AlienFTM

That's embarrassing. That's my regiment when I was there.

That was what I was trying to imply and not come across as arrogant. I have seen the pics now and I am convinced. Cheers.

So that'll be a slice of humble pie and, er, have you somewhere I can dispose of this sceptical hat, please? It's a poor day when you don't learn something new. I stand corrected.

I could be wrong here, and maybe there were ACVs with turrets, in which case I'll have a slice of that nice-looking (but I'll guess bitter tasting) humble pie, please. The key word in your reply is "do". I have been following a thread either here or on ARRSE about an LAD 432 with a turret user-modded onto the commander's position (and I have at home a book about a Wehrmacht heavy independent self-propelled anti-tank battalion with Elefants, whose LAD had a Bergepanther and user-modded it by sticking a PzKpfw 4 turret onto it) so there is no denying that a turret can be added to a Saracen, and that there now exist Saracen ACVs with turrets. In service, I never saw one. In fact, as a slight aside, I now struggle to remember how the commander's hatch closed on a non-turreted Saracen ACV. Was there a cover that slid to the rear? Show me a picture of a Saracen ACV IN SERVICE with a turret and you'll convince me that some Saracen ACVs in service had turrets and that slice of humble pie will be mine. Until then,please excuse me if I continue to wear my sceptical hat. No offence intended.

Apart from an ACV I have seen being restored on this forum, I never saw a Saracen ACV with a turret, and I passed that comment on the owner's blog. Why would an ACV need a turret?

I see nothing to argue about in your post except this line. The ACP was ACPRA, a Command Post Royal Artillery. Command Troop 15/19H got them issued by mistake in 1977 and they very quickly got sent back to be replaced by ACVs which we retained until we band new shiny (well they were matt actually ...) Sultans in 1979. The ACV may have been replaced within the RA field HQ set-up, but most definitely not universally.

You spotted my deliberate mistake.

They look like all the battery box lids I ever saw in service.

In 1978 as we prepared for Ex Summer Sales, BFG's annual formation CPX, the RSM Big Lou decided that since his driver was away on a course, I should drive him. Fair enough. Now as a battlegroup HQ, we were at the bottom of the stack and all our radio traffic was upwards to Division (we were a divisional asset and tended not to talk to task forces). Summer Sales, in a sweltering July, was always easy for BGHQ and we enjoyed being in a comfortable village location with pubs. RSM decided he wanted to bring his springer spaniel, Wotan on exercise. Trooper Alien was less that happy and made it clear that if that bliddy dog messed the inside of my Ferret, RSM would be getting dog stew for his dinner. We arrived at something approaching 15/19H BGHQ GDP location and I jumped out to sort the wagon. The Mark 1 Ferret was heavily modified with large stowage boxes and bins wherever we could fit them. I walked around the spare wheel side and saw a trail of what looked like vomit blown in the slipstream down the side of the large ammo box bin mounted above it and went off on one. Big Lou was taken aback: Wotan had been a good boy on the journey down. (To me, Wotan not humping your leg was being a good boy.) He opened the ammo box where we found he had stored a pound or more of fresh butter which had melted in the oven-like heat inside the box with the sun beating down on it, and it had dripped out through drain holes. Funny how the RSM still managed to blame me.

I always feel the PzKPfw Ausf H or J with complete shields looks like what it is, the pinnacle of a design that was right in the first place and incomparably remained in production through 6 years of war.

Pretty sure they were long since replaced by 1991. I don't remember seeing Abbots when I was in the cavalry (75 - 82) at all, but then in a Recce battlegroup we never tended to see real artillery pieces: they were a figment of our exercise imagination. If I called in a fire mission, the attached LO from the RA at combat team Forward HQ would notionally feed the command into the divisional RA establishment where it would then be notionally passed to the guns through their chain of command. Fire missions were a work of fantasy without real guns. When I was in Osnabruck, 82 - 85, the local Field Regiment (25?) I am pretty sure had M109s: I vaguely remember taking two very young, disinterested toddlers and an equally disinterested wife down to Roberts Barracks for an open day mooch.

I always holiday in West Wales. We visited the coastal path at Castlemartin a handful of years ago and as we drove by the main gate I distinctly remember seeing a Conq because it isn't an everyday sight. There may well have been a Cent too, but it passed me by as I passed it by. If there'd been a Churchill, I am sure I'd have remembered.

Thing was in the days of Fox, BATUS was was a battlegroup trainer for BAOR battlegroups, whereas Fox was used by UKLF troops. As Bazz says, Scimitars were the only recce vehicles necessary. Scorpions weren't necessary because they were used for medium recce and were always used by their own battlegroups, never attached to the armour or infantry battlegroups. Because the medium recce battlegroup could exercise on West German Roads, there was never any need for us to go to BATUS. Only close recce troops from the Armed Recce Regt's close recce sqn were attached to other BGs, and these were always in Scimitars.

