26 April 2017

Here comes another one! SA-9 Gaskin Work-In-Progress

I’ve always wanted an SA-9 Gaskin for some reason.  Probably because it was pretty common but I’ve always liked the vehicle.  When I was a kid (and had no $$) I somehow was able to get a couple of bits of micro armour – no idea where from – and I chose a Gaskin and a Scorpion.  So I guess I’ve liked it for a long time!

Anyway…  I wanted to get an ACE Models SA-9, but they are literally as rare as hen’s teeth and the 1 I found on Ebay (in years of looking) went for a lot more than I was willing to pay.  So the dream died a little bit.

This has meant that whenever I put together a Soviet force and want to add a mobile SAM I go for a SA-13 Gopher – as I have the model.  In my lists this is a bit more expensive than a SA-9 – as it’s a better missile.

One day I was thinking about it, and I realised the SAM hammerhead on the SA-13 is almost identical as on a SA-9.  Hang on a moment…  I stopped whatever it was I was doing and went over to my cabinet and grabbed a completed Britannia BRDM-2 and the launcher hammerhead from the SA-13 and put them together.  Not an exact fit – but good enough to game with.  In fact, you may not have noticed but I included this very slap-dash conversion in my last two games:




Its the one with the red square around it!

So then I decided to do a new Britannia BRDM-2 – slightly modified to better accept the ACE Models SA-13 launcher.  Essentially all I did was add some plastic card and filler to make the SA-13 launcher head fit slightly better:
  



You can see it needed a bit of green stuff work as well.

So here is how it might look with the launcher added:



So now it just needs to be painted and I have a dedicated BRDM-2 body if I want to use a SA-9 Gaskin.  Of course this does not solve the problem if I want to run a force with both a SA-9 and a SA-13, but I think the chances of wanting to do that are pretty slim.

So I’m putting this down as a win – just a worry that it took me something like 4 or 5 years to work it out!  D’oh!!!!

Have fun


Richard

No comments:

Post a Comment