I am in two minds about buying, let alone building, a kit of the AS4 purely on principle, i.e. it should never have existed and was a monumental WOMBAT (Waste Of Money, Brains And Talent), and ascetics, i.e. it is fugly, looking nowhere near as good as the original vehicle or any of the other various upgrades and versions I can think of. I know its just a model of a real vehicle but the fact it exists at all really annoys me to the point of irrationality.
I used to crew A1s so am familiar with them while some of my neighbours are ARA so we have compared notes and they are not at all impressed with the AS4, saying it handles like a POS. Basically, while an improvement on the original, the upgrade was excesively over budget, a decade late, and failed to deliver the intended performance. A less ambitious purely MOTS upgrade would have cost a third or less, could have been ready two decades earlier, while offering superior performance, meaning the money saved could have been invested in a supplemental modern IFV and additional M-1A1s. Alternatively the same money could have re-equipped the ARA with surplus Marders, including upgrading them in Australia, providing a vastly superior vehicle that, unlike the AS4, would actually be survivable in modern combat. So many better options than what we actually did, every report into the project has slammed it yet there it is, a tactically useless vehicle still in service, endangering the lives of its crews if it were ever to be used in combat.
Rant over.
