Mike Loades is a respected author, broadcaster, director, and action arranger who has made numerous television appearances as a historical weapons expert and military historian. Mike founded the first horse archery club in California, the California Centaurs. You may have seen his work on the History Channel or on National Geographic. One of his recent projects was the movie, Assassin’s Creed, which ended up grossing over 241 million against a 125 million budget. He has several DVDs available: Archery: Its History and Forms (1995), and Going Medieval (2014). He is the author of Swords and Swordsmen (2010), The Longbow (2013) and The Composite Bow (2016).

The Ka-27/Ka-29 Helix helicopter family is a follow-on to the Ka-25 Hormone helicopter. Like the Ka-25, the Ka-27/29 has contra-rotating stacked rotors eliminating the need to a tail rotor to counter torque. Like most helicopters, the Helix’s cockpit is very visible and unfortunately, the seats included by most kit manufacturers do not bear any resemblance to those of the actual helicopter.

This set from Aires, part of its Quickboost line, seeks to remedy this by providing very nicely detailed seats with the harnesses. The set includes four seats, which allows you to outfit two kits as there are only two seats in the front cockpit of the Helix. The seats are not identical, they each have different configurations for the lap belts, as unless the helicopter is at an airshow, on the actual aircraft, the lap belts end up in lots of different configurations depending on how they are unbuckled and set or tossed aside.

Modern warfare within the last few decades has seen some remarkable (and sometimes deeply disturbing) changes. For the most part, combat in this century is no longer a matter of state-versus-state conflicts with large standing conventional armies facing off. It has instead devolved into much more local, sometimes tribal skirmishes with small, highly mobile forces either fighting other similar units or challenging large state armies with hit-and-run tactics which are oddly reminiscent of how American citizens fought against the much larger and better equipped British forces during the American Revolution. In a sense, what goes around comes around.

Quickboost has added the seats for the AV-8B Harrier to their line of resin aircraft accessories. This latest addition is molded in a grayish resin, smooth, seamless and bubble free. The seat is molded in one piece and is easy to remove from the mold block.

The package states that it is for the Hasegawa kit but it would probably work well with any of the AV-8B Harrier kits. I compared it with the Hasegawa kit. Talk about a noticeable difference, the detail on the Quickboost part is outstanding. From the photos you can see that the Quickboost seat has the belts molded on it and I can’t believe the amount of detail. The seat that came in the kit is so plain and flat while the Quickboost seat is much more detailed.

The Hawker Tempest was a WWII aircraft used mainly by the RAF although a few other country’s flew them. Primarily being used as ground attack aircraft it saw action in Operation Overlord and it was used to target railroads and Luftwaffe aircraft on the ground. The Tempest was an effective low-level fighter interceptor, even against the new Me-262 jet fighter. When the first 100 Hawker Tempest were built they were fitted with the long barrel 20mm Mark II. The rest of the production were built with the short barrel 20mm Mk V cannons carrying 800 round of ammo shooting at 200rpg.