SPG-9 Kopye

I received my M-103 tanks, and there will be a glorious posting on them once I paint them. The humidity has been very high the lately, so I don't want to spray anything, especially my preciouses!

Looking over my orders of battle for my fictional campaign, I realized that the Northern Chalupistan army called for a number of companies to be armed with the SPG-9 Kopye recoilless gun. It was lightweight and replaced the B-10 recoilless rifle. It is still used today by a number of former Soviet block countries, though probably not as a front line anti-tank weapon.

By Kolpag - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33909865

GHQ used to make one back in the 70s or 80s. Recoilless rifles are few and far between in microscale. Scotia-Grendel makes some generic ones, but I thought I'd try my hand to make it look closer to the real thing. Here is the result:

SPG-9 with GHQ Soviet RPG-7 gunner for scale.

This is the first completed one. It is made out of styrene round rods of various diameters. the main barrel is a 1mm rod, which is way too big. Its diameter is larger than the barrels of my M-103's 120mm guns! Unfortunately, the next size down that I have looks too thin. If I were to remake them, I'd go with maybe a 0.8mm rod for the main part of the barrel. One thing that I can pat myself on the back is that it is pretty much to scale length-wise.

Most of the gun is glued together with liquid modelling cement, which I am liking less and less. The glue is supposed to weld the pieces together, but on a couple of them, the conical breeches fell off. I glued them back on with superglue and hopefully they will stick. I do have rangefinders to glue on, but if I use figures like the one in the above picture, there is no reason to put them on.

Getting the height of the tripod is tricky. This one makes the gun too high off the ground. In pictures, it is much lower. Pictures show the gunner crouching down even more than the GHQ figure is in the above picture.

I have four more guns. Two will get tripods and be mounted on bases as support weapons. The trick is to find figures that look like they are firing the gun. The other two will be put onto technicals where I will glue on the rangefinders.