A&A Unit Identification Charts

[CWO Marc]

The next two charts are the cruiser and destroyer charts.

[CWO Marc]

The last two charts for today are the artillery and anti-aircraft artillery charts.

[sgtwiltan]

This is a great idea!!

[CWO Marc]

@sgtwiltan:

This is a great idea!!

Thanks!  I like the unit identification charts in the A&A rulebooks, but there are some things about them I find less than optimal, so I created my own unit charts (mainly from the perspective of sculpt organization rather than game play).  The pictures in the rulebook unit charts are a bit small and not all rulebooks have them – for instance, the 1914 rulebook has no such chart, it doesn’t have proper unit profile silhouettes for the submarines and transports, and (if I remember correctly) the rulebook even refers to the battleship as a cruiser on one of the maps.  The 1940 (2nd ed) rulebook chart uses identical silhouettes for the British and ANZAC cruisers, even though the sculpts are different.  Some of the names given in the rulebook charts are problematic: for example, some designations are vague (“Baltic Timber Ship” rather than “Volgoles type”), some use the name of a non-lead ship as the ship class name (“Ray” rather than “Gato”), and some are arguably wrong (“Hilfskreuzer” – which is incorrectly spelled with a “ue” in the rulebook and which refers to an auxiliary cruiser rather than a transport ship – instead of “Dithmarschen type”). There have also been unit name inconsistencies from one rulebook to the next, as in the case of the Yak fighter which some rulebooks identify as a MiG.  And of course, for obvious reasons, the rulebook charts for a given game exclude sculpts from other games – for instance, the trucks from BotB aren’t found in the 1940 rulebook charts, which is perfectly understandable.  So I tried to address these issues as much as possible in the customized charts I made.

Continuing from where I left off yesterday, the first two charts for today are the Allied and Axis tactical bomber charts.

[CWO Marc]

The next two charts are the Allied and Axis battleship and battlecruiser charts.

[Witt]

It is a great idea and excellent work Marc.  I did mean to say, but wanted to look properly on the PC, only I have not had time recently.
Will do at the weekend.

[CWO Marc]

@wittmann:

It is a great idea and excellent work Marc.  I did mean to say, but wanted to look properly on the PC, only I have not had time recently. Will do at the weekend.

Thanks – I enjoyed putting these charts together.  I wish I had a 35mmm SLR digital camera that I could have used for this project because it would have given me better control over the high-contrast exposure and the close-up focus.  The little camera I have isn’t designed for this kind of photography, so I’m actually surprised that most of the shots came out pretty decently (though some of them took me as many as a dozen tries to make them work).

[CWO Marc]

The next two charts are the Allied and Axis tank charts.

[CWO Marc]

The next two charts are the Allied and Axis strategic bomber charts.

[CWO Marc]

The next two charts are the Allied and Axis aircraft carrier charts.

[CWO Marc]

And last of all are the WWI and WWII generic-design equipment charts.

[Yavid]

That was really cool to check out. It did make me realize how different the two Panthers are. I’m assuming the 2 different Italian tanks come from anniversary and E-40.2?

[CWO Marc]

@Yavid:

That was really cool to check out. It did make me realize how different the two Panthers are. I’m assuming the 2 different Italian tanks come from anniversary and E-40.2?

Thanks – glad you liked the charts.  Yes, the M14/41 is the super-rare one from Anniversary and the M15/42 is the one from Europe 1940 (2nd edition).

The situation with the Panthers is actually even more complicated than what the charts show.  When I was going through my sculpt collection to figure out which sculpts I’d use for the photos, I identified (as I recall) about six different variants of the Panther – three for the old model and three for the new model.  The differences mainly involve the gun: long or short, thick or thin, with or without a muzzle brake, elevated or level.  Some other sculpts (like the Sherman) likewise show small variations of this type, and others show even more dramatic differences – like the Hipper-class cruiser, which comes in transom-stern and cruiser-stern versions.  For a while I was tempted to include all these variations in my charts, but it quickly became apparent that this would make the charts too big and too complicated.  So I decided to be very selective about including different versions of sculpts that are supposed to represent the same thing.  I did it for the German 88 because over the years it switched its game function from field artillery (which was incorrent) to an AAA weapon, with the change being marked by a radical increase in the size of the sculpt.  Ditto for the Stuka, which went from the incorrect role of fighter to the correct one of tac bomber (and likewise grew in size).  The Panther has always functioned as a tank piece (correctly so), and it didn’t change size very much when the new version came out, but the look is very distinctly different owing to such details as the side-skirts, so I felt that it warranted being divided into two versions.

