'Armour' from AdamC: Schneider CA1

To my pleasure a box of miniatures I had ordered in November of 2015 finally showed up in my local gaming store. Its Was Brett's Brawlers the AEF box set from Battlefront for Flames of War great war. One of the goodies in side was a Schneider CA 1 that seemed a perfect entry for this bonus round.

 As tank designs go this one is about as primitive as they come and has some serious flaws.  The protruding "nose" is one of them.  It was intended to help it clear a path through barbed wire but had a tendency to to get it suck in trenches, shell holes and similar obstacles.  This one you can see has had a close call and some sticky western front mud is stuck to its nose.

 I also applied a good layer of home made mud (glue, brown paint and basing grit) to the treads, I tried to strike a balance between making it muddy and letting the pain job show.

 You may have been wondering where is the gun?  Here it is a very small one on the right front corner of the vehicle. Yes its very small, even by the standards of the day the short barreled 75mm gun was considered very light for an armoured vehicle.

Taken form Wikipedia 

You can see the gun in the foreground next to the vehicle it was mounted on.  Its small, probably good for taking out gun pits and small bunkers but might even struggle against of other primitive armoured fighting vehicles of the day

A top down view to show the camouflage patter, these colors seem almost too bright on the museum example above.  Mine also seemed very bright until I hit them with a fairly heavy coat of wash.  I like the over all effect I am inclined to be skeptical about its effectiveness as camouflage but similar pasterns were used into the Second World War so some one professional thought it worked. 

In addition to the small cannon the tank had two side mounted MG guns, I can't help feeling some one should have thought to put one in the front as well but... I guess they figured any one it was coming straight at would turn tail and run (a wildly optimistic assessment in my opinion). This was a fun little project to start off my foray into the Great War. While researching this project I discovered that one of these venerable beasts is still in "action" almost 100 years after its construction, how cool is that?

The Schneider CA, at the Musée des Blindés in Saumur, is also the world's oldest tank in full running condition