Re: [SG] in seach of 15mm

Karl Heinz Ranitzsch wrote:

>>>You Americans (yes, Canadians are Americans as well - North
>>>Americans, though not USAmericans) are lucky: where I live,
>>>gamers know what both US, UK, German, Swedish and (ex-)Soviet
>>>vehicles look like :-(
> 
>At least, hardly anybody knows what Swedish AFV look like ;-).

You know, sometimes there are definite drawbacks with living a quarter
of a mile or so from the barracks of the local Swedish Army armoured
regiment...

I guess most (non-Norwegian <g>) people would have problems telling a
Warrior 2000 from a CV9030... not that I've seen any CV90xx models
around, though :-(

>So I used some 1/300 ones for my tracked Dirtside force. The 'S' Tank
>looks definitely futuristic.

<chuckle> Considering that they were built in the 60s and have now been
decommisioned and scrapped, "futuristic" is a relative term :-/

>Pity that it looks so small beside many nominally same-scale 'real SF'
>models - indeed, I have the impresison that many '1/300' SF models
>are rather bigger than minis of equivalent real vehicles.

Yep.

>BTW - I remember reading that the 'S' has been retired quite a time
>ago. 
>Anybody know the reasons ?

Can't have been much more than a year or so ago - they only began
scrapping them last spring, and they did that ASAP.

The reasons?
* It was over 30 years old, and rather unreliable mechanically
* The gun was too small to defeat modern armour (only 105mm), and it
would've been a royal pain to upgrade to 120mm since you can't "just"
replace the turret the way you do on all those M60 etc. upgrades around
the world
* It aimed the gun by turning the entire tank, which means that it
can't fire on the move and that it takes *MUCH* longer to aim than it
does for a modern turretted tank
* The gun was mounted so low on the hull that the tank had to expose
almost its entire front when firing from "hull down" positions (reverse
slopes, etc) - similar to Russian tanks with their poor gun depression,
but unlike turreted Western tanks which usually only need to expose the
turret

The last three points meant that the S-tanks would've had the
proverbial snowflake's-in-Hell chance of surviving an encounter with
modern MBTs... like T72s of the early 1980s. *Defeating* them was even
more improbable.

But it looked cool, yes <g>

Oerjan Ohlson
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
- Hen3ry