Amazing how many models tamiya makes in 1/35 over 1/16, french, British, list goes on and on.

1/16 is not a very popular scale.

Tamiya is a light weight in the 1/35 armor field to boot. DML, Trumpeter, Tristar, AFV Club, Italeri, etc are more armor specific and better at it as well.

Tamiya is really about ships, cars and AC.

There are more companies producing 1/48 armor than 1/16 and 1/48 armor is only about ten years old, just brought out as a crossover to the preffered AC scale.

You really want to see the pinch, go look at what you can get in 1/72. More armor and support vehicles than you even knew existed.

1/16 really is insignificant in the static modeling world, barely an afterthought, but all that said, you can thank Tamiya-san for it's existence in RC armor.

Imagine a Tamiya 1/35th model, scaled up to 1/16th in every respect. It would make even a Heng Long look high-tech. At a large scale, articulated, functioning suspension, individual track links, along with a higher level of detail are all to be expected. Instead of being molded in or completely omitted, they have to be molded separately. You go from less than a hundred parts to over a thousand. Then if its meant to be RC, it would have to be built to actually take some abuse. There are large scale tanks that were designed as static but converted to RC that suffered durability issues from plastics not being resilient enough and flexy construction resulting in cracks.

Its not just about scaling it up, there's a lot more in it once you take a closer look.

I'm going to have to disagree in terms of detailing. Tamiya 1/35 is kind of clunky in the armor realm, but even the earliest DML kits blow away the detail of almost every 1/16 offering. Even the Tamiya Tiger I which is the pinnacle of RC armor suffers greatly compared to the most 1/35s.

You can get a 12 year old DML Pz I with working hatches, indy links, clear optics for about $20 that'll pack more detail than almost every 1/16 short of Trumpeter's static kits. The DAK version evn has a lizard. Then you get to add all the PE and AM.

Just take a jerry can for example. In 1/35 you can get about a dozen different manufacturers of them, with PE gaskets, etc. of every type. In 1/16 you have four options: Verlinden (yuck), the pot metal one (even worse), the Tamiya one only offered wit the OOP Kubel (only accurate one I've seen) and I believe Blue Star has one (haven't seen it). Xion is supposed to be releasing a styrene kit of them with the Puma. That'll be the most welcome of the group.

Yes, RC requires different engineering, but the trade off was always detail and that never made sense to me. Yes there's no reason for Tamiya Tiger I to have radiator fans under the engine deck (most 1/35 kits will have all of that) because of the speaker box, but why the heck didn't they make the driver's and radioman's hatches functional? Or at least some periscopes, there's no mechanics under that spot.

The JS-2 has some nice detail, mostly the texturing, but the Panther G and the IV are abominations in terms of scale modeling detail. I think all you need to know about it is from the Tammy 105 M4. Absolutely wonderful RC suspension and engineering, but a 1970 upper mold. That's a kick in your scale nuts.

And remember, I love Tamiya RC. But as a static guy first, I laugh at what passes for detail.

Except Trumpeter of course, their 1/16 T-34 series is beautiful. But at the end of the day, there still isn't much AM (or anything else) for it. You could probably build a 1/35 T-34 with just AM parts and have your choice of piles of appropriate figures for it, building to put it in front of, etc.

At $250-$270, I think the new 1/16 Trumpeter Panzer IV H/J kit could be used as an update/detail set to make the HL or Tamiya Panzer IV's look better. It has 6 sheets PE and the plastic detail of the kit is better. Check out this link to the Trumpeter site that shows all the sprues and the PE detail.

http://new2.trumpeter-china.com/inde...ow&id=140&l=en

It isn't surprising at all considering the global appeal of 1/35 scale. And as the other said Italaeri or Dragon/DML have proportionally an even greater presence in
1/35. Add in all the others ( just go to Squadron, HLJ or a similar retailer and look at the manufacturer droplist in 1/35 scale to get the picture ) and 1/35 will ALWAYS
beat out 1/16 scale. And while some here lampooned Tamiya's 1/35 armor consider that some of their kits did or perhaps still do date back to the early 1970s.

Like everyone else said 1/16 isn't the big thing some might like to believe. And no it wasn't Tamiya that set the stage for 1/16 armor; Bandai with their 1/15 lineup beat Tamiya by quite a few years. And there were 1 or 2 others besides Bandai.

Jerry

I started out with 1/48 scale. Gave it up for 1/35 scale. Gave that up for 1/72 - 1/76 scale. I even tried HO scale tanks on my trains. My stuff kept getting smaller for space reasons. How I ended up going the other way with 1/16 and 1/18 scale is a mystery to me. Thank goodness I survived an early interest in 1/6 stuff.
rex

1/48 armour is older than 10 years. I used to build Banfai 1/48 armour back in the early 70's.
I have 92 plastics from 1/3 to 1/72 to build.