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Not been doing much in the way of model building over the UK summer - busy with holidays, trips out and restoring one of my old motorcycles. I think I also needed to take a break from it all and clear my head! As some will know - I've visited Peenemünde a couple of times now, once with my flying club, and latterly on a family road trip in 2016. It's an interesting place to visit - excellent museum and a lot of atmosphere - and it's fired (sorry!) an interest in some of the amazing wartime projects that were resident there. End of last year I acquired the Dragon 1:35 kit of the V-2 and was looking at purchasing a resin kit of the Meillerwagen transport trailer/errector. Was just about to pay a lot of money for one on a French auction site when I saw Takom had announced a new kit of the V-2, Meillerwagen and towing Hanomag. Would save on costs - vastly reduce work - and be a lot more accurate... SOLD to the modelholic that had seen yet another squirrel and just had to have it That set off a need to research the subject over the summer and I found several things that would be great sources of research material/detail info - the excellent V-2 Website, a full set of operational/test manuals (in .pdf/English) and a stunning film made by the British Army during their test launches after the war. I'll post more on this as the build progresses. This then set off another train of thought - like these things do... How about a diorama - a test V-2 being set up on it's launch platform, with Wernher von Braun briefing a small number of senior officers regarding progress. So that train of thought set of another stream of acquisition: From the above I'm thinking the chap in long coat (I have a photo of Von Braun in almost identical attire) and officer on far right. Just the officer on the right on the above - my son is going to grab the two tankers for one of his projects. Far left and far right figures from the above set. And some very nice Tamiya decals to help with uniform insignia. Just a couple of suitable crew figures for the Meillerwagen/Launch Stand to find now. This will be a slow build going on in the background - but stay tuned for further updates! Secret Project - so just between us eh? Oh - and *very* impressed with Imageshack so far for hosting these images... Have fun! Iain

Hello, Ladies and Gents! Do you speak French? Not so much? Not a biggie Here comes Takoms beautiful model of the French St. Chamond heavy tank, late or M2 version, of WWI fame. Got the kit for cheap from a sale. Less than 30 Euros. Nice haul! While working on Azurs Caudron I must have been infected by a french virus... Why not. Better than Spanish flu - another renown byproduct of WWI origin The box: A nice glossy printed cardbox with a number of tan and black colored sprues inside, together with an instruction booklet and a full color painting instruction. 4 different tanks to choose from, painted in bright colors like Richthofens Flying Circus. Grey, blue, bright green, sand, brown, black, with or without black borders, each an early Picasso, indeed. So I bought it together with a set of French WWI colors. The larger set, with all colors inside. Just to have them all at hand when I start painting. The tanker shown on the box is inside too. Whats not in the box? No French toast, no chocolat, no PE, no polycaps, no metal parts, no nasty surprises. Vive la France! - dutik

Greetings, comrades and defenders of the Motherland! Then and when I feel the need to bolster the stomping power of the Large Scale Groundpower, especially if the winged thingy kits tend to perform less enjoyable... As a former communist and defender of the Fatherland I have a weak spot for russian tank designs. So I started to build a model of the KV-5 tank a decade ago when I got a russian magazin with line drawings and background infos. Yepp, that is a long-term project, indeed I made a hull and a turred, accumulated runnning gear parts of Eastern Express KV-1 kits (you need a lot, trust me) and two sets of resin tracks... The project stalled when I faced the issue of making rounded parts like the gun fairing and the MG subturrets Atelier Infinite some time later offered a full resin kit, but you pay for the weight of resin, and this is a large tank. A very large, indeed, so this one was out of the range of my wallet. Last year Takom came to the rescue with an injected styrene model So I grabbed a kit and pulled my own parts out to compare them. Well, they used the same drawings - size was the same of both my effort and Takoms tank. But Takom slipped at some details. The turret front plate is somewhat thin, and the rear weld lines are in the wrong place compared to common construction of the KV tanks. Would the Soviets change something that worked well? I guess not. So I am building "my" KV-5 from Takoms hull and my own turret. Oh, you don't know what a KV-5 looks like? WoT players know him - it is the "R2D2 tank" For all the other comrades: Think about a large-turret KV-2 on steroids. Longer hull (8 wheels per side), larger turret and longer gun (107 mm, a tank killer), and much more armor. 180mm on the turret front. Sounds like a land battleship? Indeed but not a slow one - it was to be powered by two turbocharged diesel engines from the T-34. Of course the Soviets didn't start from scratch. They made some special KV prototypes before. The KV-150 with 150mm armor, the KV-3 and KV-220 with even more armor and supercharged diesel engines too. These 3 tanks went into combat in Great Patriotic War to defend the city of Leningrad. They prooved to be nimble, thaks to the supercharger, and impenetrable to anything the Wehrmacht was able to put on the battlefield, even the otherwise deadly 88 guns. The KV-5 went as close to real live as a "paper tank" could - they made the full blueprints for factory production at the Kirov plant in Leningrad. They were running before a design competition (unheared in Soviet Union) for a new heavy tank named KV-4. This made it never to the drawing board, but they took a careful look at the proposals and selected useful features and design ideas.But the project was cancelled due to the siege of the city and the need to crank out more KV-1 tanks to defend the city and the Motherland. If they had made the KV-5 it had hit the battlefield of Leningrad in 1942. Do you know what other heavy tank had it first combad deployment right at this year and place...? The German Tiger tank! Just imagine a clash of these two behemots on the battlefield Regards - dutik