KV-1 Flame Tank Variants

I have been working, on-and-off, on my first British tank, the Valentine Bridgelayer, which was supplied to the Soviet Union through the lend-lease programme. The Red Army vastly preferred the Valentine over the Cromwell, though the situation was reversed among British troops. However, this project is going very slowly for me, since the Valentine has an unnecessarily complicated suspension that is proving to be utterly infuriating to render. Fortunately, I've found other things to work on while taking frequent breaks from the Valentine project. I had previously made a model of the KV-8 flame tank and uploaded it to my Shapeways shop in both 1/100 and 1/285 scale. A few days later, a blog that I follow on Wordpress made a post about the KV-8! You can check it out below:

https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2018/06/23/kv-8/

After reading and commenting on it, I decided to check out a much older post about the entire KV series, where I finally found the answer to a question that had been poking me every now and then like a splinter in my mind: what is the deal with the KV-6?! Well, this post answered it:

https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2015/08/25/kv-klimenti-voroshilov/

Most databases do not even have the KV-6, it's treated as a missing number. Yet there is this fake land battleship called KV-6, and no, I was not fooled by it for one second. I was, however, able to find photos of the REAL KV-6 by Googling "KV-6 flame tank." And here it is, sitting in between a KV-1 and KV-8:

Both the KV-6 and KV-8 were unusual flame tanks for their time. The KV-6 mounted the flamethrower in the hull, like most flame tanks of WWII, but instead of replacing the hull machine gun, it was mounted in an armoured box on the other side of the driver. The KV-8, on the other hand, was even more unusual, as it mounted the flamethrower in the turret, next to the main gun! Because it took up so much room, the 76.2mm gun had to be switched out for a 45mm gun, which had a much smaller breach mechanism. The 45mm gun was placing inside a dummy 76mm tube to fool the Germans, but since the barrel is a lot shorter, I don't know how well that actually worked.

Flame tanks were never particularly popular with the Red Army, especially those built around the KV-1. A single KV-6 was made in 1941 and captured by the Germans. The best photo I found also had the tank missing its right-hand track, so I'm not sure what kind of damage it sustained. A total of 69 KV-8s of all variants were made: 42 KV-8, 25 KV-8S, and two prototypes of the KV-8M, which had TWO flamethrowers in the turret. Of the KV-8S, some were made with the flat-sided KV-1 turret, and some were made with the rounded KV-1S turret, but all 25 were built on the lighter and faster KV-1S chassis. I have the KV-1S hull available in my shop, but I have yet to make a model of the KV-1S turret. I would once again refer you to my last Wordpress post, were you can find a link to my tank database, showing both my completed and pending projects:

https://kjworldsong.wordpress.com/2018/06/19/update-on-the-tank-collection-and-database/