Brian, that build is stunning! I do have to chuckle at the irony of Russians using Nazi-pattern equipment given current events…
And Jakko your beast is really coming on!
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Many thanks Tom; 'glad you like it.
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Congratulations for finishing such an interesting and well done model of a very unusual subject in tank evolutionary history. The display base with the soldiers is also quite nice. Did you make the brass name plate by yourself through some home based means?
This vehicle is new to me and I enjoyed looking for more information on the subject. As an aside, it strongly reminds me of the grav tanks from Centurian: Blood & Steel, a board war game from the 1980s. Most of the vehicles in that game featured small turrets with very large guns, fed via auto loaders.
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Thanks Doug - I’m glad you enjoyed it all.
For my bases I use a 12mm MDF cut to the European paper size of A4 dimensions (that way I can use inverted paper boxes of the same size for storage and transit; the base sits in what was the lid, and the bulk of the box gives me antennae clearance.) I obtain them from my local model shop who have a local producer; they come chamfered but I sand them down a little and apply wood stain and varnish as necessary. I utilise the same for larger models/displays in the A3 size.
The name plates come from a locksmiths/cum-engraving/trophy shop in my town. They only charge me 5 pounds, which is what? Around 6 dollars? they haven’t increased their price over the last 15 years or so(!)
I’ve only recently discovered that Trumpeter produce a whole range of Soviet/Russian experimental tanks:
Object 292
Object 450 - mine above
Object 477
Object 490
Object 490A
I’m sure this is not exhaustive, but nearly all have stream-lined turrets and I think 477 has a massive 152mm tank gun. Others are equally radical in their configuration. One doesn’t seem to hear much about them, and I’ve never seen any on the display tables at shows. Perhaps they’re just not popular enough, though to me, certainly interesting now I’ve found them. However, I have more than enough in the stash at the moment(!)
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Right, we’re at the halfway point, so it’s time I got a wiggle on! I dug out the Gepard and M48 that will be stitched together for my DIVAD Raytheon competitor and made a start at Tuesday’s model club night. The turret is a part-bake from a fellow club member, who did a little paint and assembly of the radar area. I spent a pleasant couple of hours making an adaptor for the hull top to take the turret!
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Are you going to update the hull to M48A5 configuration and convert the turret to the 5 PFZ-C model that Raytheon actually used, or will this be a “what if the US Army bought Gepard turrets”?
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Good questions! I don’t know enough about the turret differences, so assumed there was nothing major to alter on the outside. Same with the A5 hull - I thought it was mostly interior stuff. The hull is more what-if than the turret as even the A5 was obsolete by the time they got to tendering! (And the models of the GE contender were built on A2 hulls from the few images I’ve seen.) I may have to give this some thought…
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The Tamiya hull is really an early M48A3, but updating it to late A3 would be pretty much the same as changing it to A5. Move the forward mudguard brace to the top, add crosses to the mudguards themselves, fit M60 headlights and new guards, fit late-type air cleaners, make square surrounds for the taillights, and add the ledges around the engine grilles. Not that hard if you have some spare parts, but more work 
To turn the A3 hull into an A2 would probably be less effort overall, but trickier as you will need to change the engine deck because of the lack of air filters.
If you would go for a 5 PZF-C turret, that will be a ton more work, as it’s not just the search radar that’s different but a lot of the top rear of the turret as well, to accommodate it. That is to say, the -C (and the -A) had a bar-type radar instead of the rectangular dish that the -B used, and it extended on an arm instead of pivoting up and down. The turret therefore has a slot in the top that the arm lies in when the radar is down. (IRL, the 5 PZF-A used a bar-type radar from Hollandse Signaalapparaten, but the Germans wanted a Siemens type, which lead to the -B. The Dutch Army, though, kept the HSA radar for much the same reason why the Germans wanted a Siemens — that is, domestic design and production — but on a turret like the -B, which became the -C. The 5 PFZ-B became the Flakpanzer Gepard and the -C became the Pantser Rups Tegen Luchtdoelen; Raytheon basically offered the US Army a -C turret on an M48A5 hull.)
(My own plan for eventually building a what-if, in-service, Raytheon DIVAD is a Takom M247 hull plus a Takom Gepard turret and a Perfect Scale PRTL conversion set. Which will be rather more expensive than a Tamiya M48A3 plus a gift Gepard turret )
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Hmm. Looking at the turret, I could do the surgery to make the C version. I’d have to eyeball the search radar parts, and I wish my donor kit hadn’t had the target radar built, as removing it for modification may take an excess of brute force and ignorance. Making the conical radar cover looks tricky, but I may be able to solve that issue by using parts from a Tamiya M247 that will never get built. And if I use that hull I get an M48A5 too… This does mean slicing off the adaptor ring and moving it to the other hull.
Of course there’s a PSM conversion for the turret, but at about £48 plus postage that’s out of the running!
[EDIT: It seems the hulls are the same in the M48 and M247 kits, so I can just use the lights and filters from the M247 to upgrade the existing M48 hull! Still need to sort the front fender ribs etc…]
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Taking the M247 I built about 25 years ago out of the cupboard it’s been gathering dust in, the Tamiya M247 upper hull is different from their M48A3. It has the proper M48A5 mudguards (with crosses) and headlights. The tail lights are still rounded at the top and there are no bars around the grille, but using the M247 kit hull would save a lot of work compared to updating the M48A3 one.
The biggest problem with the Tamiya M247 kit is that the engine deck and hull rear are totally wrong, adding a kind of ramp and a box to the existing M48 engine deck instead of having the completely different deck and hull rear as it should (and which Takom did get right). But you could make an argument that Raytheon didn’t need a revised engine deck because they found other locations for the stuff Ford needed to cram into the engine compartment?
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I wonder what Raytheon would have done about the power unit in the hull? On the Gepard it takes the space of the ammo bin next to the driver, but as he sits on the right there’s a big space to use. The M48 has two smaller bins, with the driver in the middle, so shoe-horning the PU there would be a challenge. Sadly they never got as far as detailed design, so we can only guess. The space under the turret is taken up with ammo feeds so no room down there!
Didn’t the Ford version suffer engine overheating from the get-go? All the rear-end mods were incremental attempts to solve it from what I’ve read…
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I don’t know if overheating was the reason for the new engine deck, but you could, of course, build a totally fictitious engine deck from plastic card, along the lines of the Ford one but different. This on the assumption that Raytheon would have had much the same problems in this area and arrived at a similar but obviously not identical solution. Or use the Tamiya M247 parts and say they are Raytheon’s solution to those problems
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I’ll leave the deck alone - the M247 started out with the stock deck after all, and this is the “if they built one for testing” prototype. Any evolution of the deck to deal with issues would have come much later…
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Not sure if that picture shows what Hunnicutt claims it does, because I for one can’t make out an M48A5 mockup in it. It looks like a standard PRTL turret to me, down to the Dutch smoke launchers, but who knows, maybe this really was in the USA?
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Hi Jakko, thought you’d like to know the Tamiya M247 uses exactly the same upper hull as the M48A3. So, all those stamped ribs will need to be added after all. At least it does have the later headlights and top-loading air filters!
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It does? I guess that means I converted the mudguards myself, even though under the paint it looked like too neat a job for that
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