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Author Topic: A War in The East  (Read 74042 times)

Offline Muzfish4

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Re: A War in The East
« Reply #360 on: December 06, 2018, 02:59:24 AM »
In some places in Russia there are multiple tanks as war memorials. There is a whole bunch of tanks in a park in Moscow (whose name escapes me).

Could that be Victory Park? I wandered around there years ago and was overwhelmed by the sheer size and scope of the place. Plenty of tanks (including a 38t used a a target for AT guns in a kids play area) tucked about the place as I recall.

Online carlos marighela

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Re: A War in The East
« Reply #361 on: December 06, 2018, 06:53:54 AM »
Tsk, hopefully Radio Dish Dash or SASM (probably the latter) come out with their Kord/ NSV machine guns soon so these bloody Eastern European vehicles can have another machine gun instead of that vintage one...

Funny you should mention that. There’s an NSV and crew, an AGS-17 and crew, mortar and crew and some other bits and bobs all from the Soviet Afghan war era on the horizon. Hopefully, I’ll have a selection in my hand by the end of next week. I’ve already seen the masters and they are truly wonderful items.
« Last Edit: December 06, 2018, 06:55:41 AM by carlos marighela »
Em dezembro de '81
Botou os ingleses na roda
3 a 0 no Liverpool
Ficou marcado na história
E no Rio não tem outro igual
Só o Flamengo é campeão mundial
E agora seu povo
Pede o mundo de novo

Offline Wyrmalla

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Re: A War in The East
« Reply #362 on: December 06, 2018, 10:23:49 AM »
Ah, that's good to read. Oddly we go years without this sort of variety in Russian armaments, then a load all come at once. We'll have to see how each company fares with detail and pricing I suppose.

Offline Ultravanillasmurf

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Re: A War in The East
« Reply #363 on: December 06, 2018, 10:55:57 PM »
Could that be Victory Park? I wandered around there years ago and was overwhelmed by the sheer size and scope of the place. Plenty of tanks (including a 38t used a a target for AT guns in a kids play area) tucked about the place as I recall.
Could be, it was twenty odd years ago. I am trying to find the photographs.

Offline Wyrmalla

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Re: A War in The East
« Reply #364 on: December 11, 2018, 03:24:55 PM »
I'm currently scoping ideas for future projects. More MT-LBs are in order. I'd just bought two from Empress to use them as regular artillery tractors /APCs, however I think that I may be a bit more ambitious.



(To buy Spectre's rocket pods, for like £5 each, or fork out for another Revell Hind and use the four which come on that for £20-ish. The Spectre pods will have decent detail, but the Revell ones are serviceable, and I also get a Hind. ...WTF am I going to do with yet another crashed Hind though?)

I've also seen MT-LB artillery pieces (removed from their carriages) on their roof. However, last night's Googling for 28mm modern (or even just post-WWII artillery) came up short. With the only pieces I found being made by SASM, which I already have on order, and are too large for my purposes.

Its unfortunate that Cold War wargaming went the way of smaller scales, and in 28mm its held to a Skirmish level, so more strategic weapons like artillery are hard to come by. That gun which is coming from SASM is going to be more of an objective than taking part in an actual battle, but still, I want an MT-LB rocking a large bore gun on its roof (I'll find a picture of one when I get home :P).


Online carlos marighela

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Re: A War in The East
« Reply #365 on: December 11, 2018, 10:09:25 PM »
High time we petitioned the toy makers to come up with a 28mm compatible Vasilek auto-mortar. These seem to have been field mounted on MTL-Bs on a regular basis.

Offline Arlequín

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Re: A War in The East
« Reply #366 on: December 11, 2018, 10:29:23 PM »
If you're looking for oddball conversions the Cuban Army might offer some options, not limited to;

A T55 turret on a BTR-60, a D-30 on a cut-down T34-85, or the quite conservative BTR with a BMP-1 turret, their imagination for chop-shop AFVs seemingly has few boundaries.

The premise was seemingly that the only foil to U.S. airpower was to make everything immobile mobile and to up-arm a proportion of their APCs as FSVs; the Ratel series they faced in Angola possibly providing the inspiration.

Offline Wyrmalla

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Re: A War in The East
« Reply #367 on: December 11, 2018, 11:51:49 PM »
I'm just done posting up some shower thoughts on potential modelling opportunities over on my Wordpress blog, when I come on over to this thread and Carlos posts a vehicles which I had thought was unique to only one conflict. Tsk, I was so proud thinking I'd discovered a new mod of the MT-LB. It turns out there are just even more variants than I'd managed to find in years of looking at the things. :D



Yeah, I did come across some oddities earlier today. A BMP-2 with a BMP-3 turret out of Russia. An Indian wheeled BMP-2 (and nowhere nearly as elegant as the box with wheels image you're picturing). Ukraine has a wheeled T-64 from what I can remember (though we don't speak out the crazy things that country's plants have done to T-64s in the name of export orders? "The Israeli Merkava can be used as an APC if you take out its spare ammunition? Bah, why don't we just bolt a box to the back of a tank and then it can carry infantry too? *insane eyes*).

Personally I'm quite into the BMP-64. Similar to Israeli tank based APCs, its a project which never made it off of the ground, turning (of course) a T-64 into an APC. It doesn't look half bad.




And I've actually been eyeing up the BMP 1/2. With its raised roof, instead of a complicated armour package, and BTR-80 turret, it would be an appealing simple conversion of a BMP-1.



