Greetings fellow Whiffers! This thread is going to be a double whammy. Not only is this my first posting on Beyond the Sprues, but it will also be my first Work in Progress thread. A big shout out goes to The Big Gimper who introduced me to this forum. Without gilding the lily any further let us get down to why we're all here.
If you haven't read the "Axis of Time" trilogy by John Birmingham, then I strongly suggest you do. Based upon a similar plot to the movie "The Final Countdown," It is chocked full of What If inspiration. Buzz Bomb over on the Sea Forum has built one of the ships from this series.
Without giving too much away, the story involves a semi futuristic US led "Multinational Force" being sucked through a wormhole from 2020 to 1942. As you can imagine this has far reaching consequences. Just to wet your appetite...[SPOILER ALERT]... imagine the 7th Cavalry being airlifted to the Normandy invasion in UH-1 Hueys and being escorted by missile armed Sabres -OR- M1 Abrams' charging through Japanese lines on Australia -OR- the purpose of this thread, Super Shermans of the 761st Tank Battalion...
"There was a strong push in the army for scrapping the Sherman and going straight to the Pershing...But in the end, momentum won the argument...Thirty thousand Sherman chassis already built by ’43... It made more sense to go with what we had. Anyway, the M4, your classic Sherman, she had a few problems. Even I have to admit that. A low-velocity seventy-five-millimeter popgun, wafer-thin armor, and a gasoline engine that just loved bursting into flames. In the long run I would have recommended discontinuing some of the Sherman production and switching over to the M-29 Pershing heavies... And that’s just what’s happening with some outfits. But there are quite a few mods that can be put in place on the Shermans, since we’ve been churning them out so fast...We got some slat armor...We redesigned the turret to accommodate a high-velocity hundred-and-five-millimeter gun...The whole hull’s been revamped with appliqué armor...There’s a more sharply angled forward slope, side skirts to defend against RPGs, and some composite shielding beneath that and at the rear... We switched over to a diesel engine, too."
When I first read this, it sounded quite a bit like an Israeli "Super Sherman" and in fact that is exactly how I pictured it in my mind, however, being the creative person I am, I immediately fired up Paint and started working on something better...