Cuckoo’s lay their eggs in other birds nests so the hapless surrogate parents end up looking after something other than what they expected.
There are some great photos of Cuckoo accompanying a line of Churchill’s draped in spare tracks.
Using confiscated enemy hardware was frowned upon officially.

I also came to comment about the cuckoo’s eggs in other bird’s nest thing but two people already pointed it out :/
Your pronunciation of Schürzen also wasn’t terrible actually.

Vegetables were not rationed.
So the prize for the favourite tank competition is my favourite tank and it looks like it’s the first release of the recent crop of plastic tanks announced by warlord. Pretty much settles the dilemma of which one to buy first for me.

I noticed you’d won when Warlord put it in their newsletter. Your winning vid made me smile as well. Congrats John!

My wild guess is that condoms were not rationed in the UK during WWII. Insert “No sex please, we’re English” jokes here.

Does ausf. A mean “revision 1”, mk1, etc.?

Even more valuable to American tank crews than the shells were the hatches at the bottom of the tank. In fact when the M1 Abrams was introduced it caused some consternation with the crews since it was the first tank in ages without the “disposal” hatch.

Yes Ausf is short for ausfuhrung which is model or varient. They were not released in alphabetical order though. The first one released was the Ausf D.

Congrats on the victory John. Nice looking kit. Hope to see it finished and painted up in the near future.

I know Bread was not rationed until after the war and it is where we get Wholemeal bread from (i think, might be wrong). Also, I don’t think fish was rationed, but it did become more expensive, but on the plus side, Britain did get Snoek fish and Whale meat.

I think it was ‘Waffle ‘ pattern Zimmerit.

Nice new models and a history lesson all rolled in to one.

The chin on the G mantlet was to get rid of the shot trap – rounds bouncing off the thick mantlet could penetrate the thinner roof or the hull.
A pity they forgot to incorporate the protected ammo on the sides of the Panther’s hull – that area became the target of choice for Allied and Soviet gunners.

A lot of the components feel very similar to the PSC panther. I wonder if they’re working from the same file, and Italeri/Warlord just took advantage of the scale to add zimmerit and some tiny details.

Congrats on the video win, John. I’m sure being able to include a “1:1 scale” Sherman got Warlord’s attention. 🙂
That Panther, though, is about the sexiest damn miniature I’ve seen. Well, except for maybe this Kingdom Death pinups. I know, put a KS Pinup as a Panther’s commander . . .

Yes, there were too many intelligent posts on this thread. Time to bring it back down a little. 😀

John: Panther’s main gun was a KwK L70 or L71 7.5cm, depending. Oh, THANK you, though for pointing put how the Panther’s gun actually had more armor piercing penetrating power than the L56 8.8cm on the Tiger I. Ek=mv squared, kinetic power (armor busting) has a lot more to do with velocity than the caliber of the gun. That said, once the L70 88s started coming out the Japdgpanther, King Tiger, Nashorn, etc . . . they blew the Panther’s gun away. Now I read this once, but don’t know how true it is . . . someone told me… Read more »

Didn’t know tanks were either left or right handed drive. Seriously, never. Friggin’ learn something new every day. Thanks! (And yes, this stuff is hella-interesting 🙂 ). Great commentary on the Panther’s debut at Kursk, John. 🙂 The unit most infamous in this regard was the ill-fated 10th Panzer Brigade, attached to XLVIII Pz Corps, 4th Army, with 200 spankin’ new Panthers (hmm … they still had that new Panther smell). Half of them blew up thanks to the engine and exhaust problems you describe, many of the survivors ran into an undiscovered minefield. suffice it to say the Germans… Read more »