Project II/26

Dragon Models StuG III Ausführung G 10.5cm Imperial Series

In the final days of summer '25 I visited Tieto-Nikkari and their shelves because I felt the fever for something tracked and German. Based on some looking around and chatting I dropped a StuG III on the desk and pondered out loud that if they had a Hummel, I'd taken one immediately. The shopkeep thought also out loud that "we'll get them at some point soonish, come by and check. Or it's actually easier if I just call you when I get them". This very clearly meant that I had a heavy SP howitzer elbowing its way to my work queue. Like I've said before, I had one and had even mostly painted it, but it got stuck in some sort of a limbo over the years.

Back to the business at hand: the theme was a StuG III's G variant with a larger howitzer. This happened to be a mightily titled Imperial Series box from 2004 according to my searches. Of course this all meant that I had to start thinking of ordering some tracks - or two sets of them to be more exact - from the Polish supplier.

Sprues and stuff

We've got a healthy load of plastic on numerous sprues, even the tracks were individual links in this set. There were some bits of photoetch, and one piece of aluminium.

A surprising number of said pieces were going to fly directly into the bits box. The tracks I didn't even glance at again, nor open them from their bags.

Instructions

What to say about the instruction sheet? Typical Dragon stuff, which had pretty-looking isometric views of how some things were to be set together, but occasionally being made less than clear enough for stupid people like me. My personal feeling was that they tried to be a bit too clever with these.

It had been way too long since my last tracked vehicle.