Today I review another AA unit for my West Germans- The Roland.
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| Roland Flugabwehrraketenpanzer. Photo from www.wikipedia.com |
History:
The Roland is a mobile Surface to Air Missile (SAM) platform. The missile was designed to protect high value targets like airfield. The platform was designed in a collaboration between Nord Aviation of France and Bölkow of Germany that began in the early 1960s. The planning an development was plagued with issues and delays and the Roland entered active service in the late 1970s.
The Roland Flugabwehrraketenpanzer was a modified Marder that mounted the Roland Launchers.
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| Photo from www.wikipedia.com |
Review:
The box comes with 2 Roland AA vehicles. These are the old fashioned resin bodies and turrets with metal tracks and weapons.
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| Box Cover |
The back of the box comes with a straightforward assembly diagram. There are 10 pieces to each vehicle. The pack also contains the unit card.
The 2 missile launchers glue to the side of the turret piece. This is fairly straightforward with some handy lugs to help align the pieces. A radar dish is then glued on top. The dish is made up of 2 parts. These are quite fiddly and require some patience to get right.
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| Box Assembly Instructions. |
For the body of the vehicle, I attached the tracks to each side. The tracks have lugs on them to meet recesses on the side of the hull, The tracks are also labelled R and L. Like the cover photos, I chose to leave the skirts of the sides of the vehicles.
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| Internal Packaging. |
The product was well packed and got to me in good condition. The packaging was the now standard plastic insert with lots of foam packing.
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| Box contents laid out. |
The only slight issue I had was the amount of flash and mold lines on the metal components. A fair amount of cleanup was required. However, no big deal, the models otherwise went together well.
Pictures:
Here are the pictures of the vehicles fully assembled. Stay tuned for my painting article.
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| Assembled Turret |
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| Assembled Hull. |
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| Vehicles without skirts. |
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