U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcats Part 2 Book Review

By Michael Benolkin

Review

Detail and Scale is back with the third electronic title in their Color and Markings series: U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcats Part 2 covering the Pacific Coast Squadrons. This title follows their previous release F-14 Tomcats Part 1 which covered the Atlantic Coast Squadrons. These titles are not only one of the best references for the F-14, but are also the best book titles I've seen using the various interactive features of the iPad and Kindle. What does that mean to you?

• You can use menu hyperlinks to jump straight to a section of interest
• You can expand photos and drawings to full-screen
• You can zoom in on details in photos and drawings for a closer look
• You can search for specific text within the title
• You can bookmark items of interest
• You can highlight and annotate the book with your own notes

As before, the authors throw off the shackles of conventional publishing including page counts and the limitations of printing color photos. If you can remember the original Colors and Markings of the F-14 Tomcats, all of the colorful examples of the F-14s that were assigned to west coast squadrons were condensed into 64 pages and most of those photos were black and white. In this new title, Bert Kinzey and Rock Roszak have made good use of the electronic publication as this title is over 450 pages and crammed full of great color photos and color profiles.

You can see in the sample pages below that this is still the thorough Detail and Scale format, but there's lots more of it at your fingertips. What's more, my iPad is no heavier with 450 more pages of reference inside...

Coverage includes:

• Tomcat Stencils and Standard Markings
• U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet Squadrons
• U.S. Navy Pacific Reserve Squadrons
• Adversary Tomcats
• Pacific Coast Test and Evaluation Tomcats

There is little overlap between Part 1 (Atlantic Squadrons) and this title. Part 1 has the color schemes, Part 2 has the stencils and markings, but there is a noteworthy gap in this coverage. While the Part 1 features the three standard color schemes, it does not provide color profiles for the adversary nor Ferris schemes. This wasn't really noticeable with Volume 1 since none of the east coast squadrons carried the Ferris scheme nor operated the F-14 adversaries. In this Part 2 coverage, there is excellent photo coverage of the VF-1 and VF-2 CAG 'cats that carried the Ferris camouflage, as well as the VX-4 'cats assigned to AIMVAL/ACEVAL at Nellis AFB. With Part 2 released, the lack of Ferris and adversary color profiles in Part 1 is now unfortunate.

Whether you're building the Tamiya 1/48 F-14A straight out of the box or using one of the many conversions to render the early F-14A through the F-14D, or perhaps building one of the multitude of kits from Hasegawa, Fujimi, Academy, etc., in various scales, this title as well as Part 1 are essentials for getting the look and feel of your model just right. Hopefully we'll see the Detail and Scale version of the F-14 in digital form so we have those excellent resources for the detail modelers.

Head over to Amazon or the iTunes Store and order a copy. This technology is also truly instant gratification as the title will download to your tablet on completion of your purchase.

For more information about this and other titles, visit their website.

Definitely recommended!

My sincere thanks to Detail & Scale for this review copy.