The tubular thing you have to glue to the side of the hull contains cleaning equipment for the main gun. Surface details on the hull are well done. There are two crew figures included: a commander and a driver (even though you can cut up the driver a little and have his head sticking out of the commander's cupola of course). The sprues are of the usual high quality. Now let's have look at that box full of nice plastic models, shall we. Only after the Battle of the Bulge calls within the US army led to serious endeavors in speeding up the introduction of heavier tank types.

Only after the Normandy landings they realized that there were a lot more Panthers around than anticipated and especially the excellent Jagdpanther version proved to be a huge problem. The United States at first took the Panther for a heavy tank for which the German arms industry wouldn't have the resources to produce them in larger quantities.

After they still struggled to keep up in terms of armoured vehicles this new leap was a serious danger of them falling behind again. The British took the new German tank type very seriously. While even the T-34/85 was surpassed by the Panther in terms of overall performance later types became a problem for the Panther tank. The red army saw the danger of the new German type, but already after they encountered the Tiger earlier they had started to work on tanks with larger calibre guns. Overall it was very similar to Ausf.A, but the driver's vision slit was removed (and replaced by a periscope) and the hull got a slightly simpler and more economic design. In 1944 a new version of the Panther (by then the name Panzerkampfwagen V was officially changed to just 'Panther'), Ausf.G, commenced production. 1768 vehicles of Ausf.A were produced until 1944. See what they did there? Starting over again with the lettering of the Ausführung (Mark)? It was basically a product reboot, not even caring about possible future wargamers getting all confused about Ausf.A coming after Ausf.D! The most obvious differences were the added hull MG for the radio operator, added 5mm armour Schürzen on the sides, a simpler commander cupola with an anti-air MG added on some vehicles. In 1943 the second production version Ausführung A was produced at several different factories across Germany with the highest production priority. The bulk of them never even reached the battle due to technical failures, nullifying the immense firepower and general value of the vehicle for pretty much the whole first production series. Still, several vehicles were sent off to joint Operation Zitadelle (Battle of Kursk).

15mm german modern tank decals