In the 80s, the U.S. Army began to look for a light tank to replace the M551 Sheridan. Specifically, the Army was looking for an air-deployable tank to support its airborne Divisions and to replace their TOW anti-tank HMMWVs. In 1992, the Army selected United Defense’s vehicle designated XM8-AGS. Six prototypes were made and the M8 began trials. The basic armor package of the M8 is made of welded aluminum alloy, designed for rapid deployment and was capable of being airdropped from a C-130. There were 2 additional levels of modular armor planned for the vehicle depending on the threat level of the operating environment. Each additional level obviously increased the weight of the AFV, which decreased it’s “air mobility”, but still kept it light enough that at its maximum armor protection, up to 5 could be delivered via air landing on a C-5 Galaxy.

Thank you to the Eduard Company for sending this masking set for review, it is always a pleasure to see what your new products bring to the scale-modeling world. Thank you also to the IPMS Reviewer Corps staff members who do the hard work in getting us modeling products to review, the reviews posted, and the news spread to the world.

History

The first prototype of the Fw 190 took to the air on June 1st, 1939 but due to some minor faults (Ok, so there were enough problems that the RLM halted development) it was not accepted into the Luftwaffe until 1941. June 1941 saw the Luftwaffe accept the first 100 Fw 190A-1s that were armed with four 7.9mm MG 17s. November of 41 saw the next version, 190A-2, introduced with two MG 17s and two MG 151s of 20mm caliber in the wings. Part of this series received an additional pair of 20mm MG FFs. The A-2 was powered by the modified BMW 801 C-2 engine and problems with the engine rear bank of cylinders overheating were finally solved by the simple introduction of a ventilation slot on the two sides of the engine cowling as in the A-1 version.