Introduction

In this review I take a look at No 6 in the In Detail Fast Track from Tankograd Publishing covering the Type 10TK Hitomaru Shiki Sensha. This is a new series of books aimed directly at the modeller who is seeking photographic reference for their models. This series of books has been approached by Tankograd Publishing in a way that allows them to provide photographic reference material as quickly as possible.

Review

The images in this new release from Tankograd Publishing have been supplied by Koji Miyaki and the text by Koji Miyaki and Gordon Arthur. The images and text are presented over 40 pages. The text in this title is entirely written in English and covers a couple of pages. The text is intended to provide a background to the vehicle rather than tackle any aspect in depth. The sections covered in the text are:

• Introduction
• History
• Development
• Armament
• Self-Protection
• Fire Control and C4I
• Mobility
• Production and Deployment
• Variants

The images in this release are all colour photographs of which there are 70. Each photograph or series of photographs is accompanied by explanatory text, this provides enough information to cover what exactly you are looking at and in some cases has been used to point out specific details. This publication is a slight diversion to previous titles in the In Detail Fast Track books as it does not concentrate as such on specific areas of the Type 10, but instead looks at the various different offerings that are in use. The tanks covered are:

• First Prototype
• Second Prototype
• Third Prototype
• Fourth Prototype
• Series Production Vehicle
• Tank School Regiment
• 1st Armoured Training Unit
• Ordnance School
• 1st Tank Battalion
• Technology
• Type 11 Crawler Vehicle Recovery

To my knowledge the only Type 10 model on the market of note at this time is the Tamiya offering, a review of which can be seen here written by Matt Flegal. This publication should allow you to check the model against a good reference source and if wished fine tune your model into a specific vehicle, with in some cases fairly unique features. If you really want to test yourself there is a single image of the Type 11 Crawler which shares the lower hull and chassis of the gun tank, and while other images will need to be searched out, it may plant a seed.

Conclusion

I am a fan of this series of books that Tankograd Publishing is releasing at a fair rate, but I prefer the approach used in the earlier titles, where the specific vehicle is broken down and covered in areas. I should say that this is not a book I consider to be poor, in fact it shares with the reader some excellent reference material; however I found myself wanting more in the way of specific area detail, I suspect this may be due to limited access rather than a failing on the part of, or change of direction by Tankograd Publishing. If you have a Mk 10 kicking about and are a little lost as to what you want to build with it, then this book could be just what you are after due to the various vehicles covered.