Wonderful – I am really enjoying watching the effort being put into this restoration and seeing the detail of the work you are doing. This is one of the most interesting threads on the forum.

Dead easy 49 out of 49 but they got two wrong – 10 is a poor drawing pf a P26 and 22 is not a P43 Lancer but a much modified T6.

Trying to hit anything with a manually operated gun from a moving aeroplane (especially another moving aeroplane), without some form of radar guidance or heat seeking missile is next to impossible anyway. The only sure way was heavy burst firing or multiple guns all shooting at the same target and even then actual hits resulted from a tiny proportion of the rounds expended. Most kills by gunners in bombers were down to blind luck and to the fact that the target was most often the subject of several gunners firing from different aircraft and different positions. The box formation defence was probably at its most effective when it frightened defending fighters into firing from longer ranges and not trying to press attacks through the box.

In the Battle of Britain the head on attacks by the RAF served more to disrupt and drive the attackers from their intended bombing run than to actually shoot them down – the idea being to preserve the intended target not just shoot down bombers. The latter was the icing on the cake but the primary task was to disrupt the bomber stream. The Germans worked on the same principle and relied on flak to do the real damage.

The Steelite brand name still exists – it was acquired according to Wikipedia in the 1960s by Royal Doulton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Doulton Royal Doulton were later acquired by WWRD Holdings Ltd who in 2015 became part of Fiskars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiskars

The original Ridgway name goes back to the early 1800s. Their Steelite brand products were very popular in the hospitality, shipping and airline industry because it was very light and very strong. Perhaps Fiskars can give you an answer from their records.

Mind you someone will probably recognise the logo and my search will be redundant – it’s just that among my interests I collect English 18th century porcelain so I leapt at the challenge. :eagerness:

My point is that that when any country is in a declared war (not these acts of international criminality we indulge in now where wars aren’t declared and governments send in troops to advance the financial interests of their backers, e.g. the Gulf Wars) all the country is involved. Civilians are directed by their government into jobs made necessary by the war’s requirements and the military is subject to obey or be disciplined instructions by the representatives of government in the person of their commanders. WW2 was fought on that basis and that is why it was a total war – military and civilians were in it equally and were all considered legitimate targets by both sides. The only difference between the two was that civilians were prevented by law from fighting back – they were just there as cannon fodder. Well ****** that for a joke.

Therefore when the civilians are considered legitimate targets not just the military they therefore have a perfectly clear legitimate, and in fact essential right, to take the fight to the enemy to defend themselves. If they are being bombed then it is clear that their paid servants the military have failed to protect them so they must themselves become part of the fight to protect themselves.

So if I was a citizen of some non-military area of a town and had some thug destroy my house or my family because they couldn’t be bothered seeking out the military target they were directed to attack (if they couldn’t find it they shouldn’t just drop their bombs willy nilly as both sides did) then I have a perfect right to make sure that the people that created the carnage directed at me never do it again and the simplest way is to make the experience of capture so bad for them that they will become instant pacifists unwilling to attack civilians ever again and therefore unwilling ever to serve in the military. That’s the basic ethos instilled into recruits so it also should be a part of civilian thinking. Why do you think the atom bombs were used against the Japanese – they were used because the Allies knew that that ethos pervaded the Japanese culture and they knew the casualties of any invaders would be horrific. It is also the same reason why no nation has ever attempted to control North Korea with the obvious military solution – the cost to any invader would be too high. If a nation wants to ensure it is left in peace it has to foster those extreme attitudes.

It needn’t mean a loss of rights at home all it means is that another country will think twice before attempting a military invasion. Perhaps if we had had it in the last half of the 20th century we would have avoided the corruption of the various excursions on behalf of oil companies that created the Gulf Wars and the uncontrollable mess we have now, or wars like Vietnam without honour or purpose except to make suppliers of military equipment richer than they already are.

