Barbarosa!!!!! No, not the Willie Nelson movie. Although its worth seeing.

Hi Kids, Around here we've been talking about Barbarosa for the past couple years. I'm intending to build some forces for 25mm Disposable Heroes games, and some 15mm stuff for Flames of War too.  If it's good enough for one scale, its good enough for two!  I decided to go whole hog and get some big honkin' units for the smaller scale, especially when I discovered The Warstore carries Zvezda kits! These BT-5's were only about $3.60 each!  Only about 5 parts so they go together in a freakin' snap! I didn't bother checking the unit sizes in FOW Barbarosa, so instead of maxing out at 16 tanks I only ordered 15.  Oh well.  Guess I'll be ordering at least two more, one to be #16 and another to be the HQ tank.

 Here we have a shot of the first batch of BT-5's!  Although Commie tanks tend to be green, I'm a sucker for camo.  And in this scale it's a snap!  I'm undecided whether I should paint the tanks a steel or grey color.  Usually I do but that's a lot of work.

With this many tanks in one unit I decided to at least make an attempt to avoid confusion and number the damn things.  I ordered some Soviet AFV numbers from I-94 Enterprizes. For $3 you can get two sheets loaded with numbers. I think they look pretty good! Highly recommended!  I only had one misbehave, flip over and become unusable.  In the future, if I ever build another BT-5 unit, (unlikely since they are about 1000 points for this many) I will put the decal on the flat part of the turret side. And these kits have only been lurking in the Basement for about a month or two!

So what does everybody think?  Should I paint the tracks or leave them black?