If the world works in mysterious ways, why would you expect anything less from its smaller inanimate cousin? Case in point, Modelcollect, and their soon-to-be-released take on the German Landkreuzer, an outlandishly proposed project that took form towards the latter stages of World War II and was intended to be the “be-all and end-all” of armored fighting vehicles. Going well beyond the idea of a so-called “land battleship”, the Landkreuzer was, nevertheless, a foolish idea that never got beyond the sketch book stage. It called for two and perhaps three main guns that rivaled anything on a warship, as well as a series of secondary armament designed to protect the vehicle from both aerial and ground attack. The reality was that the vehicle would never be able traverse the battlefield, could not transit bridges, roads or railways, and would need a battery of high-powered engines to get it to run fed by fuel reserves the Wehrmacht no longer possessed. Likewise, the Landkreuzer would have required an inordinate number of men to operate, all of which could have been better suited in other roles.
Despite its massive size and misguided aim, model company Modelcollect has been feverishly working on a 1:72 scale replica of what the Landkrezuer might have looked like had it been completed. In the accompanying image, they even posed their finished project alongside two other fairly large 1:72 scale vehicles, just to give everyone an idea as to its size, perspective and finished appearance. As you can see, the Landkreuzer is absolutely huge, requiring a vast amount of shelf space to properly display. Its still not clear if the Company will offer a pre-assembled or even partially assembled version of this build to the diecast collector market or consign it to the model kit sector. If they do, it will be costly, not just in terms of price but in terms of shipping, likely weighing in along the lines of a 1:16 scale Extreme Metal tank previously made available by Unimax. Keep all of this in mind should you decide to chase this replica down later this year.