AlienFTM

I'd have thought that carrying out a First Parade in accordance with the Servicing Schedule ought to cover eveything.

When I transferred from cavalry to Pay Corps in 1982, I had to be able to type 15 wpm. This was effected by getting us into a classroom every Monday at 0800 to spend an hour being trained to touch-type by a very nice WRAC. I was first first to pass the typing test (achieving 17 wpm) but continued to attend the classes. After all, she was a lovely WRAC. Aah, memories.

I remember in the 80s, the Russians pulled a number stunt on NATO during a round of arms reductions. Both sides agreed to reducing armoured corps staffing. What the Russians didn't say was that they were replacing their four-man T62s with three-man T64s (plus autoloader) and selling off the T62s. Tank crews reduced by 25%; tanks reduced by ... nothing at all. In fact the T64 was a complete new generation, a huge improvement on the T62.

Not a flop at all. The Swedes designed it to be as small as possible to hide in the woods and advance easily backwards through them when the Commies came. Small population, limited human resources for crewing: autoloader reduces the manpower of the armoured corps by 25% at a stroke (I am guessing at a three-man crew. It might be a two-man crew, in which case it has reduced armoured corps staffing by 1/3). Removing the turret reduces the height and complexity enormously. Imagine the one in the pic with the suspension in its normal, level state, it is no higher than the man standing by it. The design was so good that in 1976-77 I saw a Chieftain hacked about by removing the turret and mounting the 120 directly through the glacis plate, being driven behind our barracks onto Salisbury Plain for trials. Obviously it never came into service. Pictures are like rocking-horse droppings, though I vaguely remember seeing on www.arrse.co.uk somewhere a picture of a hangar at Bovvy where the vehicle at the back might have been said Chieftain S-tank.

Evidently representing the missile just out of the tube. 1. Did the round for Striker come in the same packaging as it did for Mark 5 Ferret and (was it?) FV438? The empty fibreglass tube inside the launcher would then be an interesting addition (and you wouldn't need actual rounds in the other launchers, just the siver-paper covered fibreglass tubes. You could then display the other rounds for Joe Public to admire and go, "Oooooh, rocket!"). 2. I notice they are marked as PRAC rounds (pale blue) but marked with a gold band to indicate explosive (because of 4000m of rocket fuel presumably). I don't remember ever seeing the gold band on the PRAC round, but then again, it would only be visible AFTER it had left the tube heading downrange, so why should I? I cannot therefore pass comment. However, I presume the round is actually inert (containing neither explosive warhead nor rocket fuel). That being the case, I'd posit that the markings are not accurately indicative of the current state of the round either way. This being the case, have you considered getting hold of the markings for a service round to improve the overall image of the scenario? I'd expect a service round to be painted Olive Drab with Gold band, but since I was never actually Swingfire-trained, this is all observation and pure guesswork on my part. No offence intended.

And what is 209 supposed to indicate?

