Designed in 1935, the B-17 became a force to reckon with by 1942 when the F model was introduced. It had a total production run of 3,405 – 2,300 by Boeing, 500 by Vega, and 605 by Douglas.

This release by Hasegawa features a new set of decals, but the same basic moldings which this kit had 35 years ago: overall good fit, lightly raised panel lines, light grey plastic, and some sink marks expected in an older kit. It has 98 parts and comes in a nice box with a sturdy cardstock bottom and a nice glossy top.

For years, I’ve been fascinated by what has come to be known as the 1946 Luftwaffe, or Luft ’46 – the seemingly inexhaustible blizzard of drafting-table designs the German aircraft industry produced before and during the Second World War for aircraft that were never built. The what-iffyness of these proposals that could have been flying against the Allies had the war continued for one more year has always deeply intrigued the science fiction fan in me. I first became aware of the phenomenon in 1967 when I bought Aireview’s German Military Aircraft in the Second World War, which included a series of line drawings of aircraft I’d never heard of before. As the decades passed, more and more information about these fanciful designs has come to light from declassified government files.

Once again, I’ve chosen MiniArt’s 1/35 diorama series for my conversion project. Like the other kits in this line, the walls and base are thin vacuformed styrene. The air ductwork is also vacuformed in halves, like the walls. This requires a lot of putty-work to clean up the gaps as usual, so I do not recommend this kit to beginner modelers. However, despite the extra modeling work required for these kits, the results can be very rewarding. I used half a tube of Squadron Green Putty on this kit, and the putty and sanding took longer on the ductwork than the walls.

Quickboost now provides a seat with safety belts for the A6M2b Zero among their line of resin aircraft accessories. This is a tiny seat, but the details are excellent. The seat is molded in gray resin that is without flaws – no problems with seams or bubbles. The mold block attaches to the bottom of the seat, thereby making clean up easy, particularly as the attachment point will not be visible once the seat is installed in the cockpit. I removed the mold block with a jewelry saw and smoothed the surface with a few swipes of a sanding stick. Several of the lightening holes in the seat back had some flash, but that was easily cleaned with a sharp knife blade.

The recent release of the Meng AMX-30 B was quickly followed up by the AUF 1. It uses virtually the same hull as the AMX, so it’s an obvious follow-on to the AMX. In the 1970s, the French Army explored a new self-propelled howitzer to replace the MK F3 155 mm. Development of the AUF 1 was completed in 1972 and production began in 1977 with a run of 440 vehicles. Vehicles were also exported to Saudi Arabia and Iraq. It’s armed with a 155 mm gun with an auto loader and a crew of four.

The kit is composed of eleven sprues molded in green and five sprues of track links and pads molded in brown, a small sprue of clear parts, a small fret of photo etch, and a lower hull and turret. There are decals for two vehicles, though the color profiles only feature one.

Assembly

I wrote the review for the AMX 30, so the assembly of the chassis and tracks is nearly identical to the AMX 30.