There are no high moral values in war, the basic truth it is kill or be killed and high moral values went the way of the dodo the moment civilians ceased to be collateral damage and came to be considered legitimate targets. That is now the way things are done and therefore civilians owe to themselves to take every effort to ensure that anyone who attacks them comes out of it in far worse condition than when they went in. Perhaps then governments might start to find better ways of sorting out their mainly self-created problems.

Well it is a contentious subject as I originally said but what in effect Matt and Duggy are saying is that I as a civilian who has just been attacked by members of a foreign military force without my approval nor due to any actions committed against them by me personally should just sit back and accept their behaviour as being perfectly justified. And not only that but I should also rush to their aid and succour should they be in any way harmed in that attack on me, or find themselves the target of other angry people upset by their thuggish behaviour – pull the other one folks.

I don’t know about Matt and Duggy but I take all attempts to do me physical harm as personal attacks on me – I don’t care if they are the military servants of another country or even servants of the country I’m a citizen of. If someone commits an unjustified attack on me then ****** them – they started it and if I can I will finish it. I can only assume that Duggy and Matt live in a world where they happily turn the other cheek and say “that’s alright old chap, I know that you are only following orders and I must accept that any injury I suffered and the loss of my home and possessions is nothing personal – here have a nice cup of tea and I’ll find a phone so I can ring up your chaps and tell them where to pick you up. I hope we meet again under similar circumstances”. I wonder what the resistance forces in occupied Europe, or an inmate at Auschwitz would have said to that peculiar ideal.

Military conduct code demands that military personnel if captured will be treated fairly as POWs. All fine and very cosy but that doesn’t extend to civilians who in every war since time began have been universally treated as easy targets by both sides. It was WW2 which saw the concept of total war universally accepted to the point that the German Einsatzgruppen in eastern Europe slaughtered everyone they came across; the mass bombing of cities by both sides was accepted as quite justified, the sinking of passenger liners by submarines and aircraft of both sides became common military practice; columns of refugees were attacked – the list of killing civilians is endless.

The vast majority of the casualties of WW2 were civilians not military forces and those civilian casualties happened because it is easier for the military of both sides to kill civilians than it is to kill trained service personnel. Casual slaughter that occurred because these hapless people just happened to be in the way of military forces, and that has been the philosophy of war ever since it began. And in economic terms the greatest amount by far of property and resource destruction in wars is inflicted on civilian resources as is the cost and labour of repairing the damage – insurance companies tend to exclude war damage from coverage. Wars are not things to be gone into lightly and they should be as horrific as possible to continually remind us that we should not get into them in the first place.

Thanks to the universal acceptance of mass slaughter of civilians in WW2 we now live in a world where there is now no longer any attempt to separate civilian and military targets. Just ask the citizens of Hanoi, the Balkans, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan – countries everywhere in the world, the military architects of the Mutually Assured Destruction philosophy or the operators of UAV predators, and the victims of idealistically driven terrorists with military objectives in Europe and world-wide. So as a civilian I say I have the absolute right to vent my anger on any military personnel, either in or out of uniform, that are trying to do me harm. If they behave and leave me alone, I’ll behave and leave them alone – not too much to ask is it.

Beat me to it – the last few weeks have been a bloody irritation. It’s slow to load while I wait for some connection to an advertisement (which I don’t want to see or buy anything from anyway) to load and then once it gets that out of its system the page jumps just as I click on what I want and I get something else. Then just for a change it will sometimes just go unresponsive and I have to reload it.

Could I make a suggestion. If we have to have advertising would Key stick with advertisers who have state of the art servers instead of under financed chancers whose cheap servers don’t seem to be able to handle the volume that seems to be the cause of these slow loading banner advertisements. On another forum there is an banner advertiser in a central European country whose server seems to collapse at weekends and there are long waits while that loads which then hold up the loading of the forum.

I wonder when advertisers will wake up to the fact that if their advertisement causes annoyance they have just lost customers.

I think some of us just get a bit ‘uncomfortable’ about some of these campaigns pressurising for honours and awards.

Yes that is the way I look at it – honours are things granted not demanded.