Strike Dog: Russian Quad Mech

   

Not every model I make ends up on the cover of my novels, or at least not yet. Pokhodnaya Boyevaya Platforma or Object 295 appears in Strike Dog, Chapter 9, Assault: as the "big bad" that ruins the day for CASDA 5136.

In the past I've played WW2 wargames with Soviet forces. Despite reading a bunch of books about the history of the Eastern Front, my Russian language skills leave a lot to be desired. I know a handful of words and the odd phrase.

The usual yes, no, thank you, good-bye platitudes etc., but it's all Greek to me (pun intended).

Also, when I was doing the research I found that there's no one way of transliterating Cyrillic into Roman letters.

Worse still, the number of letters in each alphabet don't even match. So, if you take the phrase, "I can't read Russian," it looks like this when written in Cyrillic script:

Я не могу читать по-русски.

Transliterated from the Cyrillic alphabet into our Roman one, it comes out like this:

Ya ne mogu chitat' po-russki.

To my Western eyes this looks a lot like squiggly maths.

 

This model was nearly finished two years ago, when I planned on using Dream Pod ( Heavy Gears for my Bad Dog games. But, now I've gone up from 12mm to 15mm, this model is not that big when compared to the RAFM Gears.

So I may have to make another, larger model. We shall see.