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EC-645 T2 LUH in 1:72


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Today I´d like to show you my EC-645 T2. This is the military version of the Eurocopter EC-145, with a changed tail (hence the "T2"). The german military bought 15 helicopters as LUH, Light Utility Helicopter, which will see the primary use as support helicopters for the german Kommando Spezialkräfte (Commando Special Forces, KSK), the german counterpart to forces like SAS, SFOD-D or SEALs.

Until now the procurement hasn´t begun, which means that a lot of the equipment and the final design of the aircraft is not officially specified nor publically known. Out of the rumours I read in various sources it seems like there will be two different versions of the helicopter, one troop carrier and one fire support version. I don´t even know if these differents versions will be achieved by different designs of the aircraft or by modularity like "bolted-on" planks for troops.

Well, this left me in the comfortable position to create many items and features of the helicopter on my own. Eurocopter (now Airbus Helicopter) does show many pictures of mock-ups of this bird, but often many details are missing on these or are different from one mock-up to the other.

My choice fell to do a fire support version, and therefor I completely cleared up the cargo room and only put in two seats for door-gunners (rumours are armament could include two miniguns, although the german forces don´t have any yet), ammo boxes and guns.

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As you see, the pilot seats got some ballistic armor as well, and I also removed the doors.

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The gunners are smaller in scale, I had to use 1:87 figures to make them fit into the tight space. But they look good anyway.

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The most daring thing for me during this build was the changed tail. I bought an EC-135 and took his tail-boom, but pro-longed it a little bit. Looked horrible, but fortunately that section is covered by a thin metal plate on the original.

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Two former Huey-pylons were attached for the forward firing weapons:

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Then the fun part - adding antennas, sensors and stuff to the bird. I oriented myself on the 160th SOAR helicopters that show different equipment on nearly every picture you see.

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A gun-pod and some unguided rockets have been attached, and I painted the bird in dark green and a mixture of black with some drops of green in it. The mock-ups all show a dark one-tone camoflage similar to the 160th helicopters, but I prefer "real" camoflages and oriented this scheme on the German Army Bo-105 helicopters.

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Just in case you´re wondering what happened to the EC-135: I built it together with my 5-year old daughter who loves big cats, especially Leopards. This is how it turned out:

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HAJO

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