Ron writes about British light tanks (WWII and earlier):
Oooo ta, I'll look into those. Hadn't heard about them obviously.
That's what I meant. Lots of models of T-34's and a fair number of KV-1's and even the Fujimi KV-2, but nothing of the numerous T-26 or BT variants, no T-28, no T-35, no IS-1 or IS-2, none of the many light tanks used by the Soviets in WWII. There were a few not-too-good kits of the IS-3, which technically was a WWII tank even though it entered service only in the last few days of the war.
Now that I think of it, there were some kits of Soviet self-propelled guns, mostly from Tamiya, but none of the most numerous: the SU-76.
Now, happily, there's a whole flood of new kits on WWII Soviet stuff. Still no kits of BT's in 1/76 or 1/72 that I've seen, although there are some in
1/35 now.I used to have a pair of the original Tamiya T-34/85 kits in 1/35. Yuck. Motorized, rubber band tracks. Must have been late 1960's or early 1970's, probably about the same time as their old T-10. The Tamiya KV-1 kit was a huge improvement.
The M3 Grant wasn't earlier than the M3 Lee.
I have a bunch of resin kits from around 20 years ago, but they haven't held up well. Most of the fenders are broken, many of the track sections have broken in one or more places, and all of the gun barrels have broken at least once. More than that, I don't really enjoy building the resin kits, so they don't do much for me.
I looked over some of the new resin kits at the Fall In game show near Baltimore this past weekend. Looks like they've vastly improved the gun barrels, reinforcing them with metal, and some of the kits had thicker and more robust track and fender bits, but some of them looked pretty fragile still.