I am intrigued by the markings. P13B is surely a callsign, but here is the nub. Pre-1982, the first character (in this case Papa obviously) of a four-character callsign would be an arm-indicator, fixed for decades to indentify the arm of service to which the remaining three characters (13 Bravo) refer. 1 = A Sqn/Coy/Bty etc 3 = 3 Tp / Pl, etc B = Troop corporal, third vehicle in the troop / platoon (after 13: Troop leader - and the troop as a whole depending on context - and 13A, Troop sergeant). When the OrBat eneabled major units to swap squadrons and companies to create battlegroups, it might happen that B Coy of an infantry battalion would attach to a battlegroup which included its own B Squadron of tanks, both using three-character callsigns prefixed with 2, leading to major confusion. By assigning an arm-indicator, this confusion was eliminated. Until say an armoured battlegroup acquired a recce squadron which shared three-character callsigns with its own squadron. Or a mechanised infantry battlegroup acquired a lorried infantry company. Or Artillery or Engineers acquired likewise. So these four arms, as well as having I (for Infantry), T (for Tanks - Armour), G (for Guns - Artillery) and E (For Engineers), also had made available to them the respective alternative arm-indicators K, U, W and F. Voice Procedure required that the combat arms always answered up first on the radio net, so the order of answering was thus the acronym IKTUGWEFA (spoken as it reads) followed by the non-combat arms in alphabetical order, B, C, D, H, J, L, M, N, ETC. The W Artillery alternative was relatively late, and you may well hear bleeps talking about Iktugefa rather than Iktugwefa. A was army aviation, B (Bravo - how appropriate) was airborne or Special Forces and so on. REME was Romeo and Military Police was Papa. So how come this vehicle bears the arm indicator Papa? With no A Vehicles of their own, why would RMP own a 434? Hang on, you say, at the start, I stated that this situation existed until 1982. The 434 is in desert cam, so it is logical to assume it represents service in a sandpit. In 1982, Signals issued a total rewrite of Voice Procedure because the arm-indicator (and the variations of the standard callsign allocations across arms) was giving far too much information to the Commies' listening stations monitoring our radio traffic. Under the new system, every radio net used exactly the same set of callsigns without variation and every unit was allocated a new prefix in lieu of the arm-indicator, which changed daily at midnight alongside the radio frequency. (It did no good on the 1 Armd Div Logistic Net because even the GOC recognised my accent and first time he heard me in the next room, he walked through and greeted me accordingly. Imagine hard at work in the office and in bounds a Major-General who greets you with, "I know that voice. You run the MRG radio systems and are forever giving my operators a hard time." "Sorry, sir." Grovel, grovel. "Not at all. They are a bunch of slackers who think they know everything and need the occasional rocket up the arrse from somebody who does know what he is talking about.") When I heard about Bravo Two Zero, I could not help but notice that, according to McNab, they were "randomly" (according to Signals SOPs as described here) allocated the prefix Bravo (previously airborne or Special Forces) which stuck for the duration of the Op. Quelle coincidence. Ever since, this has nagged me. Did "they" realise they had created far too much work and revert to the old system prior to Op Sandpit 1? Last month, chatting with Command Troop, The Light Dragoons, I was assured that the daily-changing prefix does indeed still apply, though once Bowman has rolled out to everybody, it is planned to drop this and revert to the old arm-indicators because sat behind a totally-encrypted net, the arm-indicator will prove useful to those on the net, and only those on the net. So back to P13B. If the callsign is daily-changing, whose bright ieda was it to paint it on the side?

As originator of the thread he may have been able to do it himself simply by editing the title field of the original message (as per other message board software) unless the forum fascisti (no offence intended) have tailored this out. I notice that the Title field is editable by me as I sit here composing a reply, but fear that if I do, because we are mid-thread, it will cause strange things to happen so I shall keep my fingers off.

The frequency range appears to tie in quite well with the stated rod length of just under 4m for 1/4 wavelength.

It reminds me of the business end of a ZSU 57/2, similar to the ZSU 23/4 but equipped with twin 57s rather than quad 23s.

IIRC The Ursula Suit worn by submarine crews during the war originated as either a Babour or a Belstaff wax jacket which was converted by an officer of HMS Ursula and, proving eminently suitable for purpose, the converted went into official production.

Have I gone into a time warp or something or is this not yesterday's news? Literally, as there has been a thread running about it since then.

The long lorry reminds me of something I saw recently, superheavy Russian Second World War tanks. If it wasn't on this forum, it must have been satellite TV. One such superheavy tank comprised what looked like (no contemporary pictures were available - somebody had built a 1/76 scale model) three separate KV1 hulls welded together to create one long tank with three separate gun turrets. First time it drove over a trench it split in two. Ho-hum.

Oh dear oh dear. Dig a bit deeper and you'll find that this rumour has been around ever since the day we won the 2012 Olympics. And that is all it is, I am afraid. A rumour. No fact to it at all - it has been denied at all levels.

