Amusing Hobby 1/35 FV 214 "Conqueror" Mk 2

Model 3 of 4 for 2021! I'd have done more, but gestures widely life gets in the way.

The Conqueror was the last British heavy tank, armed with a massive 120mm rifled cannon and was intended to knock out Soviet IS-3s and T-10Ms flooding into northern Germany. Its American counterpart was the M-103 heavy tank, with which it shared its main gun. The Conqueror resembled a scaled-up Centurion tank, and it sported incredibly thick hull and turret armor, weighing in at 62 tons versus the Centurion's 52. Unfortunately, the Conqueror also used the powerplant of the Centurion, the Merlin-derived Rolls Royce Meteor. This lead to frequent breakdowns and sluggish performance, though by all accounts its cross-country performance was smooth and comfortable, even if it was too heavy for most bridges.

The one thing people always bring up with the Conqueror is the commander's cupola, which had its own range finder. Ideally, while the gunner was engaging one target, the commander was already searching for and providing a solution for a secondary target. Given that the rate of fire for the two-part projectiles was apparently five rounds a minute, this made operations neatly efficient. That's also about it when it comes to the Conqueror: it's big, it has a cupola and it broke down a lot. Then it was retired in favor of the Chieftain. The end! I suppose when you look at things in hindsight, the Conqueror was the perfect tank: it never fired a shot in anger, there were only a handful made and it was promptly removed from service. Ah well, as the old saying goes, better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

Like nearly everything else in Amusing Hobby's catalog, the biggest draw for this tank is online games, like World Of Tanks. I don't play it anymore (and neither should you because it'll drain your wallet and make you feel bad) but when I did I hated coming across these things in matches, because the players that used them understood how to use them: stay well back and hull down, snipe anything that comes into view and let your massive turret armor laugh off any incoming fire.

The kit is simple because the real deal is simple. It has a very nice Horstmann suspension with the optional parts and metal springs to make it workable, but this will all be hidden behind the side skirts. There really aren't many "petite" parts here because the Conqueror was such a massive tank, so all of its parts were over-built.

Weathering is going to be pretty light. These tanks never had extended deployments, they were retired fairly soon and they were being repaired a lot. Sloppy mud all over the undercarriage, a dust wash, a rust wash and petrol stains. Et Voila, a Conqueror.

17 additional images. Click to enlarge.