The magazine itself is of course a bit pants - Wikipedia and 2 minutes on Google could come up with more infor on the Stryker and Bergpanzer Tiger than the magazine contains, but getting two 1/72nd models for £5.99 can't be sniffed at, can it?
The main reason for buying it was to pick up a couple of Strykers for use in Force on Force, which I'll work on soon by weathering the rather shiny plastic kit seen here - but that leaves me with the challenge of what to do with two WW2 German armoured recovery vehicles of a type which may well not even have existed...
Having had a quick look at the vehicle itself, its soon obvious that the model is essentially a bog-standard Tiger I with the gun taken off and a winch and hook arrangement grafted onto what is otherwise a standard model - even the gun mantlet is still in place. It will need a bit of filling anyway - as you can see from this photo it may have been modelled on the Airfix Tiger I, as the hull front doesn't really join up with the underside of this one either!
So, rather than either waste the kits, or spend weeks trying to devise a credible scenario for Chain of Command in which the Germans are needing to rescue one recovery vehicle with another, I had a much simpler idea. Buy a couple of barrels and do a bit of quick conversion to turn the recovery vehicles into real ones! Luckily eBay has a couple of sellers of 1/72nd Tiger Barrels
- these are machined metal barrels which modellers use to upgrade plastic kits to more accurate and robust versions (especially with the smoke diffuser end thingy on the barrel)
If you've picked up one of these magazines, maybe this is an idea to convert the Bergpanzer to a real Tiger rather than flood eBay with them! The barrels are onsale in the UK from Story Models and in the US from Small Military Models and More
