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So. Big Ugly Muddy Tortoise is done. Paper Panzers expunged. What next? The WW1 stack in the stash has been burning a hole in my pocket, so to speak. I have 3 Takom MkIVs, 1 male and 2 female, plus a Takom Whippet. Also a Schneider and an FT17, but they can wait. I'm thinking I might as well build the 4 in parallel rather than sequentially. But I might regret that with all those rollers to clean up! One of the females will be a Beutepanzer. The Male will have a Crib. Here are the things I've assembled. Male with Model Cellar resin crib, Aber gun barrels, Airwaves etch for the old Emhar kit and Takom's workable tracks. Female with Airwaves Emhar etch, Aber metal barrels, Zebrano Hotchkiss barrels (hold that thought), MR Modellbau resin stowage to share with the Male and more workable tracks. Beute Female with the Airwaves etch, Takom tracks and Zebrano MG08. Some Females has these, some had Lewis (possibly re-chambered for 7.92mm) and some had both. Whippet with Airwaves Emhar etch, Zebrano resin Hotchkiss barrels and DN Models marking masks. I managed to get the rare Airwaves set with the resin track spuds. Some other stuff that might come in handy. On the Hotchkiss front, the current wisdom is that no MkIVs were fitted with Hotchkiss while no MkVs had Lewis. I can find no photos but some books suggest that some MkIVs were fitted with Hotchkiss. Interestingly, the Bovington Male does have Hotchkiss ball mounts in the sponsons. While these could be later substitutions, I'm told they are original. I'm not sure they were interchangeable. There are only 4 surviving MkIVs in the world plus a couple of recovered wrecks, so real evidence is thin on the ground and there are comparatively few photos for the number built. Regarding Beute colours I saw an interesting suggestion that railway colours may have been used. The repair works was certainly in a railway works, an independent company who made rolling stock for railways all over the world and might therefore have had many colours in stock. I did some research with Belgian railway preservation people and railway modellers, who concluded there was no clue as to the colours that might have been held. But, more tellingly, they reckoned that the factory would have been looted and stripped of anything useful to be sent back to Germany on occupation. So standard German camouflage colours are most likely after all. But at that time paint mixing was far less precise than today and colours weren't even codified until the 30's. I've got some AK and Ammo MiG WW1 paint sets allegedly covering British, French and German colours. Oh, well. Here goes. This may take some time.............