A&A Unit Identification Charts

[Yavid]

yeah I remember when the original Europe came out. I had alot of questions like why the stuka it’s not a fighter. why the 88mm it’s not artillery and it looks to much like the AA gun. And why the P-38 it looks so much different than other countries fighters I remember it screwing up new players. I’m glad they got most of that straightened out. As far as the Panther goes over the years I’ve learned they always look alittle different and it’s one of the first things I look at when a new game comes out. What did they do to the Panther this time.

[toblerone77]

These are outstanding! +1!!!

[CWO Marc]

@toblerone77:

These are outstanding! +1!!!

Many thanks.  After the charts were finished, I printed them out in colour on standard-sized paper, inserted the pages into three-hole clear plastic protector sleeves, then put the sleeves into a three-ring binder for use as a reference tool.  I printed each chart horizontally, to make maxiumum use of the space on each sheet, so the binder opens up/down rather than left/right.  To cut the number of required sleeves in half, each sleeve holds two sheets; the sheets are back-to-back and inverted, so that each two-page spread shows a pair of horizontal charts, one above the other.

[CWO Marc]

Here’s the page order that I used in my binder, along with a couple of extra pages which I created for the binder after seeing that they’d be useful.  The two-page pairings (except for the front and back pages, which are on their own) are:

1: Cover sheet (use whatever title and/or graphics you wish)

2a: Infantry (WWI)
2b: Infantry (WWII)

3a: Equipment type list (see attachment below)
3b: Mechanized Infantry Vehicles / General Transport Trucks

4a: Tanks: Allies
4b: Tanks: Axis

5a: Artillery
5b: Anti-Aircraft Artillery

6a: Fighters: Allies
6b: Fighters: Axis

7a: Tactical Bombers: Allies
7b: Tactical Bombers: Axis

8a: Strategic Bombers: Allies
8b: Strategic Bombers: Axis

9a: Aircraft Carriers: Allies
9b: Aircraft Carriers: Axis

10a: Battleships and Battlecruisers: Allies
10b: Battleships and Battlecruisers: Axis

11a: Cruisers
11b: Destroyers

12a: Submarines
12b: Transport Ships

13a: Generic-Design Units: World War I
13b: Generic-Design Units: World War II

14: Player Nations and Unit Colours (see attachment below)

[Johnson73]

Any updates on the Charts?  Using HBG new units for example?  Or how did you create the charts, did you take pictures of the units behind white paper?

[CWO Marc]

@R:

Any updates on the Charts?  Using HBG new units for example?  Or how did you create the charts, did you take pictures of the units behind white paper?

The charts are only for official OOB A&A sculpts, which are the primary focus of my collection.

I took the photos by placing each sculpt on a little platform, behind which (as I recall) was a white sheet of paper that was lit from behind by a lamp in an aluminium photographic reflector dish.  The dish was close to the paper, and was the only source of illumination in the room (which was in darkness; I took the shots at night).  This was to produce the maximum possible contrast.  The camera was positioned directly in front of the sculpt, on a tripod.

After the photo shoot, I picked the shots that had worked best for each sculpt.  (Most sculpts were shot only once, but some gave me trouble and needed multiple shots.)  I used Microsoft Paint to cut from each large image file the small section containing the sculpt and pasted it into its own Paint file, where I then adjusted the borders to eliminate as much extraneous surrounding space as possible.  I then used PrintKey’s Grayed Colours feature to convert the pictures to black-and-white.

[CWO Marc]

Here’s an example of what an unprocessed shot looks like.  The original raw image was 1.46 MB in size, but for purposes of posting it here I reformatted it to reduce the file size.

I should have mentioned in my previous post that the aircraft sculpts had to be shot from above with the lit paper below them, not from the side with the lit paper behind them.

Some of the sculpts, by the way, were slightly translucent in my lighting set-up.  This was particularly so for the beige UK units, and especially in the case of the thin-winged Spitfire.

[baron Münchhausen]

Bumped.

[Midnight_Reaper]

Bumped, for great justice!

-Midnight_Reaper

[CWO Marc]

@Midnight_Reaper said in A&A Unit Identification Charts:

Bumped, for great justice!

-Midnight_Reaper

Thanks for the bump Midnight Reaper. I hadn’t yet looked at this thread since the move to the new forum, and I was intrigued to notice a couple of differences between its look now and its look on the old forum. First, the picture attachments display without the need to log in; in the old forum, the pictures usually remained invisible unless a user had logged in. Second, it seems that the new forum displays more posts per page than then old forum did: the thread occupies two pages, but as I recall it occupied at least three pages on the old forum. Though that’s perhaps just a customizable feature for each user.

To see if I was just imagining the page length thing, I went looking for another one of my long threads, the Global 1940 2nd Edition Map Analysis thread, which I recall was at least four pages long on the old forum, to see how many pages it occupied here. That’s when I discovered something which I should have realized earlier: the thread URLs on the new forum are different from what they were on the old one, and therefore the URLs which I have on file (in a Word document in my computer) for various threads of particular interest to me are now obsolete. The Global 1940 2nd Edition Map Analysis thread, for example, used to be at…

http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=36590.0

…and now it’s at:

https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/26161/global-1940-2nd-edition-map-analysis?page=1

On the plus side, the new URLs do have the advantage of having the thread title built into them (“global-1940-2nd-edition-map-analysis”), which is a lot more informative than the arbitrary designation “topic=36590.0”, so all in all I’m fine with the trade-off; I’d say it’s a net improvement.

[CWO Marc]

By the way, I’ve just noticed that in the first post of the Unit Identification Charts thread, which ends with the sentence “The first two charts for today are the WWI and WWII infantry charts”, the two charts in question aren’t actually there. Did they somehow get deleted during the file transfer to the new forum?

[Midnight_Reaper]

@CWO-Marc said in A&A Unit Identification Charts:

By the way, I’ve just noticed that in the first post of the Unit Identification Charts thread, which ends with the sentence “The first two charts for today are the WWI and WWII infantry charts”, the two charts in question aren’t actually there. Did they somehow get deleted during the file transfer to the new forum?

The links for pictures did not directly transfer over when we switched to the new software. @djensen attempted to revive the old picture links, which may have only been partially successful. I would talk to @djensen to see if he can help you find the missing pictures.

Also, let me thank you for all the work you put into this. It is both practical and beautiful and I think it’s great work, top-notch in all aspects.

-Midnight_Reaper

[djensen]

The photos transferred but the links in the posts are incorrect. I wrote a plug-in that fixed it in most cases but apparently not this one.

[djensen]

@CWO-Marc Fixed. I updated the plugin for the missing photos in the middle of the topic. But for some reason the first post wasn’t showing so I manually made the change.

[CWO Marc]

@djensen said in A&A Unit Identification Charts:

@CWO-Marc Fixed. I updated the plugin for the missing photos in the middle of the topic. But for some reason the first post wasn’t showing so I manually made the change.

Great, thanks for fixing the problem.

[CWO Marc]

@Midnight_Reaper said in A&A Unit Identification Charts:

Also, let me thank you for all the work you put into this. It is both practical and beautiful and I think it’s great work, top-notch in all aspects.

-Midnight_Reaper

Much appreciation. I enjoyed putting those charts together. I own a WWII atlas that was actually published during the war, and which contains all sorts of interesting information about the military situation around the world, and one of the sections at the back has a recogniztion chart of Allied and Axis aircraft, depicted as black silhouettes. It’s a neat feature, and it was the main inspiration for the A&A unit chart project