The KV-152

Here is yet another tank with a background in historical fiction: the KV-152. Link to my model below:
https://www.shapeways.com/product/8P2P4GVJN/1-100-kv-152?optionId=68839041

As I mention in the product description, I didn't come up with this idea, but this specific design is my own version of it. The idea, naturally, is to take the firepower of the SU-152 and put it into a rotating turret. Below are some comparisons of the two vehicles:

In case you can't tell which is which, the KV-152 is the taller vehicle. Now then, some people might think that such a vehicle was already achieved with the KV-2, but that the SU-152 was adopted simply because the KV-2 had so many problems, not least of which was that the turret could not be rotated if the vehicle wasn't level. However, there is more to the story. The KV-2 was armed with a 152.4mm M-10 howitzer. It certainly packed a punch, but it had low muzzle velocity and short range. You might also have picked up on the fact that the M-10 does not have a muzzle brake to reduce recoil when mounted on the KV-2. However, the SU-152 does have a muzzle brake, even though its main weapon is mounted in a fixed casemate, rather than a rotating turret. This is because the main weapon on the SU-152 is the much more powerful 152.4mm ML-20S gun-howitzer, which has sufficient muzzle velocity that the vehicle could be employed as an improvised tank destroyer against the heaviest German vehicles of the time. After all, armour penetration means nothing when you can blow the turret clean off a Tiger!

With modern technology, a gun as powerful as the ML-20S can be mounted in a rotating turret small enough to fit on the KV-1S chassis, but in 1943, it simply wasn't possible. Of course, that hasn't stopped people from proposing what such a vehicle could have looked like, myself included. Even then, my version doesn't rotate 360 degrees - in fact, it rotates only 68 degrees in either direction. It's still better than the mere 6 degrees of the SU-152:

By the way, the gun on my 1/100 scale SU-152 doesn't move from side to side at all, sorry. I'll eventually fix that, but I can at least show what it looks like in the rendering.

In other news, I've fixed all the problems with the towing shackles that I mentioned in "Disruptions, Disruptions," and I decided to add the KV-152 just for fun, since it took me about 15 minutes to make anyway. Next on my list will probably be the SU-100Y, though I've also gotten a request for the Yuan Wang 7 (is it one word or two?), a recently-deployed Chinese space tracking ship. We'll see what happens.