EDITORIAL

On our Facebook page, I came across the

notion that the Zero Zero Zero title of our

Limited Edition kit is nonsense for the

release, as it contains two complete kits

only, leading to a perceived incompatibility

between name and contents. In my view, this

is a question of the angle from which you

are looking at this from. For someone who

is immersed in the topic of the Zero and its

history up to their ears, like we are, the title

of the kit makes sense, and a pilot in the

Pacific in ’42 would not have an issue with

it either. In the heat of combat over the

Pacific and Indian Oceans , the sudden cry

of ‘Zero!’ was so common and had so many

forms that not all of them could be placed

on the box. At its height and in all its glory,

the Zero was ever present in the far east,

and this is the feeling that the title of the

kit is designed to convey. When you think

about it, there has generally been no deeper

meaning attached to the nomenclature of

kits in our industry, other than to convey the

box contents. If the need to be a little more

specific presented itself, then it was usually

labeled as “something over something”.

In this case, the obligatory Zeroes Over the

Pacific would have sufficed. In fact, it would

have been an excellent choice, at least locally, thanks to the Czech translation of the

book Samurai, about Saburo Sakai, to the

point of having a distinctly magical flavor.

But that would have been a somewhat common road to go down, and we actually do try

to put a slightly deeper, more original meaning into the names of our kits. This comes

with the risk that an intended meaning of

the title might be missed or misunderstood

by some. If you pay some attention to the

4

INFO Eduard

Limited Edition release Zero Zero Zero,

and study the marking options and their

descriptions provided therein, they may lead

you to the article penned by Jan Bobek, that

is an extension of the introductory section

of the kit instructions and offers a slightly

different perspective of the A6M2 Model 21

than that of the norm. That norm being that

the Zero Model 21 is basically an all-grey,

boring subject, one that attacked Pearl Harbor and cut like a hot knife through butter

from Clark Field to Darwin, only to slam

against the wall of its limitations at Midway

and over Guadalcanal, to be replaced by

more capable and more colorful models of

the type, the A6M3 and especially the more

popular A6M5. With the release of the kit

today, we are trying to illustrate that this is

not entirely accurate, that this version of the

Zero had a bigger significance than most of

us think, that the type remained in service longer than most of us are aware and

provided better results than are generally

perceived. In short, for us modelers, this

realization leads to the understanding that

this aircraft is much more interesting on all

levels than we thought. Last, but not least,

the stories that these aircraft can tell are

far more interesting than can generally be

imagined. We will hit on the classic tales in

the next issue of our newsletter, when Jan

Bobek will carry on from his article into the

history of the Model 21 in a two part article

about the life of Saburo Sakai.

Model Kits

There are a further three new kits for this

month. In the ProfiPack line, we have the

later variant of the Spitfire Mk.Vb , also the

1:48 scale F6F-5 Hellcat and the 1:72 scale

MiG-15bis, the latter two being Weekend

Edition kits. The F6F-5 release signals a return of the 48th scale Hellcat into our range.

Besides this Weekend release, there will

April 2022