IN SOVIET RUSSIA!!!!!!!!!!!

I have a Soviet made toy T-34, but the box looks like it is from a different factory than this.

No doubt there are a lot of Soviet era toys that a dillitante collector is never going to know about.

I like the little 1/72 diecasts of armour made by Matchbox and Unimax. For all that they're small, they have excellent detail.

Very cool, though.

Ah, some of my favorites in WW2 wargaming...Soviet tank destroyers and Soviet artillery...Which make wonderful AT when you roll them forward and fire at close range.

Quantity has a quality all its own.

As long as it isn't your life being thrown away to overwhelm the enemy with numbers...

Oddly enough, the better wargaming simulations do convey some of that. If one is used to working with small, fairly elite and robust units, it is a real head-turner to sit down with a Soviet army that outnumbers the enemy ten or twenty to one...And realize that you will be 'throwing away' four-fifths or more of it to achieve anything resembling victory. If you are reluctant or stingy about losing units, you can't even play that army successfully.

On the other hand, if you approach enemy defensive positions with an attitude of 'Okay, if I can shove three strelkovy companies down their throat, the third one should get enough men through to take it.', it works fairly well. Even so, I tend to gravitate towards motorized companies with decent armor support. I like crossing the field quickly and trying to maintain most of my force, not just marching into the guns and hoping to have enough left when I get there.

You ought to try the PC game Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin. Morale and leadership are VERY important, and there have been more than a few times when even SS elites have had enough and GTHO. In one game I recall from a couple of years ago, a KV-8 flaming an empty building literally sent an entire company of German motorized infantry fleeing.

Thanks, I prefer miniatures games like Flames of War where (amazingly) morale and leadership are also very important, and yes, you can rout the SS...it just takes work.

CMBB IS miniatures, just on the PC. You can get right down on level with your troops, too. Actually, CMBB is virtually automated, animated Advanced Squad Leader. It's great fun to watch an elite, berserk Tank Hunter squad suddenly charge out of the woods and chase a tank around.

Some of us fogeys LIKE painting stuff up, stretching strings across tables to determine LOS, etc.

Heh. I only recently sold the rest of my miniatures. I still have some old sets of rules, notably TSR's ancients rules from... 1974?

[QOUTE]The quality is rather poor. Lack of detail, crude casting, thick yellow decals, rough paint job, plastic wheels. and a gun that barely moves up and down by about a quarter inch.[/QOUTE]

The reason why I buy Flames of War and paint them myself.

I have one of those!

The four wheel armored transport.

Wow, cool. We got a pile of those and a buncha kits back when we were trading stuff with the soviets back in '91 and '92. Shon even got one of those super rare Mig 3 kits.

The funniest thing about the whole deal was we found it easier to get mail behind the iron curtain then into Canada.

Bizzare. I have no trouble getting things into Canada or out. Maybe it depends on what's in the box?

I don't think I ever had a Soviet kit, though I've seen some in a huge hobby place in LA some years ago. I think I did built a Czech kit once. Not so good...

The commercial soviet era kits were very plain and rather poor. This Mig 3 kit was a private venture by a guy 'working in his garage'. It was a good servicable WW2 kit but it was noteworthy from a historic point. KGB shut him cause it was a private venture, luckily with just a firm finger shaking speech.

One of the ironies I recall from the 80's was that you could build a Japanese, American, or British made kit of Soviet aircraft that were probably accurate enough that it was likely a crime in the USSR to possess such "secret" information.

A Sukhoi of some sort. A fairly early swept wing jet fighter. I'd have to get up and go look.

Ah, the SU-100. Used to have a wall of those to intercept the incoming Panthers and STUGs while trying to take Berlin in Panzer General 2. Have a plastic 1:72 model of it as well, pretty small compared to the tanks, but that was the general idea of tank destroyers. Keep em small.