Review: Battlefront Lorraine Schlepper

Today I schlep a new unit for my DAK force.

Box Art

History:
The Lorraine Schlepper was created in 1942 as a self propelled heavy artillery support for the Afrika Korp. The chassis was from a Lorraine Carrier, captured from France in 1940. The Carriers were converted to accept the 15cm sFH 13. The superstructure was made in German but installed on the vehicle in France before being shipped to Africa in 1942. The vehicle provided much needed artillery support that could keep up with the mobile Afrika Korp.

Schlepper in North Africa

Due to the weight balance and recall from the 15cm gun, the vehicle was fitted with a distinctive spade at the back. This spade was retractable and was lowered when the Schlepper was fired to prevent it from moving backwards.

Captured Schleppers (background) in a British depot

The Schleppers first saw battle on 30th August 1942 with the 15th Panzer Division. Three were lost in this action. The remainder of the vehicles were lost and captured at El Alamein.

Back of the box

Review:
This is one of the new v4 box sets that accompanied the release of the new German list book. These new unit box sets now seem to be the standard for Battlefront. Rather than releasing individual blisters, Battlefront have packaged up enough vehicles for the whole unit and added the new v4 cards. I really like this new packaging. Gone are the days of needing to hunt up enough blisters for a unit.

Cards

The box contains 4 Lorraine Schleppers, 2 of the new plastic crew frames and 2 unit cards - a Schlepper card and a Panzer II observer card. Sadly no decals.

Parts arrayed.

The Schleppers themselves are resin and metal. I believe these are the old sculpts previously seen in the old blisters. These models went together well enough but needed a bit of cleanup. Each model is made up of a resin body, 2 metal tracks, a metal 15cm gun and the rear trail. The contact points for the spade is very small. I scored both contact points of the chassis and the trail in order to provide the best possible bond. The gun mounting points needed to be slightly bent in order to fit correctly on the vehicle.

Assembled

The crew are new. They are the new soft plastic range from battlefront. Whilst I like the move to plastic, I think there is a little room for improvement here. The face lack some of the detail we have come to expect from the old battlefront metal models. I hope that Battlefront will continue to work on these plastic models and end up with a product as good as the old metal figures.

Forward Hans.

Painting:
I followed my standard Afrika Korp scheme for this unit. I painted the crew separately. This is a departure from my normal process. I normally paint the crew after sticking them in. Separately worked much better. Despite some of the feedback I have seen from others, I had no problem with paint adherence to the plastic figures. They accepted paint and a wash really well.

Crew Painted

With my painting area still a work in progress after moving house, I haven't yet located my box of decals. Rather than delay this review, I have snapped the photos without decals. I will apply some once I manage to locate them.

Conclusion:
Overall I like this box, the real positive is that it contains a whole unit worth of models complete with cards. It would have been nice for some decals to be included but these can be sourced from the standard DAK decal pack. I also think the plastic crew is the way forward. However I think these crew will benefit from some more development from Battlefront. I look forward to building some more v4 box sets.

I hope you enjoyed this review!