What's on your workbench?

[RMD]

Here's those Chaparrals (Team Yankee M113s in gopping green for scale):

[Purple]

Today I’ll be working on the statue of St Gaynor the Chaste for one of Aytons extravagant plazas.
Some village stocks.
And a precious orange tree...

[FreddBloggs]

Moderately similar to tracked Rapiers.

[goat major]

Today I’ll be working on the statue of St Gaynor the Chaste for one of Aytons extravagant plazas.
Some village stocks.
And a precious orange tree...

what scale are the oranges ?

[grizzlymc]

Make them the orange trees that decorate the plazas in argie. I asked the taxi driver why the kids didn't nick them and he explained that they were so bitter that all you could do with them was make jam with them. The Spanish for jam is mermelada and suddenly I understood things I had puzzled about as a kid.

[grizzlymc]

RMD, nice to see your only leopard hul. Surely the chaperal was vastly inferior to tracked rapier?

[RMD]

RMD, nice to see your only leopard hul. Surely the chaperal was vastly inferior to tracked rapier?

It's the Canadians' turn to have the Leopard hull today.

Yes, Tracked Rapier was a better system than Chaparral, but Chaparral was in service 10 years earlier. The UK and USA had originally been planning to adopt the Mauler SAM system, but when that project failed, the USA developed Chaparral and the UK developed Rapier. Like Challenger I, the British Army would never have got Tracked Rapier, had the Shah not been toppled in 1979 - those cancelled Iranian projects then got snapped up by the British Army.

Tracked Rapier was a considerable improvement on towed Rapier. The missiles and tracking systems were the same, but towed Rapier took an AGE to get into action - our RAF Regt Rapier guys used to take about 15 minutes to get into action on a flat surface (longer if they were distracted by bananas) and if it was sloped they had to level the ground! Tracked Rapier removed all of that faff. Mk 2 Rapier (which arrived in 1990 and is still going - soon to be retired though) was a considerable improvement on all of them.

[FreddBloggs]

Wasn't tracked Rapier the only British use of the M113 chassis as well, done so it could be exported more easily in theory?

[vexillia]

For the first time in what seems like ages I've spent the afternoon preparing some medieval Russian cavalry and some Afghan medium spearmen. The former are for my Lithuanian army and the latter are for my Timurid army.

Both are from Roundway. Sadly they need quite a bit of TLC mainly to remove mould lines and fill one or two troublesome gaps.

[Wg Cdr Luddite]

Tracked Rapier chassis was M548. not M113. Export options weren't really on MOD radar at this time.