Aeroplast 1/35th BM-8-24 Rocket Launcher

The Soviets, among others, made heavy use of rocket artillery in World War Two because rocket systems were generally simple, light, mobile, and offered enormous firepower in the opening salvo. Rocket artillery has certain disadvantages like long reload time, highly conspicuous smoke trails, and relative inaccuracy, but as a shock weapon in breakthrough battles rocket artillery can be pretty devastating. Most Soviet rocket artillery took the form of the truck-mounted Katyusha, but here's a piece of pocket artillery in the form of 24 launch rails for 82mm rockets mounted on the chassis of a T-60 light tank.

The Aeroplast kit comes molded in medium-soft dark grey styrene. The kit includes the normal sprues for a T-60 light tank supplemented with two sprues for the BM-8-24 version. Both solid and spoked road wheels are provided; I used the spoked versions because I liked how they looked. The tracks are link-and-length, not normally my favorite things, and as usual the teeth in the drive sprockets didn't fit though the holes in the tracks.

The kit is reasonably well detailed. It isn't on the level of a Dragon or late Tamiya kit, but it isn't bad. The rockets are a little chunky and the stabilization fins in particular are thick, but if you squint it isn't too noticeable. The worst part of the kit are the instructions. They cover the assembly of the basic chassis well enough, but when you get to the launch rail assembly, the instructions turn maddeningly vague. In the end I worked out the assembly sequence on my own because I couldn't make heads or tails of the cramped, overly-busy drawing Aeroplast supplied. An annoyance is how the elevation links for the launch rails limits you to the maximum elevation shown in the photograph. Someday I'm going to cut out the short link so the rails can be elevated higher, but not today.

I painted mine Krylon olive drab and sprayed the undercarriage with medium-brown acrylic paint with a toothbrush so I could reasonably claim that the vehicle had driven through fresh mud and thus didn't need to have its tracks painted. It could probably use a bit more brown sprayed on the undercarriage, but it isn't bad. Otherwise, there isn't much to finishing the vehicle: a little scrubbing with some pastels, a little pencil lead rubbed on the launch rails, and Bob's your uncle. The instructions do not specify a color scheme for the rockets so I hunted around on the Internet and found a picture of a Soviet rocket launcher with silver rocket tubes and black fin and nozzle assemblies. I went with the photograph even though my hunch is that the rockets probably should have been Russian armor green as well.

All in all, it's a nice small kit (almost 1/72nd scale in size) of an unusual subject. The rocket rails aren't easy to assemble and I don't like link and length tracks, but other than that, it went together fairly nicely and it adds some much-needed novelty to my shelf.