Self-propelled German Things

[Fitz]

I've been rummaging in amongst a bunch of stuff that I 3d printed ages ago and never got around to painting, and one of them is this 1:100 (15mm) WWII German Nashorn SPAT, also called Hornisse. It was a very potent anti-tank weapon, with the long L71 88mm, but it had a real glass jaw, with very light armour. It was intended for long-range sniping rather than mixing it up with other armoured vehicles.

I've painted this one in a scheme suitable for Italy.

This one is a 1:100 (15mm) model of the German 150mm SPG Hummel (Bumblebee), a 15cm gun-howitzer mounted on a PzIV chassis.
I've painted it for North Africa, but it would also do for Italy.
(Note: The rivet-counters have informed me that it never actually saw service in Tunisia, so I guess Italy it will have to be.)

The chassis and superstructure were printed on my Mars Pro in resin, while the running gear components were printed on my Ender 3 FDM machine.

Nashorn #02
This is another model I printed quite a while ago on my Ender 3. Compared with similar prints from my Mars Pro, the FDM layer lines stand out like dogs' balls.
I've painted this one in a three-colour scheme suitable for  Kursk or Normandy or Bagration or later.

I like to include some crew figures in my little 15mm model tanks, both to give a sense of scale, and also so that it doesn't look like a bunch of autonomous robot machines tootling about on the wargames table.

I think the Nashorn actually had a crew of about six, but any more than these two in the fighting compartment would be unfeasibly crowded, so these guys are symbolic of the crew rather than actually representative of it as a whole.

I kitbashed these figures from a bunch of others. The main bodies came from 3dBreed, but things like hats and helmets and shells and so forth I made myself and added to the cut-up original figures. They were printed on my Mars Pro resin printer.

[fred]

Nice work - I particularly like the camo on the first Hornisse.

The resin prints are so much cleaner than the FDM ones.

Crew figures do make the open topped vehicles, I don't know if our model figures are so much chunkier than real proportions so getting the right numbers in is in-practical - but 6 crew (even accounting for a driver and possibly radio operator in the hull) seems a lot to cram in. Did they fight with the rear doors open to give more space, for the crew and for recoil of the gun?

[HerbertTarkel]

Nice work, clean prints; the crews make the models for sure.

[Tom Dulski]

 Great jobs on the painting.

[Rick]

Nice work - I particularly like the camo on the first Hornisse.

The resin prints are so much cleaner than the FDM ones.

Crew figures do make the open topped vehicles, I don't know if our model figures are so much chunkier than real proportions so getting the right numbers in is in-practical - but 6 crew (even accounting for a driver and possibly radio operator in the hull) seems a lot to cram in. Did they fight with the rear doors open to give more space, for the crew and for recoil of the gun?

The side walls of the resin prints are massively thicker (in proportion) than they should be so the area inside the vehicle is greatly reduced plus the figures are in proportion to the overall size of the vehicle not to the reduced size of the open compartment. Put some figures in as a token representation of a full crew and leave it at that? That might be the best approach as being a workable compromise between the outside/inside dimensions and figure size.

[Fitz]

The other day I found another German Self-propelled Thing in my digital pile of Things I Never Finished — a 15mm (1:100) Marder 1 Lorraine. So I pulled finger and finished it.

I did a test-print last evening, which was mostly okay, though there are a couple of things that I think might need attention.

The main issue is the gun shield:  printing at the angle I did meant that it was lying pretty flat to the platen, and I got some delamination and distortion at the corners. I think it might be best to detach it and print it as a separate component.

Working on the digital model zoomed in all the time, it's very easy to lose sight of how tiny these vehicles were. The physical model sitting next to my Hummel though really shows it.