JeepsGunsTanks

Looking very good, looks like it has been in service for months.

Very nice JUG! I love Warbirds with Naked Ladies on them. Sometimes, the men who fought and won WWII get portrayed as flying saints, and while I object to them being portrayed in movies like Fury, they did like the ladies and the drink. Besides, a Jug should have some Jugs on it!

I feel the same way about the high-end sims. Since I build models at my computer desk, there is no room for the HOTAS setup, or a third monitor, or the fiberglass Cockpit setup with Canopy, and if you can't have that stuff, why bother?

Man, this is cool for sure. I wonder if anyone will do a conversion to a M163? Hopefully, the next one will be an M48A3 to go with it.

Did you do any Warbirds or AcesHigh? Those were the only "serious" online flight sims I ever did. Warthunder is not serious, but it is pretty.

1. The Corsair, preferably an early one with no floors. Because it did better than expected, and was the star of the Solomons Campaign, and its one of my favorites. 2. The P-47, a M or N. It was a beast of a superplane and probably the Air Force fighter of the war. 3. The Zero, preferably an early war version before it got silly armor and self-sealing tanks. Because it was the best thing the Axis had, and it was a pretty neat little airplane, you put it on if you were big. Runners up the Oscar, because it was supposed to be really fun to fly, even more than the Zero. And the P-38, is the OG turbo bird, and the second best Air Force fighter of the war I didn't even think about modern stuff like jets. If it was jets, it would be the three great ones, the F-14, the F-15 and F-16. Well, maybe throw a Navy Phantom in the works.

That's a nice looking P-47, and properly woarn and dirty!

That's what I call a fun story. Did you put those funny big wheels on your PA-12?

Under Paul's system, I'd fall into a 2 with aspirations to a 3. While I don't consider myself an Artist, I can see there is artistry, even in model tanks, and the planes the people build here are art. I guess I lean more toward artists than realists and do not feel constrained to make my models look like a particular tank or airplane in most cases. I've used Generic Serials on every Sherman so far. What's interesting is that you can almost break down the car world in the same way. 1. Guys who wash and maintain their car, change the oil, and basic stuff. 2. Guys who do brake jobs and can fix the easy stuff, sensors, etc. 3. Guys the clutch is no problem; can deal with most mechanical stuff, cam swaps, and carb swaps. Engine swaps, rebuilding engines etc. 4. Custom fuel injection system, custom suspension, make own frames, rebuild rear ends and transmissions. Cages, custom turbo or supercharger setups You even have the subcategories. Stock car guys: They work to achieve factory boring status, right down to the chalk marks and factory labels the dealerships normally remove! Hotrodders: They want to go fast, fast in a straight line, fast around corners, fast up mountains, fast through deserts, just fast!

I have that book, but I just built mine, as far as it got, with the stuff I thought was coolest!

Ernest The movie and the book series it's based on are among my favorites. I would LOVE to see Russell Crowe play the part again; he did a great job portraying Lucky Jack. It's still possible. By book 20, Aubrey is pretty old! It's my favorite movie to watch with people who do not know much about history. Most parents today won't let kids the age of the young mids out of their sight, let alone sail away for months or years on a wooden ship. It can be mind-blowing! The Johah Mid is another one of those shocking moments. It was almost an entirely different world than we live in.

I find it really interesting, and so few people know that the Mids were kids! And they were not the only kids on boards. The movie Master and Commander really did a good job showing this. It's a real shame it did so poorly.

The problem with the Tiger is that it underwent so many minor changes throughout its life; finding two exactly alike was probably hard when they were actually in "Production"! Funny, such a great machine required so many little fixes! I bet Henschel charged each change. I got one of those 1/35 Dragon smart kits for a late Tiger years ago. Every step had about four different things you had to choose a version of. It got really annoying after a while. I ended up building it as a stripped-out Museum tank, so I didn't have to deal with the nightmarish PE tool clamps. It was the last German Armor I ever tried to build.

You can almost see tiny little men rigging this ship; man, it looks good!

I've downloaded it and tried it. The F-14 are super tempting. The idea you need to study to use the Sim is daunting, and I barely have time for models and my other stuff, so spending time to study how to fly is a low priority. I get my Airplane fix from War Thunder, it arguably looks better, and you can just jump in have some fun and do something else.

This is going to be so amazing when done! So far its magical.

