"Fahrpanzer" Topic

Hi

I spent some time in the War Museum in Athens yesterday, and was more than a little taken with a little thing called a Fahrpanzer.

They were designed as a retractable fortress turret running on rails this one was used by the Bulgarians between 1894 and the end of WW1. The interesting thing is that these two are still on their transport carriages. I took quite a few pics and they are posted here -

colanhomm.org/Fahrpanzer

What struck me was the potential use for VSF or Pulp games possibly as some sort of armoured horse artillery

I made some rough measureasurments for anyone interested -

Large wheeldiameter 48"
Small Wheel 15"
Barrel section of Hull 40 " tall
Dome section about 18-24"
Barrel hull Diameter 36-40"
Overall width 70-80"
Hull armour 20mm
Hull to front (horse) end about 48"
Barrel hull to end of rails about 20"
Overall length 110 – 120"

To me all this was completely new, although now I'm home I find that Wikipedia has pages here.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrpanzer
and here
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrpanzer
The German language page is much more extensive but there is no direct transaltion

Matador models make one in1/72 but without the carriage


Hope it inspires you !

Pete

Splendidly wacky , bravo.

Steampunk Dalek?

Bet it can't climb stairs!

This is a very cool-looking item . . . and it would be great to have some on a VSF table top.

Thank you for the photos and details, sir. I presume that a number of people will be scratch-building quite soon.

-- Jeff

Sadly the Matador one is both out of stock and 1/72nd scale, but I am certainly going to be looking at a version in 15mm.

Googling Fahrpanzer and then selecting Images brings up a number of photos of them in situ, as well as this image

which will be of great help in scratchbuilding.

Pete

Looks like something the Quar would use too!

My first thought was "Dalek" too….

So glad you got photographs. Great research.

Dalek…

Every time I play World of Tanks, I think "Dalek". Pretty much any turret does it.

Interesting.

Very interesting.

My first thought was "Dalek" too….

And the rest of us are cursing Fred for saying it first. ;->=

Thanks, Guthrock!

Doug

How do you say "EXTERRRMINATE!!!" in Bulgarian?

Leland R. Erickson
Metal Express
metal-express.net

Looks like the goblin contraption from Labyrinth.

Looks like something the Quar would use too!

That's the first thing I thought too!

If anyone is interested, I wrote a booklet on these for the Continental Was Society a couple of years ago. I can put a copy up on Dropbox if people are interested. You can contact me at Ian dot dury at hotmail dot co dot uk
Ian

And I have just put the booklet on Dropbox for anyone who is interested
Ian

How do you say "EXTERRRMINATE!!!" in Bulgarian?

коля (kohl-YAH), maybe? There isn't really a Latin derivative equivalent like in English, but коля means impassionate killing. It's also the animal butchering word. A fairly decent equivalent. Plus it starts with a hard consonant; that's good for yelling commands.

Edit: My Cyrillic characters aren't coming across. It's "KO" then the "l" character that looks like a "JI" joined at the top (related to Greek lambda), and the "backwards R", which is the "ya" phoneme. (And, no the backward R is not an R. The R in various Cyrillic alphabets is related to the Greek Rho, and so it looks like a "P".)

Could be a browser or a website issue (in its metadata) for the usage of unicode charsets.

Good museum and normally very quiet.

These were also used on armored trains

Quiet is a bit on understatement. I was there on a Saturday, and apart from the staff, I think I saw one adult with a child and that was it.

However, I was glad to see an example of the military taking care of their own heritage rather than pencil-pushers bacon-slicing the budget until such places disappear.