Bolt Action! Crusader Tank for Desert Rats

In our world of Bolt Action, there continues a raging debate about vehicle scale: 1/56 vs 1/48 and everything in between. Being a modeler first, I have always been a 1/48 scale guy and present you an awesome tank for playing Desert Rats against Rommel’s Germans….

When the British arrived in Northern Africa and fought the Germans, their cruiser tanks were seriously outgunned by their adversaries. The British valued speed over armour and the cruiser tanks, like the Crusader, was faster then any other tank. But the guns were too small and the armour too light.

Here’s a great image of a bunch of Crusaders MKII with the lighter guns.

It;s an amazing shot of life in the desert for a tank crew!

Here’s the upgrade the British introduced soon after, the Crusader MKIII. It had upgraded armour AND a 6 pounder cannon, that would put up a much better fight against the German tanks.

You can see the turret had to be changed to facilitate the larger gun and it took away a crew member. The commander was also the loader, which didn’t improve productivtiy…

Here’s a crew cleaning a gun, you can see it’s much bigger then the MKII
Here’s the Tamiya 1/48 scale kit that I built. Tamiya gives two color schemes as options, a green one (later desert war) and the earlier yellow/black one.

I chose the latter, since I have painted enough green armour for a while after finishing my US 92nd army. Tamiya based their yellow black camo scheme on this tank:

…and I faithfully copied it:

Now a bit of a gripe with scale in Bolt Action. It really bugs me that the Bolt Action vehicles are so small. it just doesn’t look good and after spending dollars and countless hours on a model, I want it to look great in my army. Even 1/48 scale for this models seems a bit small, but certainly much more realistic then the 1/56 scale that Warlord produces. I really wish they would switch to 1/48 scale. There are not many vehicles in the game anyway, so it really doesn’t have a big foot print on the game table.

Below some Perry minis next to the 1/48 scale Crusader.

Here’s an image that gives you proper proportions

Hope this inspires! And follow my adventures at Santa Cruz Warhammer Historical

SC Mike

Author: SC Mike

Mike is a veteran historical tabletop wargamer with over a decade of experience. His specialty is the WW2 historical wargame Bolt Action. He began writing for BoLS in 2014.