You must not be up to date on the Tiger or Sherman if you think the Tiger had a quality advantage. It had a slight front armor advantage and a gun advantage, and that was it. It was so grossly unreliable that the US Army would have rejected it. The Tiger was also very rare in the sectors the US Army fought in. If I recall correctly, they faced less than ten in total (7). I'd have to go review Steve Zaloga's Armored Thunderbolt(the new bible) to be sure. Let's put the gun thing to bed now. There are tables in Sherman by Hunnicutt (the old bible) that show the M1A2 gun in the E8 Shermans could punch the front hull of a Tiger from 500 yards. In the movie they were at point blank range, at that range the gun probably had the power to do the turret face. They also could have shot through the side from any practical combat range with the M1A2 gun. That does not even take into account the fight scenario, which gave Sherman a huge advantage the movie did not portray correctly. Let's talk about turret drive systems for a second because it will also let me show you how Sherman was a technological marvel and the Tiger was a technological cludge and dead end. The Tiger tank uses a ridiculous Rube Goldberg affair of driveshafts and gears to power the turret's rotation through the engine. If you wanted full traverse speed on a Tiger, you had to have the engine at redline, and the tank could not be moving. If the tank was driving, the turret was going to be slower. It was also not very accurate, meaning the turret had to be manually put on target with hand cranks. They used the hand cranks most of the time because revving an unreliable motor for turret speed is not a good trade-off since the engine has, at best, 1500 kilometers in it. On the other hand, the Sherman—at least every non-105 Sherman ever built—was built this way. They had a stabilized, hydraulically or electrically driven turret drive system that was more than twice as fast as the Tigers and completely independent of Sherman's automotive systems. It was also fine enough in control, the gunner used it fine aim the gun. The hydraulic system was powered by an electric motor using the tanks' batteries. Even the M3 Lee had this system. This was Buck Roger's space stuff to the Germans. They could not reproduce it. You might be saying to yourself you need the automotive systems to charge the batteries, and that is incorrect because every Sherman and Lee came with its own little Joe generator to keep those batteries charged. This was considered a wild luxury by German tankers who were supplied by horse-drawn carts. We could also compare the massive all-aluminum Ford GAA, which was a powerhouse of internal combustion engines, to a true dual overhead cam V8 in 1942. Compared to the Maybach disaster in the Tiger, which had to be downrated to even make it to 1500 kilometers, it was both better in quality and technology, just like the Sherman tank. The Sherman tank was expected to go more than 1500 miles before it needed any major work, and most did.

The M103 would be massive, and I'd buy it at double the Sherman price. It's such a neet tank. As is the T29 with the big battleship-looking range finders.

Big Lori Petty fan? You might be the only person to ever like that movie.

I think I found an idea. Being a Battletech, Robotech, and Macross fan, I built all the rebranded Robotech kits as a kid. They are now being re-issued, and there are a bunch I want. Basically, all the ones they used in Battletech, plus a bunch of Macross/Robotech stuff, are now around, and I saw this. https://www.hlj.com/1-100-scale-macross-armored-factory-ban977905 . I built this as a kid, when it was rebranded by Monogram as a Robotech model. It's one of the few released that looked anything like the show. You could use this to make a perfect Macross/Robotech Nook! Put in some LED lighting, could be cool. I'd totally move some books for it!

I've been looking at those. I guess the Macross stuff had its 40th anniversary, so there is tons of stuff out there. It looks like the plastic model rights have changed hands 3 to 5 times? The Hasegawa kits seem pretty reasonable too. They seem to have many of the mechs Battletech used in the first few editions before they lost the rights to most of them. They had everything from Macross but the basic bad-guy stuff. I remember being really disappointed when the company that made Battletech lost those rights, and all my favorite mechs became hard to find. I still have a bunch. No more Mauraders or Warhammers!

MAN, that is cool. I searched on Ebay, 1100-1200 bucks now! To rich for my blood, but I would have shelled out retail for it, if I had known at the time!

Fury was a nice looking film. The tanks and doughs looked right. I do not like how they portrayed the US Soldiers as dirtbags. I've read a lot about WWII tankers, and I've never heard of them acting like the Fury crew. The fighting in the city, and when they take on the AT guns, are ok. The fight with the Tiger was super silly, the M1A2 76mm gun on Fury could punch right through the front of the Tiger, no problem at those ranges. If they wanted to make it about Tiger fear, they should have found a running 75mm Sherman and based it in Italy or North Africa. Clearly, someone also gave that trash book Deathtraps to the director and writing team, and that book is a travesty. Bogart's 1943 Sahara is a better movie in every way, as is "the tanks are coming". I think the Tanks are coming is on youtube, the whole movie.

I went and checked it out, and also did a search for Macross, and now I want to order all kinds of stuff... I wish there were some actual pictures of the M4A1 sprues.

Interesting, I'll have to check out the site, never heard of it before.