Editorial

Good evening, Dear Modellers

Times are very turbulent right now, and it’s a lot like the saying about how the situation on the battlefield changes minute by minute goes. As soon as I announced the release of the F-18C based on Kinetic plastic in the last newsletter, we learned that the moldings would not arrive in time for us to release the kit as a September new release. Since our release schedule is full to the end of the year, we will have a little trouble finding a new release date. We haven't set onet yet, so that piece of information will have to wait for a bit. What I will tell you is that the replacement for the Hornet is the 1:48th Ju 88 A-4 founded on the ICM kit.

Otherwise, everything is going more or less according to plan. The new items for July are at the retailers, and we have also launched their sale on our e-shop. We have a small hitch with the Bf 110 D, which is currently unavailable on our e-shop, but I expect it to be back on sale by the end of this week. The reason is that we are missing three plastic sprues that we did not have time to produce, because our press shop is currently a bit overloaded with demand for other kits as well. First off, we need to produce sprues for the new 48th scale P-40N, which we will be packing this week, so that we can start sending out pre-orders for the Royal Class P-40N next week and pack the rest of these kits for retailers. In total, we need a little over 7,000 units, and to make matters worse, we need another 2,000 for the pending Limited Edition issue with the somewhat complicated name of ‘15,000’, which is about the famous P-40N with lots of attractive markings used by some of the units flying Curtiss fighters. We have this ready as one of the items for this year's IPMS USA, which must make its way to America no later than the week after next. From this, you can see that we still have a lot to do and that we are definitely not bored.

We are also working on molds for our planned new releases for the fall. We have more or less all the molds ready, eight in total, for the MiG-21F, which is in 48th scale. They have not all been tested yet, but I expect that we will be able to do that by mid-August. Molds for the S-199 are also in production, which we should have ready for the beginning of September. For the MiG-21F, it is already clear what will happen with the introductory Limited Edition release, dedicated to the service of this type in the Czechoslovak Air Force. It will be released as a special with a book by Martin Janousek, it has been written, language and style adjustments, as well as proofreading, are underway, and the typesetting is being prepared. The book will be published in Czech, we will not be translating it into other languages. The design of the decals has also begun. Pre-sale will start on Friday, July 18th, and will end on July 31st. The size of the production run will be determined by the results of the pre-orders, where the pre-orders from our e-shop and orders from retailers will be added together. This is the same principle that we use for the kits released in the Royal Class series. It follows from the fact that you do not necessarily have to buy this kit from our e-shop, but you can buy it later from your retailers, if your retailers stock it. At the same time, you do not have to buy this kit just to have the MiG-21F. Another MiG-21F kit with the same moldings is planned as a November release, which will premiere at E-day in Litomerice on October 3rd and 4th.

We have received questions about whether it will be possible to order the S-199 as part of the MiG-21F pre-order. This option seems logical, given that the S-199 should premiere at E-day as well, which is only about two weeks after the pre-paid MiGs are to be shipped. However, this will not be possible. The fact is that the molds for the S-199 will be completed and fine tuned only at the beginning of September, and the same goes for the decals, instructions and other accessories, which can only be completed after we have the final moldings at our disposal. And all this is practically impossible to make it to the planned date of shipping the pre-ordered MiG-21Fs. We will not be able to get the S-199 into the boxes until the end of September, and when I say at the end, it will really be sometime on September 30th, if not even October 2nd, just before E-day. It will be exciting to have the S-199 at E-day, we will have to try very, very hard. Of course, we will keep you informed about the progress of our efforts, and we will also show the progress of our efforts live at various events. For the first time, we would like to present the S-199 and the MiG-21F in Pilsen at the Plzensky Velbloud exhibition, at the beginning of September at the now traditional meeting in Prostejov, and just before E-day in Prague. So if you go to E-day to get the S-199s and the MiGs, you will definitely not be disappointed.

In my editorial in the last newsletter, I promised you that the sale of the book for the 100th BG would start in June, and unfortunately I am not able to keep this promise. The reason, I would say, is administrative. It turned out that we do not have the option to set synch the VAT for books in our data transfer system from the e-shop to the accounting and invoicing system. It may seem like an easily solved issue to you, and it probably is a relatively easily solved issue, but it is precisely these types of issues that can cause significant damage. Here in the Czech Republic, this is not a fundamental problem, we have zero VAT on books. At least for now, I am afraid that sooner or later some minister of finance will think that something needs to be done about it and make some money from it. The current problem is in the ingenious OSS system, which is the charging of VAT from sales in the e-shop to EU countries. This means that when selling to individual EU countries, we have to charge customers the VAT of the given country, and in each country, customers, their citizens, have to pay the charged VAT to each EU country once every 3 months. Payment is made through the clearing center, and a statement is sent showing how much money is to be sent to each country. Just to ensure that it is not all to easy and to ensure that all countries report this properly, we have thirteen different rates for books in the EU, starting with the zero Czech rate and ending with the 18 percent as the Hungarian rate. When this madness broke out years ago, we made a mistake and had the option of setting only one VAT rate for each country programmed into our two interconnected systems. We somehow overlooked the possibility of multiple rates at the time, and now we have caught up on that oversight. We ordered the modifications, but don't ask how much it will cost, and I don't know when it will be ready, debugged and initiated, I hope it might be ready by August. I hereby apologize for my mistake, and I promise that we will start selling immediately as soon as this precarious situation is resolved. You know, regulations must be followed, order must be maintained!

It's like those little swastikas. In some countries they are allowed to be in pictures, and in others they are not. We have already explained how we deal with this - to some customer displeasure, we do not put them on our boxart at all. But now something unpleasant has happened to us. The author of the box art on the Bf 110 D painted swastikas on the tails of both flying Bf 110 Ds. Nice, double-lined, really precisely done. A joy to look at. The product manager who was supposed to catch it didn't, and about eight other people who could have noticed it, didn't, which is quite unlikely, but unlikely things just happen, and so we have boxes with a total of eight swastikas on them. Which is ripe for throwing the boxes away and reprinting them. Of course, this is bad for the environment and uneconomical, so my colleagues decided to cover the hackneyed boxes. Katka made up stickers, nice, camouflaged ones, and our gentlemen covered the boxes that are supposed to be sold in the EU with stickers covering the offending symbols. The boxes that are supposed to go to countries outside the EU, or rather to countries that have not completely banned the representation of the symbol, are not covered. I'm looking forward to someone in the warehouse changing them over, sending the covered boxes to Japan, and the uncovered boxes to Germany. And you, my friends, especially don't tear off the stickers. On the one hand, you'll be breaking the law, and on the other hand, you'll be depriving yourself of a future rarity. You know how it is with stamps or coins. The most valuable ones are those that someone once printed with a mistake, and then reprinted it as best they could. There's a certain probability that something similar will happen with building kits. So consider these painted Bf 110 Ds as a great and amazing investment opportunity! Of course, they won't be easy to get, as you probably remember from the introduction to this article, Bf 110 Ds are currently sold out and unavailable, and when they become available again, they’ll be gone very soon.

If this sounds like a Donald Trump crypto-savvy move, no, it really isn't. You can't make that kind of money on hackenkruezes, even if you piled eighty-eight of them onto that box.

Happy Modelling

Vladimir Sulc