houses. Since 1998, when Kagero started publishing in English, over 600 titles have been produced at a pace of 60 per year or more. Topics focus on specific planes, armor and ships, along with a bevy of focused topics, such as a class of warships or an armor type. Kagero caters to ship modelers by turning out books filled with line and 3D computer-generated illustrations, with incomparable accuracy to details. For warships, Kagero has two series: 1) Super 3D Drawings and 2) Top Drawings, focusing on a single ship per book. The topic of this book review is one of the Top Drawings series, which are designed for modelers to have a reference for detailed appearances of individual ships. Top Drawings consist of color covers with black & white (B&W) line drawings of the ship, particular features, and equipment, especially armament.

When I heard a 1/72 scale World War I submarine kit was coming out, I was excited. It ended up being the U-9 class from Germany. The kit is molded in light gray plastic and comes packed in a nice large, sturdy box. In fact, it will fit back in the box all the way until the completion of the build.

Kagero’s SMS Torpedoboot A-III is one of the latest in their Super Drawings in 3D series. This edition is in their standard 8.25” x 11.75” format softbound publication that is 60 pages (including covers). This volume starts off with two pages of historical text followed by 61 pages of color 3D illustrations. There is also a Centerfold full of line drawings (B2; ~26.8” x 19.0”) that starts with profiles at 1/100^th scale and goes up to 1/25^th scale for the details. I counted 106 color 3D illustrations, 42 line drawings, and two tables. There are no current nor period photographs.

This is the first book of a potential new series from Duke Hawkins Books on aircraft carriers. The volume grew out of its earlier book on the Harrier II/AV-8B, as while working on that book, several of their photographers were given the opportunity to visit the Juan Carlos I while she was at sea conducting operations and ended up with an extensive collection of photographs not just of the Spanish Navy’s use of the EAV-8B Matador II (Harrier II Plus), but also of the ship itself and its other facets of its operations – helicopter and amphibious operations.

AFV Club has provided very nice detail-up version of the Knox Class Frigate. It’s the standard kit plus a resin upper hull, a large PE sheet and resin diorama base.

• One light grey sprue
• One large photoetch sheet
• One resin lower hull
• One resin base
• One small decal sheet
• Two instruction sheets (one for the kit and one for the PE parts)

The basic kit is very rudimentary, so the addition of the PE and Resin parts make this a very interesting kit to build. A couple of the areas where you need to remove details that will be replaced by PE parts will need filling, for example on part 20.

The PE instruction sheet is very well presented and detailed. I also suggest you heat treat the PE parts before starting to form them as they were very fragile and will break at the fold lines. The other area to be careful is the steps on the ladders as these snap off easily.