The Thaw of '46

[Ballardian]

Following this thread with interest, lots of good stuff so far.

Maybe I turn it into a Panther II (whatever one of those would actually have looked like)

Apologies if you've already seen these, but there is the chassis & running gear of a Panther II at the Fort Knox armour museum - it had no turret when they found it & they put one from an Ausf G on it. It was proposed that it would have the schmalturm, but whether it'd have had the same 75mm or a new version of the Kwk 43 88mm (shorter breach, different recoil buffers & a shorter, fatter casing on the shell - a bit like what we did to turn the 17pdr into the 77mm for the Comet) is conjecture.
 As you can see, the main visible difference is the simpler, two layer roadwheel system - pretty much the same as the Tiger II.

[Wyrmalla]

Were I to make  Panther II I'd base it off of the existing chassis, but mixed in the Ausf F as well. The Panther II was cancelled for being too expensive and too heavy, whereas the Ausf F was an incremental improvement which came years later.

My fictional Panther II would be similar to this build:



Thicker front armour, plus spaced armour on the other surfaces (the Panther II had thicker armour, till it was found spaced armour was lighter and cheaper). The thinner turret, with bigger gun (early plans was for it to mount the same on as the Tiger II, but this was downgraded).  I'd keep the existing engine instead of the cancelled jet engine style one, with my thinking being that the Panther II was a short lived project. Only a few hundred would be made, rather the E-50s came in quickly and they were overall better/ cheaper (notably I don't see any fixes for the Panther's overtaxed front suspension, in fact that would've been worse with the added armour).

The one the Americans captured has the wrong turret attached, though popular opinion is wrong about how incorrect it is. The one people tend to think the Panther II should have mounted wasn't the production one, rather the turret would have looked similar to what the Americans wound up plunking on top of what they salvaged.

Regardless, seeing as any sort of useless of the Panther II (particularly over the Ausf F and E-50) is jumping the shark I can get away with making stuff up. My fiction is that it was an overpriced piece of crap often found in a gutted and abandoned state by the Soviets because they broke down so often.

Luckily I have a plastic kit. However it'll take some work, as the Rubicon one is one solid set of road wheels and tracks instead of individual bits. Whenever my Tiger II turns up I'll probably not touch the road wheels on that, even if the E-50s had a different system (I'd rather not accidently stick a dremel through the thing).

[Predatorpt]

If you are using a PzII as a basis for a Leopard, guess you have seen this conversion?

http://www.warlordgames.com/conversion-workshop-the-vk-1602-leopard-by-jakob-lotz/

As for the Katzchen APC - ever considered doing a resin version of it? Just build another one from scratch and then get someone to cast it? I guess there would be more people interested in it (hint, hint  )

We definitively need a company doing the E-series in 1/56  

[Wyrmalla]

Aye, I based the whole thing on that guy's mini. As I said though, I don't get how he messed up the scale so bad. He must have look at the tracks and thought they were the same thing. IIRC the rough widths of the three are: Panther 3.2 metres / Leopard 3.1 / Panzer II 2.2... My own justification for this are a subversion of why the thing wasn't produced in the first place. It was too big a target for a recce vehicle, so they scaled down the design and used the excess of Panzer IIs they had instead.

I think I took a note of the Katzchen's measurement's somewhere. I may buy another and make a tutorial, though I couldn't find that for the life of me yesterday so the second's one was made by me reverse engineering the first. They're just a Hetzer hull with plasticard though, but the glacis are a bit thin for resin because it has an interior (or you could just add a canopy to cover that).

But... I might shelve any more Hetzers instead for stuff like these:




1/72 - 1/35 is the way to go for Historicals... And we'll leave my passive aggressiveness to non-28mm scales at that. 

[Predatorpt]

Ahh, that first one is from Queeg. Love his site. Pity he's doing moderns now! 

What track sets did you use for the Katchen? Received my Rubicon Hetzer today and I'm looking at it sideways, thinking if I should try my hand at doing a Katchen, even if my skills are very low.

[Wyrmalla]

With the tracks its up to you. That kit comes with the original and updated sets. Personally I used the newer set as though the Katzchen was made from scratch, but either would do if you imagine they were being converted over from older Hetzers.

I started work on the E-50/ 75 tonight, against my better judgement. When I say start I mean spending an hour gouging out the rear hull so it'd fit a Panther's engine deck. God I hate resin.

[Predatorpt]

With the tracks its up to you. That kit comes with the original and updated sets. Personally I used the newer set as though the Katzchen was made from scratch, but either would do if you imagine they were being converted over from older Hetzers.

I started work on the E-50/ 75 tonight, against my better judgement. When I say start I mean spending an hour gouging out the rear hull so it'd fit a Panther's engine deck. God I hate resin.

Are you using Warlord's Tiger II? For me it would be a massive effort not to botch anything! I could give it a go on a plastic model but never on a resin one.

[Wyrmalla]

Aye its one of their resin kits. The tracks turned up all out of shape and there were no instructions, so things started well...

Right now its sitting with a new engine deck and some other wee details. I didn't bother changing the road wheels as they're one solid piece and the back side is completely undetailed unfortunately, so I may as well just have made new ones from scratch.

Bar some cosmetic changes, and a new turret, the E-50's going to be easily mistaken for a Tiger II. An E-75 would be even worse, as the turret's pretty similar bar a different mantle and some slight changes to the shape. I'll probably just use the regular King Tiger rules to represent it.

