Scratchbuilding C&Cs Mammoth Tank

[sassgrunt]

You might want to look at a "splatter screen" that's sold for cooking. It's pretty inexpensive, and had aluminum screen with a very nice diamond-shaped pattern (we call it "expanded metal" here in the US). Once you remove the outer frame, you are left with a large circle of screen that you can cut easily with scissors. I've used it as walkway treadplate on trucks, but it might look good in conjunction with your grill. -Mike

[dylan9391]

Hi Munty, this is excellent and from ordering plastic to starting the build hasn't taken long at all. I've been stirred into something and just started my fibreglass 1/6 Hetzer. I've made the hull bottom and it came off the wooden mold (a bonus), so gotta to make the top. ll post a photo when I get a chance.

[Munty]

Thanks for the grill advice guys Will definitely be trying the cheap shop in town as a place to source that from! Still not sure about how to offer it more protection in the rear but thanks for all the ideas. I've made some great progress on my other project yesterday so I'm back on the mammoth today. My goal is to finish the 2 rear track housings I've started so I'll post up images of them if I do!

First though I have to do the housework Boring though it is it does need doing and bearing in mind 50%~ of the floor is covered in styrene filings I think I owe it to the other half anyway lol

Dylan, soudns great, can't wait to see how you get on! Who knows, maybe the enxt step for me is a 1/6 mammoth lmao would be friggin awesome!

[Munty]

I've only met half of my quota today but I think I'm on track to hit my target by the time it's up. I have one of the 4 track housings completed and 3/7 parts cut out for the second one. The remaining parts are only small so it won't take long to finish up the second one but I'm taking a break right now. It's a very strange trait of mine that I seem to get distracted from projects mostly when things are going very well

Anyway I'm sick of posting all my updates late at night so I thought I'd do it now instead, there won't be much to add this evening anyway so the next update will probably come when all 4 tracks are done!

So when I stopped last time I'd cut the inner sides and tops of both rear tracks but that was it so first job for today was to cut the outer sides. I'm taking increasingly to the scoring and breaking method of removing long pieces from the sheet as it saves a lot of time spent sawing/dremelling/filing/sanding! That's how I got these parts from the sheet and it went by very quickly!

Now there are an awful lot of angles involved here as none of the pieces you'd imagine to be lined up with each other actually are. There is a slight camber on the top of each piece that rolls down towards the ground from being flush with the top of the hull. It's still all straight lines but it made assembly rather difficult and I didn't even know where to start with sanding on the chamfers! In the end I temporarily taped one side together in the form that I'd be building the other. It gave me a visual aid to judge the angles involved and was very helpful!


Here are all 7 parts laid out in flatpack, looks simple enough right?


In the end I decided to work from one side rather than the top as this gave me almost perfect 90degree angles to start with. Here are the front and rear pieces in place.


The other side attached,


And the top in place, it was a perfect fit which I was rather impressed by!


I've actually slightly altered the original design at the back of these parts which can be seen in this next image. The large flat back piece should actually have another smaller strip at the bottom, angled inwards, much like a reflection in a puddle of the one on top. I figured this way it'll give more space for me to play with the track configuration and quite simply is ever so slightly easier to build! I have excess material this way so I can always revert to the original plans at a later date.


Now the small filler at the rear (above) was actually a very nice size and fitted rather snugly. The one in this image was almost 2mm too narrow on the outside edge though as I'd had to file that much off the larger piece fitted below it earlier. Should've seen it coming really... With a little sanding and careful work with the Dremel it achieved a fairly good fit but I may well revisit it later. At least it will be at the back of the model when it's finished!!!


I tried to get a good example shot of how the finished tracks may look here but wasn't really able to. Here's the best I got but it doesn't quite show off the scale as I'd hoped it would. Still some more shots in a moment should do that!


And here's one of them! I decided to put together the bits I had so you can see the gigantic turret base here for the first time along with the new tracks. Everything is mocked up as it will be in the end result but I must confess it looks very ugly at this point. The sheer size of the turret bottom is what's causing it I think but once everything is finished that won't be a problem anymore.


Here's one from the front with the cardboard track guard and the other unbuilt one mocked up in place. This is the kind of view a giant would get just before it had it's legs mangled beyond repair.


A nicer image from the side showing an almost perfect profile minus the turret. Add the cannon to this veiw and you have the full length of the build!


And finally a shot to put the newly completed part into perspective! This is where it will fit, right next to the death star grill!


I thought now was a good time for another scaled comparison with my little baby Tiger tank so I sat it next to the base of the Mammoth's turret. The ruler is there representing one of two main cannons and is 40cm long!


Will get on with the otehr side today and hopefully be able to show off all 4 of them finished soon. I'll at least have them done by the time the weekend is up as I have time off from the nipper on Sundays

Thanks for watching, input as always please. It's the only way to make things better! T

[Von kraftwerk]

you're doing well,in the track mock up pic,is the sprocket going to run on ground,or is that just there to for demo,anyway those track/running gear housings look like Maus,don't they?you mentioned welds a while back,best left until you've got it all together,then think about it then,what do reckon?

[Munty]

Thanks VK. Based on existing artwork, the drive wheels actually ARE on the ground so that's something I'll need to overcome at some point by either changing the design or coming up with a sprung drive-wheel! And they do look rather Mausy don't they? The enclosure of the tracks is good for me though as it means I can make the suspension and drive components somewhat less than perfect without it detracting from the overall appearance of the build! And yes I think regarding welds it will be easier to see later on but I think it's something I'd really like to do to add some detailing to the build.

