Hi everyone,

Sorry to have been absent for so long; this is the first time I’ve logged into my forum account since the pandemic started. I’m fine, and I appreciate the expressions of concern; I’ve simply had to devote my time and my mental energies to dealing with the new situation we’re all living through. I’ve sidelined – for the moment – a lot of normal activities, including (sadly) my daily visits to the forum because I need to maintain my focus on working from home and dealing with the surreal environment in which we’re all living. Who ever thought that grocery shopping, a normally mundane task, would turn into an experience similar to the movie The Andromeda Strain, which features a multi-level biological research laboratory which requires increasingly severe sterilization procedures as one goes form level to level? Anyway, I hope everyone is doing okay.

All the best,
Marc

It’s all a matter of preference, of course, but here are a couple of related reasons why painting the stern is a good option. Most (though not all) A&A destroyer sculpts have transom sterns, meaning that they’re flat, which means that looking at the shape of the stern is already a good way to distinguish destroyers from cruiser sculpts (whose sterns tend to be pointy) – so by painting the stern, you’d be attracting attention to their most distinctive characteristic. Also note that if you paint just the flat vertical part of the stern, the paint won’t be visible if you’re viewing the sculpt from the front or the side. The benefit is that this doesn’t mess up the appearance of your sculpt too much; the drawback is that you won’t necessarily be able to tell at a glance if a sculpt is a destroyer, which may not be what you’re trying to achieve.

@captainwalker said in On this day during W.W. 2:

February 22, 1942. Eastern Front
Adolf Hitler institutes a new practice by designating the Demyansk pocket a “fortress” (Festung). This makes the position there sound deliberate rather than unplanned and connotes a pleasing sense of permanence.

This could be viewed as a case of using inflated rhetoric and wishful thinking to compensate for a desperate situation on the ground. A similar thing happened in June 1940, when the Germans were sweeping through France: overwhelmed French generals repeatedly drew “halt lines” on their maps, only to find out that the Germans had already passed them.

@SS-GEN said in On this day during W.W. 2:

@Wittmann said in On this day during W.W. 2:

@barnee it is. I checked its operational history though and thought it was first used in late 42 at Leningrad. I don’t think the photo can be from the Demyansk encirclement.

Yes wittman. There was 4 Tiger tanks that saw service on Aug 29 in SE of Leningrad. 3 broke down and all 4 had to be recovered. Then they made more changes to the Tiger designs and then later mass produced them.

Another way of looking at it is that Tiger tanks – as A&A sculpts – were first deployed in 2012 when A&A 1941 was released. Truly a historic moment.

@captainwalker

The Channel Dash was a huge embarrassment to the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, with the Times commenting that “Nothing more mortifying to the pride of our sea-power has happened since the seventeenth century.” As I recall, when Churchill was informed by telephone that Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen had escaped through the English Channel, he answered, "Why?’ then hung up. One recent naval historian summed up the answer by saying that the British had spent the operation periodically tossing handfuls of gravel at the German ships, and that they would have been better served by taking a deep breath, taking the time to concentrate their forces properly and throw one good well-aimed rock.

@captainwalker said in On this day during W.W. 2:

On this day in 1944, Field Marshal Manstein begins his relief attempt to break the Korsun–Cherkasy Pocket.
Six German divisions were surrounded. Though many trapped men escaped, they had to leave nearly all of their equipment behind, with heavy losses.

Interesting. This engagement sounds like an Eastern Front counterpart to the Falaise Gap engagement on the Western Front, in August of the same year. A similar number of German troops were encircled, and like the ones at Cherkasy-Korsun they left vast amounts of equipment behind in order to escape.

@captainwalker said in On this day during W.W. 2:

1 February, 1943
T-34s on the main square of Stalingrad, a six-barrel Nebelwerfer mortar standing by.
While the last fighting goes on in the industrial district, the city center is cleared of German troops. Victory is near.!

In another indication of approaching victory, Friedlich Paulus had surrendered the previous day, the same day on which Hitler promoted him (by radio) to the rank of Field Marshall. The promotion wasn’t exactly in congratulations for a job well done: no German field marshall had ever been taken alive, and Hitler – who wasn’t known for his subtlety – therefore expected Paulus to shoot himself. Paulus declined the implied suggestion.

Captured equipment can be very much of a mixed blessing if you’re trying to actually use it on the battlefield, especially big complicated pieces of equipment like tanks which are notorious for requiring a lot of maintenance and spare parts. Supplying spare parts to your own guys for your own tanks is already enough of a challenge; it can be downright impossible if your captured enemy tanks use components which aren’t an exact match for what your own factories produce. Ditto for ammunition: I don’t know if the Germans had 45mm guns on any of their tanks, but if they didn’t I can see why they would have replaced the KV’s 45mm gun with a flamethrower. When the French battleship Richelieu switched to the Free French side in 1943, and went to New York for a refit, the shipyard workers – whose experience and measuring tools and (literally) nuts and bolts were based on the imperial system of weights and measures – had all sorts of headaches working on the vessel, which had been built using the metric system. Sometimes the best use for captured equipment is study rather than combat, a good example being the T-34, which gave the Germans a considerable shock when they they saw the shells from their Panzers bouncing off of it. Once they had recovered from their embarrassment (among other things, at discovering that the supposedly backward Russians had successfully produced a diesel engine powerful enough for a tank, something which Germany had failed to do), they created their own version of the T-34, the Panther. Another good example is the Akutan Zero, an A6M Zero which crashed in the Aleutians during the diversionary operation for the Battle of Midway. The pilot was killed, and from the air the plane looked like it had been totalled, but in fact it was barely damaged. U.S. forces found it about a month later. It was dismantled, shipped to the States, reassembled, then throughly evaluated by test pilots. This told American pilots, and American aircraft designers, everything the needed to know about the Zeros’s strengths and weaknesses.

And actually, here’s a supplementary idea. Since the I.D. charts contain a silhouette for every nation-specific sculpt, what you could do is produce a nation-specific version of this chart for all of the player powers, with the name and symbol of each power added at the top. The textual data would remain the same in every chart; all you’d need to do is is replace the unit images.

@Cloudesley said in Player Aids for G40 and G42 (Global 2012 Europe +Pacific):

@Cloudesley I don’t like these, they are too low resolutions and grey on grey is hard to read, anyone got a snappier style?!

If you’re looking for high-resolution silhouettes of the units, you could use the ones in my unit identification charts:

https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/21626/a-a-unit-identification-charts

Click on each chart to expand them to full size.

Your four-part table mostly consists of text, plus unit silhouettes, so you could create a higher-resolution new chart by:

• Having one-part large table rather than having four quarter-size tables
• Using images from my ID charts
• Using a larger text font

I don’t know, however, where you could get a larger image of the four grey squares depicting bases and ICs.