I looked at the first photo at thought, "Sure, 1:1 is a scale. I guess." Very cool. I used to work at a military museum and we had in our collection a buttload of models from someone's collection. On occasion we'd pull the appropriate model out and put that puppy on display. I keep hearing we all get old enough to become interested in historical models and I'm sure I'll get there at some point.
I remember watching a wargamer who started doing some historical talk about how the experience was different. He had come from Warhammer 40k where you paint models bright blue, yellow, maybe black or red, but suddenly he found himself painting some WWII American tanks. Green. Everything was green. What color to paint the shovel attached to the side of the tank? Green. What color is the hitch on the back of the tank? Green. But you can have a lot of fun with weathering. Making the tank dirty, looking like it's been through a war. That's the fun part of historicals.