Collins Does a German Winter Offensive

I was gifted 3 of the 250 halftracks over Christmas, there are 3 kits in total with options to make 7 variants overall. pretty neat really.

anyway, I started making one and I’m really only planning to have them as 250/1 variants (or rather, bog standard machine guns) so that leaves me with quite a few spare bits, guns, bodies etc.

Queue head scratching and kit bashing.

it was this page that caught my eye… what is the frame under instruction ‘u’ for?

well I went off and googled a bit and found out that the cannon was a light antitank gun, well technically a heavy antitank rifle but often misidentified. It is called Panzerbüchse 41 and Panzerbüchse translates German -> English as Anti-Tank Rifle but due to the way the Allies viewed it, due to the gun carriage/sled and the shield, they often incorrectly called it a light antitank gun.

It works on the fascinating principle of squeeze-bore. that means that the loading end of the barrel is 28mm wide, but the muzzle break end of the barrel is only 20mm. why do that? well it means that the pressure inside the barrel increases all the way down the length which then means the bullety bit leaves the barrel at a significantly higher speed. that coupled with a super hard tungsten core leads to some very impressive momentum and penetration capability at short ranges but it does have negatives, namely it drops off rapidly over longer distances.

http://maximietteita.blogspot.com/2017/12/28-cm-spzb-41.html

here I found some interesting photos that explained what that frame was.

Now that we have that little nugget of info we can see whether the sPzB 41 (Panzerbüchse 41) has an entry in the rule book. obviously it does, and at only 60 points its dead cheap. Winner!

Now to break out the leftover sprues of winter infantry to get those all important kneeling bodies to help make the crew up with the arms from the 250/11 weapons kit.

As things didn’t line up well on the height of the arms and the height of the ‘weapon sled’ I had to improvise with cork matting and superglue to make a small makeshift dugout look.

The reason the wheels on the frame aren’t touching the floor (or at the lowest point) is because (I think) they are folding. folding down to move but when shooting can be folded up to allow the carriage/frame to take the weight and make be a bit more of a stable shooting platform.

Overall I’m quite happy with this little pleasant surprise. the only disappointing thing for me was that I wasn’t able to make it so the weapon could be mounted in the 250 and then dismounted onto the weapons sled. that would have been top banana but unfortunately I couldn’t work out how to make it happen due to the fragile nature of everything connecting together.