Thursday 11 November 2021

BP-44 Armoured Locomotive

 

The BP-44 was a WWII German armoured locomotive, used to propel mixed AA, anti-tank, artillery and infantry transport trains.

Germany didn't use armoured trains as much as others, such as the Soviet Union, but they did have some. Generally speaking, armoured trains tended to fall out of favour over the course of the war as road or tracked vehicles were more flexible and became ever more potent, and railway tracks were very vulnerable to sabotage and aerial attack.

This is a 1:100 scale model for 15mm gaming. It was designed by a chap called Tolawdjk, and came from Thingiverse.

I hollowed the model in Chitubox to 1mm walls, and it printed fine. However, it does flex very easily under finger pressure, having such large flat panels (curved surfaces being self-reinforcing) and it could probably do with some internal support structures. I've read that Chitubox can create infill structures that don't impede resin escape, but I can't figure out how to do that (I'm using the free version). I think probably the easiest option for me would be to save the hollowed model from Chitubox as STL, import it into Blender to add the support struts and/or bulkheads, cut a great big hole in the floor, and re-export it to STL.


And if you want to field a BP44 armoured train on your wargames table, but you can't be faffed actually modelling one, then you could just grab a bunch of clump foliage flock and dump it along the railway track :)

This was Pz75, surrendered to the Americans at Hagenow in May 1945.

Process Notes


1 comment:

  1. Great paintwork on that locomotive, and thanks for mentioning the colors and techniques.

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