Session VII

In the powered end

There wasn't much to say about this session. I built stuff for the drive sprockets and those V-shaped whatchamacallems, most of the time disappeared while cleaning the bits, dry-fittings and such fun activities.

Well, I did build some subassemblies for the next session, but I decided to omit them from this post. It was about all those logical chunks, see?

Session VI

Working on the lower hull

These funny winglets, that got installed with all their appendages into the front of the hull looked like they would be used to somehow adjust the tension of the tracks, maybe. At this point of the construction process I really couldn't tell whether or not this was the end where the return roller went or was it for the drive sprocket. Based on my "the Soviets always had the drive sprockets in the back"-kind of gut feeling I would've put my money on the first option.

Either I was going too fast or those bits that were installed at ~45° were mismarked either in the instructions or the sprues. Not that it was a big issue as I noticed it while dry-fitting, but it made me wonder. At least I thought that I had been careful with the numbers and the pieces.

While dry-fitting the upper front glacis plate and especially while gluing it on I got very iffy with the way it all looked. As if the whole front had been pressed in way too deep into the tub. Weird Soviet design, that wasn't for mere mortals to understand.

Then the rear upper glacis plate got a couple of small-looking hatches whose nature I wasn't 100% certain of. For any sort of maintenance they looked damn unergonomic, for escape hatches way too small and inconvenient. But just like I said a moment before, you couldn't always understand all these grand ideas.

Session V

On the sun deck

Rather obviously I continued building and installing the boxes that belonged by the foot of the main turret. Only one of them (bottom in the photo below), curiously, got an additional rod for something mysterious.

After that I got to finish up the Emma turrets, which meant that I just glued on the roof plates with the lifting rings. The annoyingly downwards-bending front bits would've given me grey hairs if I wasn't already well along the way... Thanks to the shapes it was close that I didn't get to make a "congrats, your mg ammo just cooked off" scene in the finest BattleTech spirit.

Engineering tools

It may very well be that I'm going to rue this moment in the future. I glued all the deck decorations on already, weeks or most likely months before the first drop of paint touches this model.

Well, I had to try that approach at some point, anyway, right? Maybe it wouldn't be as awful as I remember / think. Speaking of awful, that spare track piece holder you can see in the center-top? It required a surprising amount of violence to settle in, I was somewhat concerned while pressing it in place. But still it survived, amazing as it may be.

Otherwise there was a calm amount of crap to be installed. Two shovels, an axe, a couple of confusingly short tow cables and a weird metallic piece for something even weirder. Somehow I would've thought that this kind of a monstrous tank (and keeping the Soviet mentality in mind) they'd thrown in a blacksmithful of junk. There'd been more than enough space at least.