Karl Morser	Dragon, 1/35
by Stephen Amstrong

Description

As a fan of anything German I recently finished the 1/35 scale Dragon Karl Morser and thought you might like to see the end result.

This vehicle is not seen that often in mags for whatever reason and when it was purchased for me as a Christmas present I thought, happy days, time to clear the workbench!

The box is rather large which I think adds to the excitement of opening it like a kid at Christmas. On doing so there is a rather large number of sprues which are of course scrutinised like we all do on opening a new kit.

The box art shows the vehicle ready to fire but this is incorrect as the suspension is lowered. For actual firing the suspension would have been raised to take part of the recoil which as you can imagine would be quite considerable.

Seven of these large beasts were built six for active service and one for training. They were named Adam, Eve, Thor, Odin, Loki and Ziu. The one depicted on the box is Loki but there are decals for all six. I cant see any difference in the vehicles and think they were just named as they came of the production line. Interestingly these vehicles had inter changeable barrels. The 54cm was used for range but there was also a 60cm barrel available for a heavier punch, both of course could flatten a building with ease. The best known action of these vehicles was at Sevastopol where I believe two where used along with a variety of other large calibre guns.

The vehicles where transported mainly by rail suspended between to carriages by two crane like arms and the lifting eyes are present on the kit. The vehicle also had an engine, a Daimler-Benz v12 for travelling short distances and the average weight of a shell was one and a half tonnes the vehicle weight itself was 124 tonnes.

The build process is as would be expected from Dragon is pretty straight forward, but I would suggest that the hand rails on each side be left off until the rest of the kit is completed as they snag on everything during the painting process. The kit builds up in large sections that all come together at the end this is very helpful due to the fact that because it is so large, manoeuvring it around the work bench for painting and spraying can be awkward at times hence leaving the hand rails off which are quite delicate.

Paints used were Tamiya and Vallejo and the figures are mainly Mini Art.

Enjoy!