Introduction

Unitec Medienvertrieb is a new publisher to me, who have sent some titles for review. The books written under the Fahrzeug Profile covers aspects primarily of the German Bundeswehr, but a look through previous titles in the series indicates that American Military units also get covered by this publisher. The books are soft backed and consist of 48 pages in the examples I have here.

Review

These titles from Unitec Medienvertrieb look at the Engineers and the Artillery of the Modern German Army. The books are printed in a duel language format and cover German and English. The text is printed in German on the left side of the page and English on the right side.

Issue 68 looks at the German Engineers, covering the many vehicles in use by them. This book and for that matter these books generally are not for those who want in depth information on the units as the text is quite short. While on the subject of the text, I found the English text a little odd as the translations appear to be literal and so some of them need reading more than once to clearly understand what is being relayed. The issue seems to be most prevalent with the captions that accompany the included images.

The title covers both armoured and un-armoured vehicles in use by the Engineers, the vehicles being shown in both use and static. The photographs in the book are very good, but there are a number that I would have preferred to be larger. With that said they have covered a huge number of vehicles in this title and so the limited picture size in some cases is down to the number of pages. The captions that accompany each image are printed in German and English and do a good job of explaining what you are looking at, as mentioned earlier some words are a little odd or out of sequence.

Issue 69 from Unitec Medienvertrieb covers the Modern German Artillery and this for the most part means the Panzerhaubitze 2000 and the MLRS or MARS as it is known to the Germans. The book also covers the support vehicles that help units to locate and engage targets. From the off I should be clear and say that the Panzerhaubitze 2000 is one of personal favourites when it comes to modern armoured fighting vehicles and is possibly why I was so impressed with this edition of Fahrzeug Profile. The book itself shares all of the same qualities as the previous title, but as there are far fewer vehicles to be covered I feel it does a better job of providing the information to the reader.

Bothe the Panzerhaubitze 2000 and MARS are pictured at work, rest and play, with some very good photo sequences covering the roles they perform. Anyone who has purchased one of the Meng Models of the Panzerhaubitze 2000 will find this book of use, especially so if they intend to use the model in a diorama or vignette. All of the pictures in the book have very good captions in both German and English, but again suffer from what I believe is direct translation.

The support vehicles are not left out in this title and get a little of the attention they deserve. Everything from straight support vehicles to the mobile ground radar are covered and while the detail is not as thorough as the weapons systems, it is still fair. This title even covers the drones used on the battlefield, and I have to say these are much larger than I thought they would be.

Conclusion

These books do provide a fair reference, but in the case of the title covering the Engineers I feel it is trying to do too much with the available space. It is still a worthwhile title in terms of visual reference, but it may not contain all that you want. The book covering the Artillery is far superior as a reference title due to the reduced number of vehicles it needs to cover. This has allowed the title to provide far more images of the covered vehicles and that increased quantity increases its value to the modeller. I highly recommend the Artillery title to anyone and the Engineer title to those with a specific interest.