Marvel Onkey

Seems to me that it would be a lot less confusing just to give all the aircraft different names...

Is it just me, or is the effect of all of the work and research into making the plane blend into the sky in different lighting conditions somewhat compromised by painting a great big shark's mouth on each nacelle?

Thanks for the answers guys; amazing aircraft and incredible flying, it's hard to credit that more of them didn't hit the ground or the drink- one sneeze from the pilot and it's goodnight Irene.

Forgive the stupid question- was there anything about the Buccaneer that made it particularly suited to flying at very low level?

Now that is what I call a stash!

Thank you, that makes sense. It has just occurred to me that kills belong to the pilot not the airframe, so Ginger Snap and Lanakila could be displaying kills the pilot made prior to flying recce missions I suppose.

Do the red dots on the fuselage above the wings of Spitfires PA 892 and MB 946 signify missions flown? They surely can't be 'kills' on a recce bird can they? I was surprised to see 12 kills recorded on the nose of 'Ginger Snap', I'd always assumed all recce planes had the armament removed to reduce weight.

Poor gunner. Talk about heaping insult upon injury- not only are you being sent to war in the hopeless Defiant but they're dressing you like a clown while you do it...

I like a metaphor as much as the next man, particularly if that man is the recently knighted Professor Van-Tam; on the other hand people using management speak to make their topic and themselves seem important really causes me to grind my teeth. Some of the examples that particularly set me off: 'Forensic' as in "we need to have a forensic look at this". Me: "Are we investigating crime or do you mean that we need to look at this in detail?" 'Deep Dive' as in "next time we'll take a deep dive into this topic". Me: "Are we going to sea, or do you mean we'll look at it in detail? 'Granular' as in "the report goes into granular detail". I accept that common usage is for 'granular' to be synonymous with 'detailed', it's the unintended tautology that causes me angst. 'At pace' as in "We'll need to complete this project at pace". Why can't you just say 'quickly'? Someone has already brought up the use of 'myself' when the speaker means 'me', that also sets me off...

Max Hasting's Overlord is a perfectly good general history and benefits from being very readable, Cornelius Ryan and Stephen Ambrose are very good on individual and small unit stories; Normandy '44 by James Holland is an excellent narrative of not only D-Day but the whole Normandy campaign, Anthony Beevor's book is very good. John Keegan is a world renowned historian and Six Armies in Normandy is a fine book, but he is a bit of the declinist view of British history which you may or may not subscribe to; Carlo D'este meanwhile has a not particularly balanced point of view best summarised as "the Brits were useless, Monty was rubbish, the US won the war on their own etc etc..." which may cause the more anglophile reader to throw his books across the room.

That's a good point; although most of my paint effects are inadvertent and the matt coat covers a multitude of sins!

I am definitely not a highly-respected modeller, at best I'm a ham-fisted kit assembler who only sporadically completes one; but I've also stopped using a gloss coat before decals, These days I prefer a gloss coat after decals so I can correct my weathering mistakes without damaging the painting or decals (weathering is my worst skill), then a matt coat over everything at the end.

Is it me, or are some of the panel lines pretty clear on the red and white 'Columbia' in the background?

Buy the tester pots of emulsion maybe?

Dare I suggest that in extremis you could model it as a vignette with a figure stood right in front of the pump who might just co-incidentally be obscuring some of the bits that are hard to get an image of...