Cartagena Military Museum : A Video Tour

[madaxeman]

Tucked away in the southern Spanish port city of Cartagena is a very nice little military museum, majoring on the Artillery arm of the Spanish Armed Forces, which I recently toured - and I've created a YouTube video of the most interesting stuff there, which is online at https://youtu.be/d4yOlpL7MFQ

The museum has an extensive collection of field guns, ranging from the 1800's up to the present day, displays on ammunition, sights and ranging devices, small arms, uniforms, as well as several historical dioramas and maps showing the growth and defences of the Cartagena naval bse through the ages.

The left-field highlight (for some) though is a collection of model tanks and fighting vehicles (every one representing a different model, marque or variant), all in what looks like 1/72nd scale, which were built by one man and which do/did hold the Guiness Book of Records title for being the largest collection of military models in the world.

The official website of the museum is here: https://ejercito.defensa.gob.es/unidades/Madrid/ihycm/Museos/cartagena.html

There's also a lot of great Roman, Medieval and Carthaginian stuff in Cartagena too for the history buff.

[sultanbev]

Wow, that 1/72 tank collection is about double mine! Although 200+ of them I've yet to paint....

[Big Insect]

There are some absolutely fantastic and 'mad' tanks in that collection.
Whether all of them were actually made, even as 1-off trail prototypes, must be debatable, but I'd love to see some of the 'funnys' - like the extra long British and Soviet tanks or the French tank with the giant front track-wheels included in some range or other, even if only as 3D prints.

Great report - as always Mr Porter     

[sultanbev]

There are some absolutely fantastic and 'mad' tanks in that collection.

In mine too. 3D prints are a great source of prototype and what-if models, most availabe in 1/100, 1/76, 1/72, 28mm. Whatever we think of War Thunder and World of Tanks, they have provoked research into archives worldwide of unusual subjects, and model makers have responded.
A recent example was War Thunder introduced the T-77, a 6-barrel .50" AA tank based on the Chaffee, which was actually built in real life, and sure enough a 3D print arrived on the market soon after, in this case from Sonic Miniatures over on ebay.

I even have some of the French fortress tanks in 10mm:

the foreground ones are Pendraken FCM-2c and Renault Char D2 just for size comparison

[sultanbev]

If anyone wants to know what any of the odd-ball model tanks are in that collection, post a screen shot and I'll give you the details (not the SCW armoured cars though, not well up on them)

[madaxeman]

There are some absolutely fantastic and 'mad' tanks in that collection.
Whether all of them were actually made, even as 1-off trail prototypes, must be debatable, but I'd love to see some of the 'funnys' - like the extra long British and Soviet tanks or the French tank with the giant front track-wheels included in some range or other, even if only as 3D prints.

Great report - as always Mr Porter     

I have a suspicion - based largely on guesswork and also the date of the "Record" - that all of these models might be made from commercially available kits or models of some sort.

My reasoning is that it seems many of these were done, and the Guinness Record noted too long ago for 3D printing to have been a thing, and also that if you could just make any old sh*t up and paint it then it wouldn't be that much of a challege (OK, obvious caveats apply!) to get to truly ridiculous numbers of tanks and AFVs to claim this "World Record"... so surely there must have been some sort of conditions or parameters applied to it?

[sultanbev]

"that all of these models might be made from commercially available kits or models of some sort. "

Oh they are, I recognise plenty of them. Some are resin, such as the Cromwell Models Articulated Nuclear Tank; some are plastic kits, the BT-5 with the 132mm rockets on the top-sides of the turret is a UM Models kit for example. I think there are some scratchbuilds, such as the Chrysler TV-8 tank (I don't recall seeing any kind of model of that)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_TV-8
and probably some of the SCW armoured trucks, but yes, I would be quite surprised if they were all scratch built from plasticard, milliput and hand cast wheels.

[Big Insect]

I did not articulate my question clearly enough - apologies.
What I meant by 'into production' was not as models, but as actual vehicles. e.g. are there some here that never left the drawing-board or did they all actually end up as an actual 1:1 model - even if only 1 was ever made.
Cheers
Mark

[sultanbev]

Ah I see.
The entire subject of what-if tanks, prototypes and the like have always been fascinating to me ever since reading Janes Armour & Artillery in the local library in the 1980s. The French were particularly productive for example, when you add up every turret variant of each APC model of the 1970s-2000s, it would be easy to get to a total of over 2000 unique AFVs since 1905, especially if including armoured cars.

The Tank Encyclopedia website does a good job of sorting the cut-in-metal from the fakes. The YT channel Armoured Archives
https://www.youtube.com/@armouredarchives8867/videos
is also very good on some of these, especially the 1950s-60s British.

I'm just happy that I can get 3d print models of many prototypes now.

Looking at the museum video, it's a mix, some were cut-in-metal, some just paper designs.