Finished: Project IV/20

M65 280mm Motorized Heavy Gun

I've constantly talked, through the duration of this 145-photo and nobody knew how many hours long project, about the cannon as the M65 and the trucks just as trucks, when M65 was the identifier for the combo. Had I been smarter I'd been more factual and consistent, but here we ended up again. Then again, I've tried to keep the tags of 'Mumblings [since moment t in its lifecycle] from getting to fine-grained, so maybe just using one single project-specific tag was acceptable.

Cannon T161 on carriage T72

The nuke gun, atomic cannon, Atomic Annie, a dear child had many names. Not too many of these were built, just 20, of which #9 fired one 15kt W-9 shell  (diameter: 280mm; lenght: 1380mm; mass: 364kg) in the Upshot-Knothol operation's test Grable. I assumed that anyone reading posts like this already knew these things, and had the video clip playing in their mind's eye already.

In the real world the whole M65 weighed 42,5 tons in addition to my own mass, and had a total lenght of 11 meters and was about three meters wide. Unlimbering it took 12 minutes and getting it ready to run away ate fifteen full minutes. Not that those were to be taken anywhere near a danger zone, as the official range was 32km and the unofficial up to 56km.

I tried to find some more facts from an article I had found months ago, to flesh out this post, where the normal shells were also talked about. I just couldn't re-find it anymore.

M249 & M250

Obviously the trucks had different model number, the front one was a M249 4x4 Heavy Gun-Lifting Front Truck and the rear one was also aptly named: M250 4x4 Heavy Gun-Lifting Rear Truck. Simple enough.

They didn't really look like it, but they both weighed 16-17 tons, while their max speed was allegedly about 72km/h, most likely without the cannon slowing them down to reach those numbers. The full mass of the 26-meter-long M65 reached 78 tons, and that wasn't something you'd get up to those speeds too easily.

Final images

The model was so ridiculously long, that I didn't even attempt to play with some A4s - and I still hadn't invested in a light tent (not sure if this had fit in one of those, either), so these pics were taken on top of the dining table.

My one complaint about the instructions was that it was absolutely unclear how to get the cannon's barrel set up for transport, for all the steps only showed the firing mode. So my cannon was stuck into the firing mode and could not be safely unstuck to get it in the proper transport mode. In case someone was going to point this out for me: I know it's wrong ;)

A rocket for scale

At the very last moment I got the idea of taking a pair of photos of the M65 next to the Lego rocket. This was indeed hilariously long, fully assembled. I just thought that for scale a Lego Saturn V would work much better than a banana.

Weathering with dirt

Very gentle weathering

Before I started with the dirt layer, I strongly drybrushed the headlights of both of the trucks with off-white (VMA 71279 Insignia White). Somehow the light white layer on top of the steel base has made lamps more plausible for me in previous projects.

Insane mess-making

As in a number of earlier modeling projects, I airbrushed a dirty colour (VMA 71133 Dirt) from a distance. Time had played its tricks on my paint, so it didn't flow as well as my Badger would've liked it to. Despite the suboptimal paint thickness I got these three constructs dirtified to some degree.

After the dirt layer had dried, I attached the forks onto the trucks. The vehicle #2 at this point looked like something was missing from the deck, but I just assumed that that round hole just was there.

Cannon, the

I had dirtified the cannon's carriage earlier, now what jumped into my eyes from these photos were those cursed decals with their silvering.

Small details

 Fooling with little details

Even though I had decided to leave the little people off my model, I still painted the 280mm W9 atomic shells grey (VMA 71048 Engine Grey). Their tips would still need some steel on them, I thought.

To get at least a tiny amount of change to the overblowing olive drab, I caressed the molded-on cables with black. Afterwards I wasn't still sure if I should've washed them with black or brown instead.

The same cable-blacking operation was done to the cannon's carriage. Here this worked much better in my opinion, even though these were a bit tricky to get to with the paintbrush.

Front vehicle

I was excited getting to the non-green parts at long last. Not that there was much to do, thanks to the specs. The windshield wipers' soft bits I painted flat black instead of tyre black and while I was at it I also drybrushed black on the engine compartment's mesh screens. The wing mirrors, extra lights, the main headlights and that round thing in the middle of the truck's nose I painted with steel. All the yellow and red signal lights I painted as ordered, being so small they were hardly distinguishable.

Rear vehicle

The second truck got the same treatment as the first one. Red-yellow signals, steely mirrors and headlights, blackened meshes. This one had more axles visible, so I painted them with the same engine grey that I had used on the shells earlier. Having these axles done differently looked pretty decent to me, so I went back and repeated it on the first truck too.

