White Elephants - The 'War Elephants' of the United Nations

Regulars readers of this blog may have noticed that I've been using the UN Operations during the Congo Crisis in the early 60ies for many of my wargaming scenarios, as these were very offensive peace enforcement operations. For these wargames I painted regular plastic Army Men as generic UN-troops from the 60ies. For some of my wargames I've been improvising some vehicles, but eventually I wanted to add some prototypical vehicles to bring my UN-troops into battle and be able to provide some fire support as well. 

During WW2 Sweden designed an Armoured Personel Carrier based on a 4WD truck chassis; M/42 KP or KP Cars. This design was so successful that it was still in service Post War and it was brought to Congo by Swedish UN Forces. It was so successful that the UN even bought 15 of them to deploy with other UN units as well. In UN service they were nicknamed "White Elephants". They were later also deployed in other UN-missions. The last KP-cars were withdrawn from Swedish service in 2004.

During my Motorcycle tour to Sweden in 2024 I saw one of the KP-cars from Congo at the Swedish Tank Museum Arsenalen:

So a KP car would be a suitable vehicle for my miniature UN troops. At Thingiverse I found a free STL-file of a KP-car for 3D-printing:

It was designet to 28mm scale, but I resized it to roughly 1:35 scale to go along with my Army Men and 3D-printed it. -And some 5 hours later:

The bonnet didn't look so good due to the angle it was 3D-printed and the layerlines involved in this type of 3D-printing. Since I read a blogpost at Grid Based Wargaming where Peter used Gesso to add texture to some models, I've been curious to try out a similar method on 3D-printed models. It was soon clear that the Gesso was a little too thin for this purpose, so I used a more thicker variant from the craft store; Acrylic modelling paste.

Then it got some coats of auto body filler spray:

Then it was painted:

I then added some 'UN decals' which was simply just printed self-adhesive labels. From reference photos it looks like there were no norm of marking these vehicles, as they had a lot of different variations on their 'UN markings':

I also wanted to add a crew-member to operate the machineguns. Since I'd 3D-printed this APC to 1:35 scale, I was looking in an old box for old and odd bits and pieces from different old 1:35 projects. I found a useful 'upper body' which I altered the arms:

Now my miniature UN-troops can drive into battle in a periodic and prototypical vehicle which also will provide them with some firing support. One single vehicle is actually enough to carry 2 squads with 8 men each. 

Now it's just to find some (free) usable wargaming rules and make a scenario so I can put this APC into service. Stay tuned and please follow this blog if you aren't already.