Thank you very much to the wonderful folks at Osprey Publishing for providing this new publication for review. Thanks are also due to the IPMS Reviewer Corps for allowing me the opportunity to explore a wonderful documentation and fascinating historical description of the earliest super carriers.

On opening the book you will find 48 glossy pages filled with text, 30 color photos, 11 black-and-white photos, 2 black-and-white drawings, and 7 color painting and diagrams. The softcover binding is 9.75 x 7.25 inches and a little less than a quarter-inch thick, with a color photo of the U.S.S America off the starboard bow. In 8 chapters, Mr. Elward provides a brief historical introduction explaining the roots of these early super carriers, and focuses on the Forrestal, Kitty Hawk and Enterprise classes. I appreciate the thorough bibliography and index.

The Ship

A lesser-known fact about u-boat attacks is that most came during broad daylight and were conducted with the u-boat's deck gun not at night with a torpedo. The convoy system was yet to be established, so when the u-boats encountered individual unescorted ships rather than waste a torpedo, which they had on board in limited numbers, the u-boat would surface and shell the target with their deck gun. Sometimes the target would surrender, so the u-boat would send over a boarding party to help themselves to whatever they wanted before they told the ship's crew to abandon ship. They then scuttled her using no more valuable ammunition. However, when the target did not surrender or chose to run, the u-boat would just blow them out of the water with the deck gun.

Thanks to Plus Model for sending this elegant aftermarket pilot figure for review, and thank you IPMS Reviewer Corps for letting me review it! I am very appreciative of the chance to contribute back to the scale-modeling community.

Introduction

Many stories have been told in science fiction of man’s development of artificial intelligence and the subsequent enslavement of man by the machines he created. One such story was Battlestar Galactica (BSG) which first aired on ABC television in 1978. Mankind had created an army of automatons known as Cylons to protect and serve them but the Cylons evolved a sense of purpose of their own, destroying the human civilization and chasing the last few thousand human survivors into deep space and forcing them to search for a new home - Earth. In 2004, a darker and more sinister Battlestar Galactica was reimagined as a miniseries on the SyFy Channel.

Over the last few years, Moebius Models has developed several great and accurate model kits devoted to the new Battlestar Galactica series but in late 2013, Moebius released a 1/32nd scale Colonial Viper kit, one of several new kits released to commemorate the 35th Anniversary of the original TV series.

This is a resin kit of a 1956 vintage BMW motorcycle in 1/87 scale (HO train scale). Kit comes in 22 gray resin pieces and two photoetch pieces.

The frame pieces E & F are cast within a casting ring completely surrounded by flash. Hauler suggests an interesting method to remove the flash by placing the parts on a piece of sandpaper and sanding off the flash. It worked pretty well and left the very delicate parts fairly clean without breakage.

Some of the flashing around the parts is fairly thick considering how small the parts are.

The front and rear tires use imaginary spokes as the hubs hang in the middle of the wheel. There are two photoetch handlebar pieces supplied so I assume they needed to be glued together and that’s what I did. The kit goes together really well considering how small the pieces are and has nice detail for a small kit.

I painted the model with some gloss black, flat black, aluminum, and chrome paint.