Decalation

A few decals

Despite all my grumbling I still used a few decals with this complex. The tow trucks got a String "U.S. ARMY M533" to their extreme ends, their doors and roofs got five-pointed stars. To the sides of the cannon's carriage I used similar String-based decals but the left one I cut into two because I just couldn't bring myself to fight a long decal over a bunch of molded-on bumps. For a change the decals behaved.

A cautionary tale

Striped bumpers

Let's be very clear about this: I've always liked using the caution stripes in numerous places (ever since I was involved in making Doom pwads), in my opinion they've been most at home in scifi weapons platforms, such as Battle- and OmniMechs. They weren't that prevalent in real world warmachines, which wasn't really surprising, these being large and high-contrast-y decorations practically screaming "BEWARE OF THIS THING HERE!". And all this is why I was a bit surprised to find these stripes in the decal sheet, but I filed that under "test stuff" and as something that wouldn't have been done that way in fighting conditions. In any case I wanted to paint them instead of getting frustrated and sweary with the spaghettifying decals.

First I masked the immediate neighbourhood of the bumpers and started painting. The bottom layer was a dark grey (VMA 71268 German Grey), over which I then applied an almost full coverage of plain flat black (VMA 71057). Somehow I expected that this'd give the dark shapes a bit more realistic look than pure black.

Intermediate result

After giving the paint the traditional 24 hours of drying time before smashing masking tape on the fresh surfaces I started fooling with the tape. I settled with about 2,5mm strips and made some slashes and some backslashes per bumper. As my yellow I used a Medium Yellow (VMA 71002). The uneven painting was the result of a partially too thick paint that I hadn't been able to stir up enough. In this case the result looked kind of realistic to me, at least much better than a decal!

More truck painting

Olivification, part 3

I painted the trucks excitedly, before the last layer of the replenished olive drab, I used a couple of other greens (USAF Olive Drab; one of the German Panzer greens) to cover a couple of underpainted sections. These weren't exactly what I wanted, so I toned those down with the instrucion-declared colour. The little    differences weren't something that I even wanted to undo, because I felt that even a tiny bit of life in these mostly monocoloured things was more than a good thing.

While airbrushing I also started working on the wheels (VMA 71315 Tyre Black). A number of the wheel hubs I masked off, some I didn't. I guess I had some kind of a thought process behind this, I just couldn't remember it while writing this.

I also blasted a bit of some desert-ish, light brown to the lower halves of the cannon and the vehicles. I didn't concentrate on that work much at this point, the plan here was just to test out the colour in preparation for the actual weathering session(s).

 

Olivifying the vehicles

The most boring paintjob ever?

As I've complained a few times, this flat olive green scheme wasn't the most exciting thing to paint. Even though I wasn't going to follow the instructions to the last detail, I didn't feel like doing a random US Army camo scheme from the sixties, either.

Then again, a three-tone NATO pattern wouldn't have been too far off, unless my memory failed again. Maybe the safest option was to keep it in boring monocolour, but tone down the designer's bright, large and clean steel / aluminium surfaces.

Green

I started by painting the wheel hubs first. The first in line were the tow truck front wheels and the spare wheel hub that were still unattached. What I didn't take pics of were the cabin roofs that I painted separately from the outside and the inside.

The bottoms of the vehicles were pretty simple to paint, the strange angles and of course the rear wheels were blocking the paintflow from certain angles, so I had to paint this way and that way sometimes. My goal was to get some kind of variety inside the flatness somehow. I decided not to strive for perfection on this first painting run, but to instead fix up any issues later on. Right now I wanted a good enough general coverage.

Top sides

After letting the previous paintjobs to air-dry overnight, I switched to the side where the sun was supposed to shine occasionally. Earlier I had already painted small parts of the front vehicle, so wouldn't have to fight those right now.

While working on the more visible parts of the vehicles I was starting to run low on paint, so I concentrated even more on the general coverage than I had planned to, with the cost of the opacity. With its more broken forms the first vehicle showed the results of this choice more clearly than the second one, which ended up looking somewhat better.

This last photo showed where my painting process ended when I ran out of paint. I had to take an intedetermined break because I didn't go by the office during the corona season that often (Hobby Point, my royal provider, was located pretty near), and I wasn't in such a rush that I had felt the need to order paints to be delivered home, either. Ordering almost always had the funny habit of leading to the infamous "oh, I need those too" effect...

You, esteemed reader, have hopefully not noticed a thing, thanks to my post buffer.

Builds done, minimen in their activities

A dude test

Now that I had the construction phase wrapped up, I set up the scaled-down dudes on and around the built pieces to show what kind of monstrous vehicles we were talking about here. I guessed that the pics had shown that especially the cannon was enormous, but I felt that the humans brought an essential amount of real-life scale to drive the point home.

Especially the nuclear shells were of a noticeable size.