COBI SU-100 Set 2541

COBI's SU-100 is built from 655 blocks, 32 cm long, with working tracks, a movable gun, an opening hatch and a detailed engine under the service flap. Markings for Soviet or Polish service are supplied, along with a figure of a soldier with a Mosin rifle, a cap and a red banner. The manual includes a statistics card for the free COBI Historical Battle Game. All markings are printed; no stickers.

The gun is still in service

The SU-100 was a stopgap: take the existing SU-85 hull, put in the new D-10 100 mm gun, and get something into the field that could kill a Panther or a Tiger reliably. Around 4,500 were built from 1944.

The vehicle is long obsolete. The gun is not.

The D-10 went on to arm the T-54 and then the T-55 — the most-produced tank in history, with somewhere around 100,000 built — and it stayed in production for decades in the Soviet Union, China, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. T-55s and their derivatives are still in use in a number of armies today, and the gun in them is a direct descendant of the one on this model.

A weapon designed in 1944 to deal with German heavy tanks has outlived the tanks it was built against, the country that built it, and the Cold War. Very few pieces of military hardware have that kind of run.

The Polish markings

SU-100s served with the Polish forces raised in the Soviet Union and stayed in the Polish army well after the war. Several countries kept them in reserve into the 2000s.

In the COBI range

Set 3096 is the ISU-152 at 1:72, and sets 2595, 3088 and 3092 the T-34 family this chassis descends from.

Specifications

Pieces: 655 · Figures: 1 with banner · Soviet or Polish markings · No stickers
Model dimensions: 32 × 8.5 × 11 cm (12.6 × 3.3 × 4.3 in)