From HerrRobert: Quantity has a quality all its own (20 points)

The commander folded the paper with stiff fingers, aware that its phrasing allowed no appeal to weather, fuel, or enemy strength. Ahead, the forest line burned with intermittent muzzle flashes, and somewhere beyond it German guns waited patiently. The BA-20’s engine coughed into life, its tires biting into frozen mud. As the vehicle lurched forward, the commander understood that, not victory, not survival, but obedience, absolute and unquestioned is what mattered in the brutal winter of the Russian front.

My first entry for the 16th Annual Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge is a Soviet BA-20 armored car. It's a roughly 1/50 3D print I sourced off of ebay for a 1941 Chain of Command campaign several years ago. It sat in the primed pile of shame for years until The Cull warning approached, and I needed some quick points. So I picked it up, dusted it off, and got to work.

You can see a lot of the lines and layers of the 3d print in both the original and the photos, but I honestly think that works for Soviet vehicles in WW2.

For those of you wondering what a BA-20 is, Wikipedia provides a pretty decent summary, and several images of surviving BA-20s in various museums to use as inspiration. It's basically a Russian copy of a Ford truck, given a bit of armor and a 7.62mm machine gun. Since it was used in the Spanish Civil War, the Khalkin Gol incident in Mongolia, the Soviet invasion of Poland, the Winter War with Finland, and the summer and winter fighting of 1941/1942 against the Germans, I wanted a pretty universal color scheme for maximum versatility. Fortunately, I found a few good examples in the Wikipedia article to copy:

I think I did a reasonable job approximating the plain green:

Paint choices were pretty simple. Prime with Vallejo Russian Green, paint over the primer with Vallejo Russian Uniform, wash with Army Painter Quickshade Military Green and paint the tires. I used craft paints for those, first Mondo Llama Fresh Pavement (available from Target), and then dry brushed with Apple Barrel Pavement. The goal was to get as close to the worn look of rubber tires in actual service.

Comparing to real world examples - not too bad!

It was reasonably simple to put together. The only difficult part was getting the axels to fit into the chassis, since the slots to glue them in were narrower than the axel pieces. Fortunately, the axels are the same width as my very large file, so some elbow grease and a lot of unkind words eventually solved the problem. 

I admit to a slight bit of cheating on the photos. As many of you know, I've always been trying to get the pure black background Curt uses in his photos, and I think I have finally cracked it, by having Preview on my Mac remove the background, so the black of the blog shows through. It has worked on these photos, so we'll see how it works on more complex ones in future entries. 

Scoring:

• 1 28mm(ish) vehicle @20 points per = 20 points

So that's it! I'm on the board and 20% of my way to my goal, and I now have a BA-20 ready to zoom off and scout, or maybe just get blown up. Only the dice gods know.

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Sylvain: Remarkable vehicle and paint job. The amount of research you did to find that "perfect color" is impressive. Excellent travail!