Wasteland Terrain & Russian T34/85 Medium Tanks from Warlord Games

Lately we completed a new batch of custom Wasteland Terrain and worked with David Dinsmore to begin production on some Warlord Games armor. All of these are now listed on Ebay for any who are interested. Look for Battleground-Hobbies on Ebay.

Each Terrain piece has a hard base made of MDF board and the top is carved polystyrene insulation board. We showed how these are built on a previous blog post.

Now about the T-34 series, with its sloping armor that changed the principles of tank design during the war. The sloping, angular layout of the T-34 increased the effective armor thickness, and also saw a larger proportion of shells deflected away than penetrated its armor.

The introduction of the T-34 into action saw German tank design follow suit with similarly angled armor on the likes of the Panther and King Tiger. As German tank design came to the fore, the Soviet war machine once again raised the bar with the T-34/85.

The T-34/85, the very symbol of Soviet military strength in the Second World War, had a new turret to house the more powerful 85mm ZiS gun. A supremely rugged and reliable tank, the T-34/85 had excellent off-road capability, especially in the marshland or snow of the Eastern Front, and was easy for the crew to operate and maintain.

The T-34/85's great strength lay in its adaptation of the T-34/76 tank design which preceded it. This ensured a far smoother and faster production line than would have been the case with a completely new design.

Another major advantage was the sheer number of tanks the Soviet tank factories could produce - by the summer of 1944 the Soviet war machine could produce more T-34/85s in a month than the Germans had Panther tanks in the whole of the Eastern Front!

With over 21,000 of the 57,000 T-34s built during WWII being T-34/85s, the Russian credo was clearly one of quantity over quality, although it was an unwise Panzer commander who discounted the ability of the T-34/85.

Now that our history lesson is over, you can see the job David did in painting these Russian Tanks! Here is another he completed, a US Sherman, also ready for sale.

We'll have a batch of German Armor very soon. Panther IVs, Stugs and a Hetzer are all on the way. If you have a request for a specific piece of armor you'd like painted, please let us know!

Have A Great Battle,
The Old Crow