Not to digress too much, the Russian BTR-87 could be a project along the lines of what I did with the BTR-4 (using the same dimensions as the BTR-80, just with a new hull and BTR-82A turret).



Finally, there's the BTR-90. A failed project to replace the BTR series in Russian service. Mounting either a BMP-2 or BMP-3 turret, it features better ergonomics and armour (being deceptively larger than the BTR-80). The project stalled due to costs, and those that were built went onto be used by the FSB. More recent projects have tried to turn it into a drone APC. Though the Russia 2020 project has its own IFVs which have supplanted it (one of which Radio Dish Dash are potentially making in 1/50th scale after their recent Kickstarter).




Anyhow, here's a link to that recent post of mine if anyone's wanting to read a bit of waffle.

https://thesticks.net/2018/12/11/project-ideas-the-mt-lb/

Offline Ultravanillasmurf

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Re: A War in The East
« Reply #368 on: December 12, 2018, 08:25:19 AM »
Interesting read. In 6mm I never looked at the MTLB beyond the requirements for command of self propelled artillery. Evidently a lack of imagination on my part.

Some of the field modifications might inspire me to revisit the vehicle.

Offline Wyrmalla

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Re: A War in The East
« Reply #369 on: December 12, 2018, 01:08:12 PM »
If there was a cheap option for T-55 and T-64 tanks in 1/48-50th scale, there'd be so many opportunities for making all those weird variants out there. Currently however I don't intend to spend upwards of £50 on the Tank Mania T-55 kit, and Blitzkrieg Miniatures (despite a fair number of people saying they wanted one) don't see making their T-54 in 1/50th as a viable business decision.

Hopefully Tiny Terrain's potential future vehicle range will have some options. Its pretty poor however that some of the world's (if not the world's) most produced and exported tanks aren't available in this scale. If T-55s were as cheap as T-34 kits you'd be seeing something similar to what I did with my WWII collection here.

We'll see how these newer tank kits turn out. Hopefully Spectre do a T-55, and given their current range I have hopes for that (its pretty strange that nobody's doing an affordable T-55...). Empress' Soviet lineup unfortunately don't have return rollers, so aren't great for conversions - besides having resin hulls (which I could put up with, but I'd like tracks similar to how Warlord do their's at least).

If there was an option for these vehicles I'd totally go ahead and make a tank based APC to stick some special forces in. Even if in reality those haven't really taken off the ground, in this fiction we could always say that in desperate times the prototypes were donated (better than riding about in an armoured van).



Offline Ultravanillasmurf

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Re: A War in The East
« Reply #370 on: December 12, 2018, 01:31:21 PM »
A T-55 would be great (a T-54/Type 59 would useful).

I was disappointed with the price of the Blitzkrieg Centurion.

Offline Wyrmalla

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Re: A War in The East
« Reply #371 on: December 12, 2018, 02:28:23 PM »
Christ, £45 is a leap. I imagine that they priced that for its niche customer base, as the comparatively sized Churchill is two thirds of the price. Given the response that I had when asking about a 1/48th T-54 from them, they must think that nobody will buy it to justify the cost.

I'd actually gone onto a few Facebook groups asking if folks would order a 1/48th T-54 and received a good response. When communicating this to Blitzkrieg they still couldn't see the market potential. However, the Centurion and T-54 are different beasts. Whilst the Centurion has had a long service, it may not have the same appeal as the Soviet tank. Which given that the T-55's the most produced tank in history, its perhaps a misconception that there's no market for it in 1/50th.

Hopefully Spectre or Tiny Terrain Models will produce a T-54/55. It seems ideal for Spectre's current line, and they could laugh all the way to the bank with how many they'd probably sell. Even though the vehicle's seen diminished use in Eastern Europe into the 21st century, I'd still buy a couple to turn into a support vehicles (of which there are many).



Offline Dr. Zombie

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Re: A War in The East
« Reply #372 on: December 12, 2018, 03:39:37 PM »
I would love to have some T-55’s. Preferably I would like to have a cheapish plastic kit. To make it easier to do all the variations of it. And also to produce some wrecks for terrain. The cost of the resin ones available does not really justify wrecking them. But I feel like every post WWII battlefield should have a few wrecked T-55’s.

Offline Wyrmalla

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Re: A War in The East
« Reply #373 on: December 12, 2018, 05:20:49 PM »
Warlord Games may wind up doing one. Problematically it'll be 1/56th scale and folks will say "but its close enough". :(

Its a pity that WWII is so over presented when it comes to kits. There's every other German tank available, yet we don't have a T-54 in 1/48th. You'd think the dedicated modelling guys would be asking for one, but 1/48th seems like the stepchild of scales. Too small for the serious modelers, too large for the casual ones.

However, 28mm modern miniatures are only now really taking off, so hopefully things will change. Ideally with companies indicating that they want to expand their vehicle ranges this will be an obvious option (it just happens that certain companies haven't seen this opportunity when it comes to their own ranges so far).


Offline Ultravanillasmurf

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Re: A War in The East
« Reply #374 on: December 12, 2018, 06:43:06 PM »
I suppose that Blitzkrieg's problem is that they have done the Centurion (and Chieftain) in 1/50 scale and they are not popular. Partly because the prototypes are not as popular, and secondly, they have priced themselves out of the market.

From that they are not interested in looking at the market again.

A T-55/54 plastic kit would be great, it would make conversions a lot easier.

 

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