T-80Us coming out from Battlefront.
After nearly a decade waiting for somebody to make the T-80U somebody has finally done it and that somebody is Battlefront Miniatures.
When Battlefront announced their Team Yankee range it looked like we were about to get another range of the same 1980s vehicles and infantry, helos and planes we had been getting pretty much since the Cold War was a real thing. QRF, Old glory, Skytrex, Qualtiy Castings, everyone who had been pumping out the same Cold War era stuff just seemed to never budge beyond this point.
I pleased my case with nearly every manufacturer that would listen, and was pretty much given the same answer (which didn't really make sense), that they were sticking to vehicles that had been used in real wars. This argument is a fair one, though it fails to be honest with itself when you consider how many of the vehicles in some of those ranges hardly ever saw service outside frontline Soviet forces and how rarely those forces were engaged.
One of the main reasons for making models of leading edge military hardware is to allow players to play what-if scenarios like Team Yankee which has been at the forefront of mainstream public awareness of Cold War based what-ifs for a long time. The existence of evolved T-72s and T-80s in existing ranges would seem to acknowledge this basic concept as well which makes the argument of not producing later vehicles because they "weren't used" even stranger. Later model T-80s and other former Soviet hardware were indeed used in the aftermath of the Cold War and were developed during and for it. This includes the T-80U which was used in the Chechen conflicts (and used as a scapegoat for Russia's failure their) which makes them actually better used than some of the earlier T-80 variants.
I am glad Battlefront recognized that there was room for a newer T-80 variant in the market. the bonus is that we get them in nice modern plastic kits.
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