Last night on satellite I found "The Battle of Chernobyl," which (as you can guess from the title) treated the events of April 1986 and the years of clean-up that followed like the military operation it was. There is a school of thought which sees this event as the second stepping stone (after Ex Able Archer 1983 - Google it) on the way to ending the Cold War. If the reactor core meltdown had continued through the concrete reactor base to where water used to douse the fire had collected, the nuclear magma would have caused an explosion estimated at around 3 to 4 megatons, compared with Hiroshima at 12 to 15 kilotons. Minsk would have been destroyed. Had the meltdown continued further, an aquafer supplying most of the Ukraine, on which Chernobyl sat, would have been contaminated into the distant future. An interview with Gorbachev suggested that the clean-up from this single event cost the USSR 18 billion dollars and ruined half a million lives. Whole armies of reservists queued up to ruin their lives forever by spending 45 seconds on the roof of Reactor 4 shovelling uranium-coated graphite cooling rod remnants off so that they could enclose the reactor inside its sarcophagus. The sarcophagus was designed to last 30 years until a second containment dome was built over the whole thing. It's now been 22 years and the Ukraine has no money to build such a containment dome. A short distance from the reactors was the top secret Chernobyl 2, one of the USSR's primary missile detection radar sites, which had to be abandoned. At this point Gorbachev personally realised that there could be no winners in a nuclear war and opened talks with Reagan. The difference between Chernobyl and Hiroshima (they were compared, but the programme did not discuss the following) was that Little Boy was designed to explode the entire atomic mass whereas at Chernobyl, the nuclear mass was not designed to be exploded, so the fallout would have been (and even contained as it was, was) orders of magnitude worse than at Hiroshima. I am delighted that we no longer live, to quote Freddie Mercury, beneath the shadow of a mushroom cloud. Just a pity there are people who want to convert warheads into radiological bombs and create the Chernobyl effect in our cities.

There's an advert for Smirnoff which intrigues me, giving their concept of all the stuff dumped in the oceans over the aeons. It would be a good advert if I drank, cos I can remember what it advertises.

Perhaps an LCM (Landing Craft, Mechanised)? As rendered by Airfix in 1/76 scale complete with a Sherman. Aah, halcyon days.

A couple of years ago ITV showed (IIRC) "Distant Shores" about a doctor who goes to practise on a fictional island off the Northumberland coast (filmed at Craster). The ferry from the mainland was some sort of landing craft which I think was an LCA. Can I claim that as a "Probable"?

But why is the night-sight aperture open? I don't believe Fox ever had retro-fitted a night-sight suitable for daytime use prior to its withdrawal from service. If that sight were switched on, the aperture would instantly black it out anyway to stop it burning out. (At the Light Dragoons Association weekend last month I got the full tour of the new night-sight to go into a tranche of Scimitars currently being purpose-rebuilt for use in Afghanistan. The picture clarity was astonishing, a world away from the first-generation image-intensifying night-sights we used on Scorpions in the 1970s. It was so good that the sergeant showing me round reckons gunners will use the night-sight by day in preference to the normal optical gunner's sight. It zoomed in close enough to easily identify the ASM's REME cap-badge and the built-in eye-friendly laser-rangefinder told me he was exactly 50m away without the ASM falling to the ground screaming, "AAAAAAAAAAAAARGH! I'm blind!" What did disappoint me was a regular Royal Armoured Corps senior NCO so badly over-estimating his range at 75-100m before lasing. They let anybody in now. Don't they teach them anything?)

I think you are right. It so reminds me of this:

You may need something bigger than that: according to the Daily Mail, these are massive tanks. Even if they are smaller than a Sherman and only maybe half the size of a Tiger 1. There is nothing to compare with the misuse by the media of superlatives to big-up (if you'll pardon the pun) a story.

I love that with Ebay. My wife buys crafting kit. She has a handful of favourite shops. When she needs something, she goes away and orders at the rock-bottom price. Then toward the end of the auction, she always gets outbid. Because we don't bid again, we don't win, but the following day Ebay always invites us to Buy-It-Now at the original price. I would love to know who thinks he is being clever by outbidding us every time.

ISTR that Warspite was deemed an unlucky ship, damaged during the Battle of Jutland, never fully restored to perfection and prone to sudden, unexpected swerves - presumably a bit like a car with a warped chassis. I agree with your sentiment, but in the light of this, during the post-war disarmament I am not the least bit surprised that she got the chop.

The bombers were 617 Squadron. A year earlier they had been bombing the dams and since then they had become high-precision paragons of the Bomber Force. The crews were less than happy at being allocated such a mundane task on such a momentous day. But the fact of the matter was that the mission required hours of low-level, split-second formation flying. The idea was that they flew in a column as wide as an invasion fleet and periodically (every few seconds?) the lead aircraft dropped a bundle of window - aluminium strips to light up coastal radar. The lead bombers then cycled back to the back of the queue, unseen by the radar behind the window. As the new lead bombers came up to and passed the position where the previous bundles had been dropped, they dropped their own window in front of the last. What displayed on the radar was an invasion-fleet-sized wall of contact advancing on the coast at the speed of an invasion fleet. The Germans saw what they wanted to see.

You know what? Even though I was a radio man and D&M was merely a stepping stone to crewman, this sounds familiar to me.