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In his continuing series of walkarounds, Chris “Toadman” Hughes has concentrated this volume to the German Anti-Tank guns of World War II. There are recent kit releases of the 37mm PaK 35/36, 50mm Pak 38, 75mm PaK 97/38, and 75mm PaK40 from Dragon, Italeri, and AFV Club, this is an opportune time to get this CD.
If you are using a Windows platform, the CD should start by itself to take you on a journey of the guns. I prefer to look at the images in a graphics program so as to be able to manipulate them. For this, I right click on the CD drive and click on Explore. This opens a folder where I can then right click on a file, ‘open with’, and choose the graphics program. Using a graphics program will let me zoom in, change the gamma or increase the brightness of an image.
Now, let’s get back to this CD. Inside, there are 239 photos with four GIF files used as a background. The 37mm gets 77 photos in great detail. The 50mm is represented with 22 photos. Both 75mm guns, the PaK 97/38 and the PaK 40 have 63 and 77 photos respectively.
The photo quality is excellent with a good resolution at 300dpi and a nice size of 1504 by 1000 pixels. This translates into clear images when printed. Most of the pictures on this CD were taken at the Military Vehicle Technology Foundation (MVTF) also known as Jacques Littlefield’s collection. The PaK 40 photos were taken by Chesapeake Model’s Bill Miley and passed on to Toadman by Joe DeMarco.
The autoplay feature has the user come to a table of contents which allows one to view the acknowledgement page. Here, one can find a bibliography, reference sources, and mission statement. This CD was created with the modeler in mind…and it shows.
Upon clicking on the Main Table of Contents, a new table of contents appears for different guns. Each then directs the user to another table of contents which list each of the photos pages. Each HTML page has simple but interesting captions which point out details as well as a navigation which allows one to go to the next page, the previous page, the sections table of contents, or the main table of contents. Certainly a well thought out plan.
Quite interesting are the pedigree of some of the guns. For example, the small caliber PaK was used by Finland. Chris even opened one of the boxes to allow the viewer to see the contents. I quickly noted details on the wheels that need to be changed on the Dragon kit but also that the wheels have a cutout which I thought was for the tire’s air valve. However, the air valve appears directly across from it. I only missed seeing the stampings on the gun barrel itself. Chris did a superb job of documenting the others.
Similar attention was paid to each of the guns. Almost all details are covered. One should never forget that these are restorations and, as accurate as MVTF usually is, compare the photos to period photos to ensure authenticity. As an example, some photos show what appear as nuts yet the MVTF’s examples have screw heads.
This CD-Rom is one of many references which I am really happy to have acquired. At the asking price, it is certainly a bargain when one considers that the average ten dollar book only gives about a 125 photos at most. I highly recommend the Toadman Walkarounds for any modeler whether on a budget or not! Get your copy by visiting: http://www.toadmanstankpictures.com/
Now, how long must we wait before we see an in depth coverage of the 88mm guns?
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