More Tiger I for Flames of War

 A couple of years ago I acquired three late Tiger Ie tanks for a sweet price.  I painted them up and added them to the collection but I really had no idea what to do with them.  To make matters worse I was not playing any late war armies and as a result they never made it to the table.  With the release of the Bridge by Bridge supplement for Flames of War I found a use for these tanks as well as a reason  to buy even more - Kampfgruppe Hummel.

The core of this army list are Tiger I tanks.  But they are not your usual killer Tigers that FoW is know for.  No Tiger Ace skills, no wide tracks but they do get Unreliable and Confident Trained.  The tanks are only 149 points each, which means you can have lots of them but the lack of abilities means that they are just tanks.  In late war armor 9,8,2 is not really very good.  Even with these drawbacks the idea of fielding a company of ten Tigers was too much to resist!

Here we have the next three Tigers for this force.  These are all Battlefront models.  I would have gone with Plastic Soldier Company if I did not already have three BF models.  The BF models are pretty good but they are starting to show their age (as are nearly all the BF metal/resin  models).

The company commander is the Michael Wittman model from Battlefront.  I was really disappointed in this model. I was really hoping that this would be a variant of the standard Tiger I model but it is actually the same one you get in the blister.  For this model I used the commander figure from the old GE072 Tiger I from BF (this is the old Kursk Tiger that is OOP). 

With all the hatches open there is no doubt as to who the boss is.  The only problem with modeling the tank this way is that it is hard to turn the turret - but it looks cool!  On this tank I tried to model the front fender extension in the up position.  This was a pain but it turned out OK. 

The next tank was modeled with no fenders. It turns out that this was extremely rare for Tigers.  It seems that these tanks were really babied.  Since this force if for late war and comprised of salvaged tanks it seemed appropriate.  If anything the other tanks are in too good of shape but I plan to use these for several different armies so it is all good.

 The last tank in this set has lots of extra track section added.  This may be a little a-historic but I did find examples of this (just not all on one tank).  With the power of the late war guns it seem logical that any extra protection would be welcome.  The 17lb gun really makes short work of these tanks.

Next for this project are four more Tigers.  The plan was to do these as the early Tiger I and paint some for Eastern front and at least one for Tunisia.  I am thinking that I might get one more of the late Tiger and then build a couple of franken-tigers as these were very common with KG Hummel.  These are Tigers with a mix of early and late features reflecting their cobbled together nature.

It never ceases to amaze me how good my models look in person (IMO) and how bad they look in high resolution photos.  Just proof that my camera is better than my eye.