Bolt action: Something Completely Different

Here we have the Warlord Games French Somua S35 heavy cavalry tank. It was the equivalent of the British A10 heavy cruiser or the Panzer Mk III, and in some ways a better tank than either. Its main deficiency was the ghastly ergonomics of the tiny turret and the high cost of manufacture.

By the standards of 1940 it wasn't a bad battle tank with decent armour and gun. It was unreliable but so were the British cruisers. With short production runs, everything was a prototype.

I couldn't resist painting it in a prewar French camo scheme. This one was derived from artillery usage. It was based on three colour palettes: sky colours at the top (pink, blue, lemon yellow), earth colours in the middle (sand, grass green, grey) and shadow colours at the bottom (dark brown, dark green, dark purple). This assumed that the observer was on the ground at a slightly lower elevation.

The white dots are safety features for night movement in column.

The French army put a stop to this smartish, possibly because the result didn't half stand out from the air (see pic below) or possibly because French tank commanders found it embarrassing motoring around the countryside in a vehicle painted like a tart's boudoir.