M1 Abrams AGDS

By Mark Powley

It's 2010. Mikhail Gorbachov was ousted in a coup by combined hardline Military and Stalinist forces within the Politburo before he could announce perestroika, glasnost and other economic and social reforms. The Soviet Union stagnates even more and eventually a desperate Soviet leadership orders the invasion of western Europe to try and remedy the situation. The invasion fails but NATO/US forces are only able to retake conquered territory very slowly. Neither side wants to go nuclear, so WW3 has become a low/medium intensity war of attrition

After doing the T-80H Hovertank, I decided it needed an adversary. I had a half completed M1 Abrams sitting around in my stash that was perfect but what to do with it? The US Army is somewhat lacking in AA vehicles, so I figured they would need something to deal with all the Russian Mi-24 Hinds and Su-25 Frogfoots. A search around the net revealed several possibilities. The most interesting was the M1 AGDS (Air, Ground Defence System) which featured a hybrid weapons system composed of twin 35mm Bushmaster II cannons and two banks of 6 ADATS (Air Defense Anti Tanks System) missiles. The ADATS missiles can deal with low flying aircraft, anti-tank helicopters and armoured vehicles, while the cannon are able to deal with helicopters and a wide variety of ground targets. A very potent combination indeed. a bit more searching brought up a 1996 article from Armor Magazine that had everything I needed - side views, a turret cutaway, diagrams and a picture of a promotional model. Perfect!

The original kit turret was pulled apart leaving me with just the baseplate. I widened both sides of the baseplate with plastic card to make the new turret as wide as possible. The front of the standard Abrams turret is assymetrical, so more card was used to even the front out. The next step was to make the missile pods and for this I used some square plastic tube to make up a rectangular box. After that it was a case of staring at the drawings and cutting up 40 thou sheet to build up the turret structure with the missile pod exhausts being made from 15 thou card. I salvaged many parts from the original turret to detail the new turret and made up new stowage baskets from brass rod. The rear turret basket cut down from the kit item and respliced together. The front radome and rear radar dish were made from a ping pong ball. The final result was this:

Not exactly the same as the drawings in the article but good enough for me.

Now what to do for the camoflage scheme? My first thoughts was to do a MERDC camo scheme but some research on the net showed that MERDC had fallen out of favour by the mid/late 80's and that the NATO scheme was taken up instead. In wartime plenty of improvised schemes exist and as my hypothetical war is set in the middle if the MERDC/NATO scheme changeover I decided on a hybrid paintjob of Nato colours but in a MERDC layout. The markings are from a Verlinden dry transfer sheet. I decided to keep the stowage fairly light and just went with a camo net, some C-rations boxes and a few other bits and pieces. As a final touch, I added some graffitti to the front of the turret.

This project was a lot more work than the T-80H but I really enjoyed doing it. Hmm, I wonder what a German JagdLeopard would look like ?

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