The publishers have a deserved reputation within the model
making community for the high quality of their Craft series.
Tank Craft books are very well produced and presented and this
new book is well up to that standard. It will also appeal to
those who are interested in armoured vehicles and WWII. Much
Recommended.
NAME: Tank Craft, Tiger I and Tiger II Tanks, Germany Army and Waffen-SS Eastern Front 1944 FILE: R2393 AUTHOR: Dennis Oliver PUBLISHER: Pen & Sword BINDING: soft back PAGES: 65 PRICE: £14.99 GENRE: Non Fiction SUBJECT: WWII, World War Two, Second World War, Panzers, tank technology, the heavy tank, advanced designs. Waffen-SS, Wehrmacht, Eastern Front, Russian armour, tank battles, plastic model kits, specialist enhancement kits ISBN: 1-47388-534-5 IMAGE: B2393.jpg BUYNOW: http://tinyurl.com/gsqqbuz LINKS: Special discount for our readers http://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/catalogues/aid/1170#catalogue-15 Other Current Discount Offers http://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/sale DESCRIPTION: The publishers have a deserved reputation within the model making community for the high quality of their Craft series. Tank Craft books are very well produced and presented and this new book is well up to that standard. It will also appeal to those who are interested in armoured vehicles and WWII. Much Recommended. The Tiger I and Tiger II armoured fighting vehicles introduced new standards into tank design and construction. They evolved into a family of vehicles based on the same chassis but this book only deals with those sent to fight on the Eastern Front against the Russians. The Tiger I was an impressive fighting vehicle that had low ground pressure through the use of wide tracks that required a complex set of overlapping road wheels. The track system allowed what was a very heavy tank to achieve good speed and movement across open terrain, and the hull and turret allowed the impressive 88mm anti-tank gun to be successfully mounted. Essentially, the Tiger I was a direct response to the Russian T34 and was designed to outgun this innovative tank that had come as a nasty shock to the Germans when it was first introduced to the battles. The Tiger I included many new features and advanced equipment. This provided a huge advance in armoured capability, but it also introduced all of the reliability issues that attend the introduction of any advanced design. The Tiger II introduced a series of improvements and new features, but it did not entirely remove the teething troubles. Where it met Allied tanks on the battlefield it usually triumphed, but frequently failed to follow initial successes because of breakdowns and the difficulty in operating such a large and heavy vehicle on the poor roads and bridges that sat across its line of advance. The author has made a good job of providing a history of the two Tiger models and those variants operated on the Eastern Front. The high quality artwork and photographs will appeal to a much wider readership than solely the model engineering and model making communities. Specifically for model makers, all of the kits potentially available are reviewed, together with components available from specialist supplies to turn a stock kit into an outstanding model of one of the most important tanks yet designed and operated. There have been kits produced to 1:100 and 1:144 scale, but the 1:72 scale is the most readily available small scale offering and makes into an impressive model without necessarily requiring great skill. The popular scales have been 1:48 and 1:35. These result in large models with considerable detail and the availability of specialist enhancement parts to create competition and museum grade models, requiring very much greater skill. The Tanks have also been produced in 1:12 scale which requires some space to display and many hours of skilled work to really draw out the considerable advantages of a large scale model. One advantage of the larger scale options is that the builder can add motor power and radio control.