Take you to our leader?
Man, the Russians come up with some cool looking machines…this is the…Obyekt 279, a Soviet prototype heavy tank developed in the Kirov industrial plant, Leningrad. Work on the tank started in 1957, and was based on a heavy tank operational requirements developed in 1956. The special-purpose tank was intended to fight on cross-country terrain that was inaccessible to conventional tanks and act as a vehicle to break through enemy defensive positions….(cheers to Wikipedia)…
I came across this beast in a Paper Models thread asking for ideas for new armour models so if it tweaks a designer’s imagination, maybe it’ll be a builder…I’d have a crack at the design myself but at the moment I am running at capacity doing year-end accounts, working with Hawkeye UAV, gearing up for the Winter season, and completing some of my COIN-related review commitments…I finished Benoit Mandelbrot’s The (mis)Behaviour of Markets on Monday, am almost done with Amanda Lennon’s Fourth Generation Valkyries, and have a local work on hybridism to read…
So, the blog has taken a back foot for the last week or so and this state of affairs will most likely last until next week when normal services should be resumed…
In the meantime, Dean @ Travels With Shiloh has returned from the COIN Symposium at Fort Leavenworth and started to upload this thoughts and findings..please head on over and value-add to the his comments and observations…it’ll be interesting to see what Kiwis attending the symposium took away from a national perspective…
PS…forgot to mention that Michael Yon has left Afghanistan (probably best for all concerned) and is currently in Bangkok covering the troubles there…if you’re on Facebook, it is well worth subscribing to his page where he has been delivering a steady commentary – a dozen + feeds each day – on the situation there…he offers an interesting counterpoint to the more sensationalist news media ‘reporting’ and depicts the human side of this drama very well…it is great to see that Michael has returned to the type of .boots on the ground’ that he is so very good at…
The World According to Me... 
I wasn’t an armor guy myself but I did have to work on the tracks of a M577 in my early days. I can’t imagine the difficulty of getting to those inner ones in a field environment if your track came off. Still, major points for the ‘cool’ factor.
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Fortunately I was only ever a mere passenger with the armoured fraternity – I still have scary memories of crossing lakes in closed down 113s with a freeboard of at least an inch…but when they broke one, we’d just debus and start walking so never had to touch a track…since we went ‘wheeled’ with LAV3 (think Stryker with 25mm turret) I’ve had to manhandle the tires twice – but that was only to get some worn-out ones into the garden to grow rhubarb in…
Their designs may lose out in the practicality stakes but the Russians still come up with some way cool shapes like both Hinds, 2S6, KV-2, the B-4 cannon, the Ekranoplan, etc etc…
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