December's stash addition

I said I was going to put the brakes on my new purchases until I started making a dent in my mountain of half-complete projects, and I am trying my best. This month's addition is a single kit!

...Well, technically it's two really. As you will see...

I am starting to move from my auxiliary transport building phase of my Finnish Continuation War project into the - perhaps more exciting for you, my readers - armoured vehicle phase. Last month I bought a beautiful 1/72 Mirage T-26 'Finlandia-45' light tank and this month I follow it up by adding some stablemates.

The Rapid Fire war game rules that I am using as my guidelines for the construction of my Continuation War collection specifies a total of 7 T-26 light tanks for its Finnish (1941-44) Tank Battalion. Now, while it would be nice to have seven Mirage T-26's (they do several variants that served with the Finnish Army) building seven of these excellent - but complex - display quality models seems something like over-kill.

So, I looked around and found that Pegasus Model - who specialise in war game quality 'e-z build' kits - do a rather nice set of T-26s. You get two in the box - which cuts costs drastically - and with only 16 parts to each tank they are (literally) a snap to put together!

A Finnish T-26 Model 1933 on display at the Parola museum in Finland. Note
the distinctive 'cylindrical' shaped turret. Source: Wikipedia.

But I should say that this isn't too big a compromise. Sure, the Pegasus T-26's are nowhere near the quality, accuracy and detail of the Mirage kit, but Pegasus do make some of the best 'war game' quality plastic kits on the market. They include a reasonable amount of moulded-on detail and have the best one-piece tracks among all the war game kit manufacturers (like Armourfast, Italeri and PSC).

The Pegasus tanks are also of a slightly different version of the T-26 - the T-26 m1933 (while the Mirage kit is a T-29 m1939 with the conical shaped turret. The Rapid Fire rules specify a mix of both the 1933 and 1939 models so that's convenient, my only worry is the comparative scale of the two makes.