US Light Tanks
The Renaul FT-17 in US Army service during WWI

In 1917, the USA joined forces with England and France to confront Germany in what would be the last episode of WWI. The US Army lacked the warfare experience and technology their allies earned after years of trench combat. One of such technological advances was the "Tank", a British invention to surpass the "No Man's Land" between the tranches of the confronting armies. The relative success of the Tank led to its adoption and further development by the French army, that envisioned a lighter and faster version of the Tank under the design genius of the car-maker Louis Renault. The result was the revolutionary Renault FT or FT-17, whose general layout with a rotating turret, front driver and back engine stills holds today. The tactical evolution of the Tank led to the idea of attacking the enemy with many light tanks (a swarm) instead of the original employment of few, very-slow heavy tanks. The FT-17 was a remarkably successful Tank since its first deployment on May 31st 1918 during the battle of the Aisne. The FT-17 was adopted as the US Army tank and license built under the name of M1917 in the US. This is where the long history of the American light tank started.
The 1/35 kit from Meng was used in this project, that shows an American FT-17 with a 37mm Puteaux gun in a polygonal turret of riveted plates, which was simpler to produce than the earlier cast steel turret. The kit has a reasonable parts count and it is superbly detailed in plastic, white metal, stainless steel and PE brass. Nevertheless the plastic is somewhat resistant to Tamiya thin cement and the contact surfaces provided are ridiculously small or narrow with lots of posable, over-engineered and moving parts making construction very challenging. This particular kit (TS-011) has some interior detail, but lacks of figures, engine and crew compartment details which are offered as separate kits. The instructions are clear and the painting guide is nicely done in color. Having seen the original real-life thing, it is clear to me that Meng sacrificed detail towards functionality as the suspension springs are clearly out of scale. Nevertheless, the tracks are very easy to build and they are workable. There is the option to build a machine gunned or cannoned version of the tank, but the casted turret version is offered as a separate kit. Intriguingly , Meng added a detailed trench-configured base for the model in two separate sprues which led me to think that not including more interior details (i.e. an engine) was largely decided on marketing and not in the kit itself.
Because I like my tanks heavy, I decided to use a turned brass gun and metal tracks, but as the kit parts are slide molded there is no really need for that. All in all this is a great kit and a must for tank fans.