Russ Amott [ RUSSAMOTTO ] brings us another review. SDV Model, of the Czech Republic, offers a number of detailed 1/87 kits including the subject of this review, a Russian T-90 battle tank.

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Thanks!

Thanks for the review! any special reason they went for such unusual scale? I feel this is more like a table-top game model rather than a display one

Fred, thanks for getting me the sample and posting this up so fast.

Nathan, this scale ties in with HO scale in model railroading. It could work for table top gaming as well. I have seen some fairly extensive dioramas built using kits this size to better represent size of an engagement and more accurate distances. They are also compact, for those who don't have a lot of space to work with.

Great explanation, cheers

Hi Nathan,

1/87 is a huge market in Europe, esp. Germany. Not just as a model train scale ( HO ) as Russ wrote, also for automobiles, trucks, civil diorama items and, of course, military subjects. I've read HO-1/87 can be traced back to pre-WWI. I dunno if anyone can say definitively, yet I recall 1/87 was also starting around the late 1890s; I've read that the first "true standard scale" was created by Märklin in the 1880s-90s: O scale - or 1/48 in non-model train parlance. O scale is different between Germany (1/45), Continental Europe (1/43) and most everywhere else (1/48), that being due to the struggle between Metric and Imperial. O in Imperial is a quarter-inch per scale-foot while metric makes it 7mm per scale-foot, or a 7mm per scale meter ratio. Anyway, O scale-1/48 trains are big and most people have neither the room nor money for them. So they halved it to HO, e.g., Half-O, or 3/5mm per scale foot (which actually comes out to 7.5-scale feet per inch instead of 1 scale-foot per 1/8 inch). Go figure?

Roco MiniTanks started c.1960 as small inexpensive models that were even used by Western militaries for sand table planning and scenarios; hence they became favorites of wargamers.

Anyway, 1/87 is huge in Europe for vehicles, and around the world for trains. The train people want vehicles for their layouts. The plethora of 1/87 buildings makes 1/87 military dioramas a natural choice.

You may know about the WW2 plastic standard scale models made in the UK and USA for aircraft and ship identification spotting? Museum of Aircraft Recognition (I didn't know they made them for tanks, too, until I looked this up.)

Well, that's a long winded reply to a pretty simple question. Hey, I am recovering from the flu or something.

Just for fun, this site shows how popular 1/87 vehicles are, even over here. https://www.1-87vehicles.org/