Soviet AFV Stock-take Overview

It's been quite a while since I took a long hard look at my 20mm Soviet AFVs.  I had enough stuff painted up for most games and most options, but I knew my collection was not as complete as I would like.

With my eyesight playing up still, I also knew I wasn't in a position to be painting anything right now - so I decided to clean up and reset my display cabinet.  The first one and a half shelves were all Soviet stuff - so this was a good excuse to do a bit of a stock take.

I took everything off the shelves and from my unmade kits stash laid them out on my table.

From Left to Right in the front row, you have PT-76s, BTR-60PBs, BTR-70s, MTLBs, some UAZ-469, T-80s, T-72s, T-64s, T-62s and T-55s.

The middle section is an array of softskin trucks and command vehicles. BDRM-2 variants, my little artillery park and a couple of anti-tak guns.

From the other side you have my primary Soviet Anti-Air components, BMP-2s, BMP-1s, specialist BMP variants, BMD-1s, BTR-Ds and a 2S9 Nona, BMD-2s, ASU-85s and a few GAZ-66 trucks.

The plan was, and pretty much always been once I got serious about this, to collect a company's worth of each the primary combat vehicles.  So a company of T-55s, T-62s, T-64s, T-72s and T-80s plus BMP-2s, BMP-1s, BTR-70s and BTR-60PBs - each comany being at least 10 tanks/IFVs or APCs.  Some may have more but all will have at least 10.

Within each company I am less than stressed about having 10 of the exact same make of tanks.  So my T-80 Company for instance will have a mix of T-80B, T-80BV and even a T-80U.  I also typically like to collect in platoons of 3 matching variants if I can, unless I feel the vehicle is so rare as to make sense in just having 1 - like the T-80U.  When I game with them, if I like I can just say the whole company is the same variant - it just helps to tell them apart.

So as you can see (and I can now clearly see) I am missing a fair few things and some of the vehicles I do have (I'm looking at you T-62s) got pretty messed up in my move and this is the excuse I need to give them some love and attention.

Over the course of the next few weeks I hope to make kits and do a lot of printing to fill in the gaps and finish my Soviets as a more complete force.

As I do that I'll go type by type through the stock-take and show you how I've filled it out and completed it.

Thanks

Richard