Since some of the sources seem to be a bit vague and I am far from an expert, I thought I might pose a few of my basic questions here.

Was a Daimler-Benz VK30.02 ever fitted with a turret? Was this vehicle a soft-steel mock-up, or an actual production vehicle which was then of course, halted? Were there only two?

The famous photos of the DB factory after the war illustrate a single hull sans turret. I suppose if any model were a legitimate candidate for the very fashionable "Red Menace" (as I call it) finish, this might be it.

I am disappointed to see that the Amusing Hobby kit does not have the correct running gear and has torsion bars instead of leaf springs. I suppose I could live with that... With that said, this strikes me as more of a "What if?" model than a model of the actual vehicle.

Have any of you built the kit? Thoughts?

If there were two at DB, I am thinking that if a turret were indeed available, it might have been fitted and sent out. With that said, I would propose that it would be far more "accurate" to provide it with the DB three-color camo finish, which seems to have been employed up to the very end.

As an aside, it's occurred to me that the famous photo of the camo-ed Panther F Schmalturm roughly follows the same DB camo pattern as applied to Panther G turrets. So it might stand to reason that a "realistic" finish for a VK30.02 with turret might follow that general pattern.

Thank you in advance for your comments.

I build the kit, and it was actually very nice. The running gear didn't match the one photo, so it is purely an imaginary tank as shown. I don't think the turret was ever actually installed. It includes some extras, like optional muzzle breaks and a turret stowage bin, so you can depict the tank as it could have appeared had it gone into production. The decal sheet is fairly extensive.

I thought that Daimler tested out both leaf-spring and torsion bars on their Vk30.02 design, so the suspension on AH's kit would be accurate.

Daimler batted for the leaf spring suspension, while MAN took the torsion bar approach which eventually got accepted and produced.