[Yavid]

yeah I remember when the original Europe came out. I had alot of questions like why the stuka it’s not a fighter. why the 88mm it’s not artillery and it looks to much like the AA gun. And why the P-38 it looks so much different than other countries fighters I remember it screwing up new players. I’m glad they got most of that straightened out. As far as the Panther goes over the years I’ve learned they always look alittle different and it’s one of the first things I look at when a new game comes out. What did they do to the Panther this time.

[toblerone77]

These are outstanding! +1!!!

[CWO Marc]

@toblerone77:

These are outstanding! +1!!!

Many thanks.  After the charts were finished, I printed them out in colour on standard-sized paper, inserted the pages into three-hole clear plastic protector sleeves, then put the sleeves into a three-ring binder for use as a reference tool.  I printed each chart horizontally, to make maxiumum use of the space on each sheet, so the binder opens up/down rather than left/right.  To cut the number of required sleeves in half, each sleeve holds two sheets; the sheets are back-to-back and inverted, so that each two-page spread shows a pair of horizontal charts, one above the other.

[CWO Marc]

Here’s the page order that I used in my binder, along with a couple of extra pages which I created for the binder after seeing that they’d be useful.  The two-page pairings (except for the front and back pages, which are on their own) are:

1: Cover sheet (use whatever title and/or graphics you wish)

2a: Infantry (WWI)
2b: Infantry (WWII)

3a: Equipment type list (see attachment below)
3b: Mechanized Infantry Vehicles / General Transport Trucks

4a: Tanks: Allies
4b: Tanks: Axis

5a: Artillery
5b: Anti-Aircraft Artillery

6a: Fighters: Allies
6b: Fighters: Axis

7a: Tactical Bombers: Allies
7b: Tactical Bombers: Axis

8a: Strategic Bombers: Allies
8b: Strategic Bombers: Axis

9a: Aircraft Carriers: Allies
9b: Aircraft Carriers: Axis

10a: Battleships and Battlecruisers: Allies
10b: Battleships and Battlecruisers: Axis

11a: Cruisers
11b: Destroyers

12a: Submarines
12b: Transport Ships

13a: Generic-Design Units: World War I
13b: Generic-Design Units: World War II

14: Player Nations and Unit Colours (see attachment below)

[Johnson73]

Any updates on the Charts?  Using HBG new units for example?  Or how did you create the charts, did you take pictures of the units behind white paper?

[CWO Marc]

@R:

Any updates on the Charts?  Using HBG new units for example?  Or how did you create the charts, did you take pictures of the units behind white paper?

The charts are only for official OOB A&A sculpts, which are the primary focus of my collection.

I took the photos by placing each sculpt on a little platform, behind which (as I recall) was a white sheet of paper that was lit from behind by a lamp in an aluminium photographic reflector dish.  The dish was close to the paper, and was the only source of illumination in the room (which was in darkness; I took the shots at night).  This was to produce the maximum possible contrast.  The camera was positioned directly in front of the sculpt, on a tripod.

After the photo shoot, I picked the shots that had worked best for each sculpt.  (Most sculpts were shot only once, but some gave me trouble and needed multiple shots.)  I used Microsoft Paint to cut from each large image file the small section containing the sculpt and pasted it into its own Paint file, where I then adjusted the borders to eliminate as much extraneous surrounding space as possible.  I then used PrintKey’s Grayed Colours feature to convert the pictures to black-and-white.

[CWO Marc]

Here’s an example of what an unprocessed shot looks like.  The original raw image was 1.46 MB in size, but for purposes of posting it here I reformatted it to reduce the file size.

I should have mentioned in my previous post that the aircraft sculpts had to be shot from above with the lit paper below them, not from the side with the lit paper behind them.

Some of the sculpts, by the way, were slightly translucent in my lighting set-up.  This was particularly so for the beige UK units, and especially in the case of the thin-winged Spitfire.