1:35 T-55/T-55A

A tactical number has rules of its own

On the T-55 medium tank the most conspicuous marking tends not to be the national insignia but the three-figure white number on the side of the turret. In the formations of the Warsaw Pact this was no random figure: the first digit as a rule pointed to the company, the second to the platoon and the third to the particular machine in it, so a commander knew from the side who was in front of him. The numbers were painted with a stencil, had narrow and austere strokes and on exercises they were often painted over, because the real structure of the unit was masked by them.

What the sheet contains

There is one sheet of insignia masks and masks for the wheels with it. The red star appeared on these machines sparingly, more on parades and on vehicles shown to allies, whereas in the field the combination of a number and a white band on the turret was commoner. The mask settles both all the same, because a sharp stencil edge is decisive on such simple geometric shapes. A hand-painted point of a star is spotted at once in this scale.

Rims, not tracks

The T-55 stands on five pairs of large road wheels with an aluminum rim and a rubber tire around the circumference. That tire is precisely the reason why on ground equipment it is the running gear that is masked and not the track: the rubber has a different shade from the hull, the boundary between them is perfectly circular and nobody will make it cleanly freehand. The track, by contrast, gets rust and dust, on which no sharp boundary is looked for. To that is added a practical point: the wheels on a model are usually glued on last and can be painted separately, whereas the track is threaded over the whole running gear and any transition on it would be broken during assembly. The stencil therefore aims where it makes sense and leaves the rest to pigments.