As for plastic Tiger IIs, I'm not aware of any manufacturers. I asked Rubicon, but they don't have one planned (its too late in the war for them right now). The Warlord kit's nice enough (£27 compared to the £20 which seems to be the standard for everything at 1/56), and were I not a git I'd just use it as a Tiger II.

If you really want to keep things simple the Blitzkrieg Maus is a three part kit IIRC...

[Wyrmalla]

Oh, and completely off topic, but this is perhaps a blog you folks might be into:

https://wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com/

The post war use of WWII equipment, including modernizations, up till the present day.

Anyway...

[Wyrmalla]

And I'm back with the WWII stuff again.

Panzer Grenadiers - with Assault Rifles.



By the mid-40s the Stg-44 had begun to replace the Kar-98k as Germany's service rifle, continuing the military's ethos of massed fire power over individual marksmanship. In a few years most front line units would be armed with them exclusively. However, across the border the Soviets were hastily developing their own assault rifle, the AK-46, a derivative of Germany's own designs (*). The AKs trickled onto the front at first, complementing the PPSh-41s, but they were considered inferior to Germany's own weapon at the time. With improvements to the manufacturing process the Soviets were able to produce the AK at a much higher rate than the Stg however, and so the arms race between to the two blocks escalated.

* don't hate me, but whatever old Kalashnikov says the AK shares a lot in common with the Stg. Sheer coincidence that the thing turned from an automatic SKS into what it is today when those captured German weapons designers showed up.

Ignore the fluff, I just had a load of spare AKs sitting about which look better than the Warlord Stgs I picked up. That and having AKs in WWII is cool.

These guys are another mix of Warlord/ Wargames Factory plastics along with Dust Tactics torsos and a load of greenstuff. There's about 4 different sets of body armour this time around (fitting Germany's late war style of using anything and everything...). The body armour I'm justifying now as Germany's response to the AKs, though obviously the suits would need to be pretty thick to stop a round (maybe they were just for morale), but I guess that's why these guys ride in the back of APCs all day.

Flammenwerfer 35



Nae background. I just had a spare flamethrower sitting about from a Dust Tactics model...

The picture's natty as they guy's pretty hunched over. In the setting a newer model of flamethrower would be more fitting (notably later versions were one man operated as well), but tell that to Dust for making the thing in the first place then for their own Weird War game.

Pantherturm Emplacement



All along and within the Reich's borders fortifications were built, before against foreign aggressors, or to serve as defence towards any native uprisings. Pantherturm and similar pillboxes using turrets from the other Panther mks were common, increasingly so with their obsolescence in the wake of development of the E-series. In practice they were quickly disposed of by attacking forces, barring in ambush or areas where the terrain was to their advantage.

That spare Panther turret from the APC needed to be used somewhere... I'll probably just use this for scenery, though I suppose it would be a way of including some heavy firepower in smaller games.

Soviet M8 Greyhound Wreck



America didn't officially take part in the war at all. As the 40s reached their close Germany began to turn its eye from the stalemate on the Eastern Front to other pastures. Besides the failed invasion of Israel and supplying the Japanese in Asia, South America appeared as a ripe target for extending the Reich's influence. America continued its neutrality, its leading officials being staunchly anti-Communist, but regardless American made equipment was retrieved from the conflict and sent back for testing...

Guess who had a spare Greyhound and nothing to do with it? Take the above spiel as my haphazard justification for the thing appearing in the setting.

Its Tamiya 1/48th scale kit, which is too big, but again the thing was just sitting there. It actually used to look like this, but I it never got any use.



Oh, and the concept of German soldiers fighting the Americans alongside local forces in proxy battles in South America seems neat to me. Maybe push the timeline forward so the US has Vietnam era weapons as well?

On the chopping block right now following that lot's: another squad of SMG Panzer Grenadiers + plus a squad with Infrared ARs, another Katzchen, possibly a Panther II (if my order ever shows up) and, depending on whether they ever see any actual game use, some Konflikt '47 Heavy troopers (don't hate me for these, but I felt an urge to buy them...). The E-50/75's on hold as I work on smaller scale stuff which'll have a higher chance of being used in games, but it'll see progress eventually (I kind of doubt a model using Tiger II rules will see much use considering a Sherman's overkill for most scenarios).

Anyhow, go on and slag my paint jobs.

[Predatorpt]

Damn, you are really working hard on this project. Nice work!

As for the Panther II, if you are waiting for the Heer46 parts, he usually takes a bit to send the things (I guess he casts them on a order basis?).

[Wyrmalla]

Aye, the Panther's turret's from Heer 46. 4 days and counting since I placed the order.

[jeffb]

Have you read Afrika Reich and the Madagaskar Plan by Guy Saville. A trilogy of books about an alt WWII in Africa in the 50's. Highly recommend.

Jeff

[Predatorpt]

Aye, the Panther's turret's from Heer 46. 4 days and counting since I placed the order.

Mine took 8 days to be sent, but I also bought a Kugelblitz turret and another IR set.

[Wyrmalla]

@ jeffb

My reading on the subject's fairly limited. Those books do seem to have a similar point of divergence to the one I'm nicking ideas from though. It was only in the late 40s that the Nazis decided world conquest wasn't an immediate option and disbanded their colonial branch in Africa (I assume that book's premise involves them taking over sympathetic British/ French colonies ...not that that'd work out too well for the locals).

@ Predatorpt

Aye, I bought the AA turret as well. I've some spare Hetzer parts left over so I'll create super structure to mount the thing on (IIRC that turret was intended to be mounted on the Hetzer chassis at one point, but as with a lot of things that never happened).