that's interesting, just today I happened upon this picture and read up on the Locust.

Diminutive indeed Frenchy

It certainly is very small! I have a, possibly, stupid question.. did they pick the crew for these small vehicles to be particularly small in size so they can easily fit in there, or did they just have to get in there no matter what their size was? Also, do armies in general pick "smaller" sized men for tank crews? I, personally, can't imagine getting inside a tank... as I'm large and claustrophobic Hisham

Who would have thought that we'd actually have the ability to do a diorama of this photo using mainstream plastic kits?!

Well, my father was detailed to move from a Sherman Firefly to an M5 Stuart but he was deemed to be too tall (6' 2") so went back to the sherman troop (just as well, a good many of the recon troop were killed by an Me262 bomb attack) When I served in recce troop in the 70's we had a couple of very tall guys but it must have been very uncomfortable for them when closed down in a scimitar.

Sh-t!! And me who just went and spent a bunch of nice US Dollars at Commanders to get myself a resin Locust. Oh well, might as well build two of the little buggers and pretend that it's a swarm of locusts .... BR / Robin

Excellent News: Al

Not stupid at all once you've seen how small these things can be. Not as a rule, no. You have to remember, adults in the 1940s were considerably smaller than we are today. Most had grown up in a rural environment and during the depression when malnutrition was a real factor. People didn't realise it, but they were quite undersized compared to what they might have been with today's possible diet during childhood. The average North American male was in the order of 5-9 (1.7m) and about 140-160 lb (63-72 kilo). British males were slightly smaller. At 6-2 Steve's Dad would have been an absolute giant. In cases, like Steve's Dad, where the randomly selected guy couldn't fit, he was put in a different vehicle. Western armies today do not select for size either, but tanks are designed to accommodate the 95th percentile modern western male, say 6-2 or so without problems, so the interior accommodations are much larger thatn WW II vehicles. The Soviet Union, however, definitely used to pick through their draftees for the shorter guys to go into tanks. AFVs like the T-55 & T-72 really can't accommodate people much taller than 5-4 to 5-6. The Soviets made a concious decision to design their tanks around smaller people to make the vehicles just that little bit smaller, reaping some real tactical advantages but at the cost of needing small crewmen. Of course, when these vehicles were sold to satellite countries who didn't have the USSR's vast manpower pool to pick through to get small crewmen, their combat efficiency suffered. HTH Paul