Tank vs Dice - Part II

And the saga continues, just love when i throw a "six".

Have fun...

T26 Light tank ( late model ) - WGS kit 1/144

The T-26 Light Tank was produced in greater numbers than any other pre-war Soviet Tank, and was the most numerous tank in Red Army service in June 1941. By then the T-26 was a ten-year old design, based on an even older British design, and the vast majority of the 11,000 T-26s in service were quickly destroyed.

The T-26 was based on the British Vickers 6 ton E Light Tank. This came in two versions – the model A, with two side-by-side machine gun turrets, or the model B with a single gun in a larger turret. The first T-26s were licence-built copies of the Vickers “E” model A, but the majority of T-26s would carry a single Soviet-designed turret on the Vickers chassis.

I. A. Khalepsky of the Directorate of the Mechanization of the Red Army purchased the first Vickers E Light Tanks on 28 May 1929, and they reached the Soviet Union during 1930.

Soviet tank designers were then given the chance to produce their own modified versions of the Vickers tank. Two prototypes – the TMM-1 and TMM-2 were built – but neither was as good as the Vickers design, and it was the Vickers E that was put into production.

On 13 February 1931 the Revolutionary War Council decided to put the T-27 tankette (itself based on a British design) and the T-26 into mass production. They were thus contemporaries for the German Panzer I and Panzer II. The T-27 was to carry out battlefield reconnaissance while the T-26 was to provide direct support for the infantry during the breakthrough stage of a battle. The Red Army’s “Deep Battle” plan was very similar to the German Blitzkrieg, and planned for the close support tanks to break the enemy line before the faster exploitation tanks (the BT series) broke out into the enemy’s rear area, causing chaos and confusion.

Responsibility for the production and development of the T-26 was given to a design team created specifically for the purpose at the Bolshevik Factory in Leningrad (renamed the Zavod Nr.185 (S. M. Kirov) in 1935). This team, the Opytniy konstruktorsko mekhanicheskiy otdel (OKMO) or Experimental Design Mechanical Section, was led by N. Barykov and S. Ginzburg, and had the job of modifying the Vickers design for Soviet production.

Sherman "Firefly" - WGS kit 1/144

During World War II, the United States has agreed to lend its mass-manufactured M4 Sherman tanks to its Allies. The British commonwealth is one of these allies and used these tanks extensively during the course of the conflict. The mediocre Sherman was no match for the raw firepower and armor of the German war machine, and as a desperate attempt to up-gun their existing Sherman tanks, they mated their QC 17-pounder anti-tank guns with the chassis of the Sherman. And this variant is called the Sherman Firefly.

The firefly uses the destructive QC 17-pounder anti-tank gun from the commonwealth, instead of the M3 75mm gun that a standard Sherman uses. This upgrade turns the less-than-threatening gun of the standard tank to a tank that can go toe-to-toe with even the Third Reich's finest and most powerful tanks, mainly the Tiger and the King Tiger. Its armor can deflect several shots from anti-tank fire and absorb some damage, while bullets will harmlessly bounce off it. To defend itself against infanty, it has a coaxial M1919 Browning .30 caliber machine gun.

Although signifiantly slower than a standard Sherman due to its extensive upgrade, it makes up for being highly effective against heavy and super-heavy armor. To even make up for this, it can be upgraded to have a tank commander giving increased visual information to the tank crew, increasing their overall firing range. And if the Royal Engineer Support is active, then this tank can use the "Hull Down" ability to plant itself to the ground, increasing its armor on its flanks, but essentially turning it into a stationary tank turret.

JF