
Here's the story....in the last months of WW2 some of the ever inventive German armaments engineers came up with the idea to save on resources and production time by mounting a tank gun in a recoilless mount. Not a recoilless rifle in the modern sense, but rather a standard tank gun mounted to a tank in a manner that simply permitted no recoil. The entire shock was simply absorbed by the entire tank, including the crew. Sounds like fun, right?https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/starr wrote:
starr (comparative starrer, superlative am starrsten):
1. rigid
This is where the Hetzer comes into play. To try out this slightly deranged idea, BMM modified a standard Hetzer in May 1944. And while they were tinkering with things man was not meant to know, they also put in a Tatra V8 diesel engine. As far as I know, this is said prototype:

A further ten where assembled at Skoda in early 1945, but these retained the Hetzer's standard gasoline engine. Some were used in combat, you can read more about them here.
Ten years ago Trumpeter released an all-new kit of this odd vehicle, and, surprise, that's what I'm building.


The kit is really quite simple, but then again so was the real thing. Upper and lower hull in one piece, four sprues, two of them identical, as well as workable tracks and a bit of photoetch. I've also thrown in a turned barrel by RB Model:



Last friday I started, and after not really doing much at all, I ended up with this:



(upper hull not yet glued on)
The build so far was enjoyable and free of troubles....I have a feeling this might change as soon as the tracks are involved

By th way, the kit comes with a full engine compartment, which is nice, but completely pointless, because you can't build the hatches open and there's not much to see through the various grates. And besides, I'm fairly sure this is the gasoline engine, not the Tatra Diesel:

Philipp