Hasegawa continues to offer easy-to-build Focke Wulf 190s; the latest one is the last short-nosed 190 to be produced during the war, the Fw-190A-9. The BMW-801TS-powered A-9 variant is identified with a larger propeller, an extra cooling fin on the fan, and a bulged canopy. This limited edition release is the basic A-8 kit from Hasegawa with some white metal parts – the cooling fan and a wider chord wooden propeller which are all that are needed to convert the A-8 into an A-9.

The kit is molded in typical Hasegawa quality light grey plastic that is flash free with subtle panel lines. There are four sprues of grey plastic, a sprue of clear plastic, one set of poly caps, and the two white metal parts. I did notice that the wings had three strange holes on the upper surface. These are easily filled. It looks like they are for the stag antler-type antennas, so I’m sure we’ll see more variants.

This set is a single fret of excellent relief-etched material which fixes the seats on the HK Models 1/32 B-25. So, you ask, what’s wrong with the kit seats? Not much, but research does indicate that the co-pilot’s seat was not a full seat like the pilot’s, more of a half seat. The fret includes 35 parts which allow you to build more detailed and correct seats.

Construction will be helped by use of one of the PE bending tools on the market today – I used a Hold and Fold and it is much more precise making the bends than any other way. Also, you will need some plastic rod to construct the seat mounts – two pieces of 1.2mm rod, each 26.5mm long, and for the smaller seat, two pieces of 1.2mm rod each 14.5mm long. I used stock styrene rod from the LHS.

This book looks at all of the piston engine fighter aircraft used by Sweden from 1925 to 1946 and their paint schemes. Each aircraft is covered with many period pictures, some even in color. There is a section on the operational history, a listing of production numbers, as well as a chart detailing the individual aircraft history of all aircraft of each type that served Sweden. Each aircraft section ends with color notes spelling out the colors used for each. While not in FS numbers, these callout will still prove useful to the modeler. The book is more of a history of these aircraft in Swedish service with color information included than it is an in-depth analysis of the colors used on these aircraft.

The Aircraft

SAAB of Sweden built the Draken as an interceptor in the early 60s, with a recon version soon following. The Draken was used by Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Austria. All operational Drakens were retired between 1993 and 1999. There are a few flyable Drakens at the Test Pilot School at Mojave Spaceport in California.

The aircraft in this kit is a pair of Danish RF-35s, the reconnaissance version. The major differences are the nose, which contains the camera suite, and the wingtips and tail top, which are different.

THE KIT

You get the basic Hasegawa Draken fighter kit, which has been out for over 10 years. The additions are a resin camera nose, resin wingtips, and a new top for the vertical stabilizer.

ASSEMBLY

Osprey Publishing continues to expand the Duel Series with the 47th installment of this collection, Gladiator vs. CR.42 Falco. This book has the typical sections of the previous books in the series – i.e., Development, Strategic Situation, Combat, Statistics, and Analysis and Aftermath.

The book is well written and incredibly well researched. The main adversaries fought each other in what some historians would consider secondary theaters of war. However, those theaters expanded from sand dunes of North Africa and the Mediterranean to the green fields of Eastern Africa and into the Middle East and Iraq, certainly an area much larger of than the main theatre of operations of WWII.