Are you telling me screw-in lenses had lugs? They were always broken off on any vehicle I ever took over! ;o)

You're going to build the house so that it can be rotated by traverse handwheel?!?!? Why not just get a motor-driven satellite dish? Sheesh.

What makes CR2 different from CR1 and Chieftain is that the former were both products of the Cold War and evolution took place, eventually leading to a replacement for each. The recent regime decided that this country would never need the ability to build new tanks and closed down the facilities. With no Cold War to generate change, CR2 will last far longer than any tank the UK has ever produced, and I'd imagine any change will be accommodated within the existing vehicles in a rolling upgrade programme like Bargepole (Chieftain) and Scorpole (Scorpion) and if you watch Megafactories (or whatever it's called), the process that keeps Abrams up to date, the USA not having built a new one since 1994. I remember once reading the assertion that six months' development in wartime is equivalent to 20 years in peacetime. I doubt very much whether you'll see CR2 on the market in the next 20 years or in the private market at all, if the government of the day can make money by selling them on to a foreign government as a fleet, with all the implications of spares, etc, as they did by selling CR1 on to Jordan.

Having spent half of my tour of UNFICYP in 1976-77 driving 01EC28 up and down the Green Line, that gave a warm feeling. A very nice example. I might be picky about the markings but I forgot to bring my pedant hat with me.

I bet his wife thought, "You think you know a man" ...

The coaxial GPMG gets badly sooted up after converting large numbers of live rounds into empty cases. RSM 15/19H (who tragically lost his battle with cancer on Tuesday) decided we'd wear brass cap badges instead of Staybrite. Imagine our delight when we discovered that Silver Dip, as well as bringing up a brass cap badge like new, did likewise with the gas-affected parts of a GPMG.

I got that one. As a professional, I invariably spot the scams before I have even opened the mail. I have to admit to having to look very hard at the raw unformatted e-mail * before I could be sure it was a scam. ---ooo0ooo--- * Depending on e-mail browser, look on the View menu for Page Source or similar

Indeed. Light Dragoons battlegroup went out to the sandpit last year and took delivery of some of 104 "new" Scimitars which had taken sandpit modifications to a complete new level.

I worked at a Working Men's club in Sunderland before I joined up. One Sunday the committee were in a total and utter flat spin because the previous night the act they'd booked weeks ago for tonight won Opportunity Knocks. Paper Lace. Standing room only. As the young lad working the grill bar physically isolated from the rest of the club's infrastructure (with a very nice woman called Cecilia whose husband cringed when acts sang the eponimous song by Simon & Garfunkel cos all the blokes leared at her ... "making love in the afternoon with Cecilia up in my bedroom"), I spent the evening walking back and forth across the Concert room right under the stage humping kegs of lager across to the grill.

Which reminds me. In 1995 I was working for (with, but a tax dodge meant that technically it was for) the Bank of England at their New Change offices. My office window looked across the street at St Paul's Cathedral on the other side (see Google Maps) literally a few yards away. My consultancy ran out (and I went to firefight another project ay Abbey National) on Friday, 8 May. We had a damn good farewell pub-crawl - I mean lunch, rolled back into the offices, I cleared my desk, said my farewells and headed off home mid-afternoon. I said goodbye to the doorman in his pink frock coat: I had only been there three months, but my distinctive Pitmatic accent and my readiness to be cordial to infrastructure people (barmaids, waiters, etc) meant that I got a sincere farewell from him, I stepped back out through the front door into the blistering hot, bright sunshine for the last time ... to find that in the half hour I'd been back in the office, somebody had erected a pair of WW2 searchlights either side of the door like a ceremonial arch of swords at a wedding. I felt touched. I sobered up on the train home and that evening I sat and watched News at Ten, fronted by Sir Trevor (or Trevor, as he was then). And finally ... I hadn't occurred to me that today was the 50th anniversary of Victory in Europe and specially for the occasion ITN had recreated the iconic pair of searchlights creating a V for victory over St Paul's to mark the occasion. And I thought they'd done it all for me ...

Certainly we were always led to believe that the slow autoload cycle time of the T72 autoloader meant that a vehicular overpressure system was inadequate, whereas all RAC crews could hand-load a round before the previous empty case hit the empty cases bin (at least the payload in Chieftain if not the charge, which would be adequate obturation for the NBC pack to restore overpressure before anything started to come back down the barrel). Irrelevant since we understood that in an NBC environment, all Soviet troops would be in full Noddy suit anyway, as indeed were we. Best thing about the NBC system was when it was really hot in summer, you could pump clean fresh air straight into your respirator and round your face. Not approved of course because it used up filter life.

Do you know, memory suggests that Command Troop 15/19H (stationed in Paderborn) spent an exercise weekend (no track movements at weekends, so exercises stopped Friday night and resumed very early Monday morning) in our command Saracens parked up at Wewelsburg in 1978. ISTR it was either the weekend Pope John Paul died or Pope John Paul II was invested. The investiture on 16 October 1978 sounds like it was smack in the middle of FTX season It was a beautiful place. We didn't get to see inside though. There must have been bars in the village.