Thursday 17 September 2009

Thin stripes and no spots

The Porsche turreted Royal or King Tiger stalking its Sherman prey in Normandy shortly after the D-Day landings, well at least in my mind's eye.


My 1/76 scale Fujimi Prosche turreted King Tiger is shown above (caught with the setting sun behind it,too far from the invasion beaches to make a difference). I remember the classic photograph with the Esci kit showing a King Tiger unit with mixed turret versions hiding under trees in Normandy, trying not to attract the attension of passing rocket-firing Typhoons of the RAF.


The side view is shown above (be warned the click-in photograph is fuzzy and may blur your eyes).

Instead of the full three-colour spotted "ambush" pattern I used previously I went for the slightly earlier, thinner (hence more) striped three-colour version. It also helps me tell from a distance Henschel versus Porsche on tabletop. All this means, and an audible sigh of relief follows, I am done with making and painting my King Tiger kits, Henschel or Porsche until in the distant mists of time I come back to decal them.

I can now claim a reinforced (very) heavy German tank company! As a footnote, tanks of this sort in CD3 and Battlefront etc, really distort ground scale effects. Making in the worse case tanks look "silly close" on  table. So why did I bother? I guess it was because I already had them and they was there. I should really move on now and paint something sensible and reusable on the wargames table ;)

3 comments:

Paul said...

Nice Work Mate!! Lets see some infantry support for those beasts!

Geordie an Exiled FoG said...

You're right, I am just putting off the inevitable, but I do have a pair of Tigers, a Hurricane, Defiant and metal Morians to address first.

The factory figure production system is being revved up in the background ;)

Paul said...

Sweet, I might look at basing some Germans myself in the next few weeks.