Ok, heres the questions that I would like to ask ya'll. 1) would an Abrams crew be loading ammo into the storage area when the power pack is being put in or being taken out? 2) What dragons kit has a parts to build the internal areas of the Abrams? 3) And would also the Ver 1976 M1A1 Detailed set help out to show the batteriers and the other stuff for the Engine? Heres what I'm think about doing, I would like to show off the power back being put in and also some tankers loading ammo and a detailed inside of the tank with an M88. thanks inadvances.

Not a likely situation. Aside from the dangers of loading ammo with the tank torn apart and large tools around, why would you load ammo on a vehicle that is not in combat or combat capable? An engine change is a major operation and isn't done in a few minutes. The tank will be down at least a couple hours and it is not done up on the front line. Just for safety reasons though, it wouldn't be done.

The Verlinden set sucks. I wouldn't waste my money on it. Most of the parts are guesswork and nothing like the real things.

All of Dragon's older M1A1 kits come with the partial interior. The new M1A1 AIM does not though.

thanks Gino for the information

Yea, pulling a power pack would be done in the rear. If it went down in the field, you'd just cross deck the ammo to other vehicles and then get towed in.

No, not while the pack is being moved to or from the tank. However, you could see this happening while the pack was out (or potentially still hooked up to an unmoving M88, with the pack on the ground). And in a field environment! We'd pull pack all the time in the field, although we'd prefer not to, since it's pretty dirty. Not an OIF/OEF occurence, but here's some examples from past experience:

October 2001, at the gunnery range in Korea, our 3 tank was down with a bad engine, but had uploaded the Tank Table VII ammo. Pulled another tank up nearby, and did the ant chain to transfer ammunition across so that the crew could still fire.

May 2001, on a gunnery range in Ft. Hood (Sugarloaf), my cadillacs had gone out, and had transferred off ammunition while waiting for 2 days on the parts. Had pulled pack for a discovered leak. All things came together at about the same time, so while the mechanics were wrapping up the repair, was putting ammunition back into the semi-ready to fire what was left of that gunnery table, and catch up to my Company.

January 1999 while at the NTC, we were on the last live-fire mission, a defense. The night before, we had a tank in the UMCP with the pack pulled. One of the other tanks in the Company had grabbed the allotted ammo (you only get so much for the whole company), and delivered it around the time the engine was being placed back together. We couldn't wait for the tank to show up to the Company Assembly Area, because by the time it was complete, we'd already be starting to occupy the battle positions. The crew boresighted and conducted all the other preps while the mechanics wrapped up repairs, and joined us around 0400 in the morning.

Not a common occurence, and I have no observations of things like that happening in Iraq while I was there. During OIF II, we didn't expend that much main gun, so there wasn't much to upload. At most, you'd see machine gun ammunition making the transition on or off vehicles, but not main gun.

All of the above examples were with the training ammunition, which looks different from go-to-war ammunition. There were times while in Korea that we'd download the go-to-war ammunition while conducting all modes of maintenance (including pulling pack), for a variety of reasons.

Biggest thing is to look at it from a safety standpoint. You would minimize the moving parts, doing one thing at a time (ie pull the pack, then move ammo, rather than pull pack and move ammo simultaneously). I have no idea on either of your second 2 questions, though. As you did not give a time frame to reference, you have got a pretty large selection of choices you could possibly do.

Jed Sargent