[majordisastor]

Great work - Its really interesting watching you figure all this out.

Your scale comparrison with the 'baby ' Tiger is a reall y usefull visual gauge- with this project on the battlefield it would even put the wind up the 1/6th boys !!

Andy

[Munty]

Thanks MD glad you're enjoying it so far, hope you keep watching

I must say I'm having trouble with the scaling at the moment as the plans I'm working to don't really work with the actual dimensions required. Thankfully that's a problem that's only really prevalent in one area but it's a BIG problem in a serious area s I'm not sure how I'll tackle it yet.

The problem I'm faced with is the armament... As I've mentioned before I can't find any existing tank-mounted weapons that are much in excess of 120mm. That scales down to less than 8mm on a turret that's over 30cm wide with barrels 40cm long... That equates to 6.4m long barrels firing very standard 120mm shells and that doesn't sit right with me. Besides, why on earth would such a gigantic tank be built in the first place if it had such basic weapons?

Scaling up from my 1:16 plans gives me a barrel size of about 260mm internally and 448mm externally which is just enormous. A quick search on Wiki found the following which I will quote here as handy reference to my dilemma...
"The largest shells ever fired were those from the German super-railway guns, Gustav and Dora, which were 800 mm (31.5") in calibre. Very large shells have been replaced by rockets, guided missile, and bombs, and today the largest shells in common use are 155 mm (6.1 inches)."

So we're a full 10cm larger than today's biggest shells and more than quarter of the way to railway gun sizes! Further down the same article I found this snippet
" a 280 mm (11") battleship shell about 300 kg"

So maybe that's what we're dealing with? Very often, the same armament was used by tanks, warships and even coastal defences so why not stick a couple of naval guns on a super-heavy tank hull and call it a Mammoth tank? And for the history buffs here (I imagine that's most of you!) I have to point out that I don't agree that 11" is a battleship shell, that's just what wikipedia says

So moving on (and I realise that I'll probably have solved this dilemma by the end of this post at this rate) what was a common size of gun used in the Russian navy during the cold war? That's the time and place that the Mammoth tank originates so why don't we take their fleet strength as an indication of what sized armaments would be commonly available at the time...

Wikipedia tells me that the Russian Navy was heavily retrofitted with rockets and missiles during the coldwar and that they did a lot of work with nuclear reactors at the same time. The Mammoth tank has surface to air and surface to surface missile capabilities so we seem to be on the right track...

Having trouble finding any specifics on the Soviet surface fleet after WW2 which is odd but given that 11" is a fairly good match for what I'm looking at I think that's what we'll go with. I'll look at exactly what machinery needs to be in place to supply and fire an 11" gun but I know most of it already. The majority of the components that occupied a naval turret were hoists and such for the handling of shells and powder which had to be seperated to prevent flash from penetrating shots. Given that a tank such as the mammoth will be heavily armoured everywhere, penetrating shots are no major concern, plus and penetrating shot when you're in a tank is likely to blow everyone inside to hell...

So I'd assume the massive hull would be packed with ammo for the main 11" guns while the rockets were reloaded automatically from stores in the top of the turret. Maybe from a rack system so they would be suspended over the crew's heads. Turret armour on this monster would be incredible and again, 13m makes for a very large tank but an explosion inside will fill every corner of it so no need to seperate your explosives as you're dead anyway!

So yes, the problem I've been having is how big to make the guns and the solution is to make them friggin' huge 11" cruiser guns!

Hope you enjoyed my journey of discovery for the night

[majordisastor]

I think your thinking is on the right course - using existing Navel guns would make perfect sense.
I wonder - like the King Tiger development if the platform would be designed around the gun??

Keep those thoughts coming !!

Andy

[Munty]

Thanks for the input Andy, I'm not familiar with the development process of the King Tiger so I'll look into it tomorrow. I'm trying to find some reliable sources on naval guns so I can get an idea of how large an 11" cannon would typically be. I have a barrel length which I can't change after all so I need to find a naval gun that's about that size. Of course naval guns of the cold war could fire a ruddy long way with great accuracy so for a tank they could quite easily chop a portion of the barrel off but then the fire control would be much more basic due to lack of elevation which wasn't a problem at sea.

I want to get an idea of lots of the technical details as I continue to work on this as I'm faced with a task of not only building a scale model but also fleshing out the vehicle it represents. So how was it built and why? What was it's purpose and how did it perform? What was the armament and armour adn why? Range, ammunition, crew? I'd like to get an idea about all of that by the end but right now it's the power-plant that's bugging me (as I'm happy with the guns for now )

I'd like to use the Abrams gas-turbine both because it's unique and because in the C&C series of computer games the 'Medium Tank' is based heavily on the Abrams. It would make sense then if the Mammoth was a further development of the Abrams then but sadly the Mammoth is a Soviet project built at a time when America weren't too friendly with them so I don't know if I can justify that...

An additional difficulty is that I'd like to make the engines visible through the rear grill to take advantage of that feature and also add depth and detail to the whole thing. I can only do that if I can find an appropriate model kit though and I'm having trouble with that too...

Will be back on this again tomorrow but I'm going to leave wikipedia and google alone now and let the thinking continue uninterrupted while I catch some Z's