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In his continuing series of walkarounds, Chris “Toadman” Hughes has concentrated this volume to the British Anti-Tank guns of World War II. There are resin kits of the 2-pdr, 6-pder, and 17-pdr as well as plastic kits in other scales such as Airfix’s 1/32nd scale 17-pdr and Matchbox’s 1/76th scale offerings.
If you are using a Windows platform, the CD should start by itself to take you on a journey of the guns. I prefer to look at the images in a graphics program so as to be able to manipulate them. For this, I right click on the CD drive and click on Explore. This opens a folder where I can then right click on a file, ‘open with’, and choose the graphics program. Using a graphics program will let me zoom in, change the gamma or increase the brightness of an image.
Now, let’s get back to this CD. Inside, there are 206 photos with four GIF files used as a background. The 2-pdr gets 61 photos in great detail. The 6-pdr is represented with 67 photos. The 17-pder is covered in 78 photos.
The photo quality is excellent with a good resolution at 300dpi and a nice size of 1504 by 1000 pixels. This translates into clear images when printed. All of the pictures on this CD were taken at the Military Vehicle Technology Foundation (MVTF) also known as Jacques Littlefield’s collection. By using the Explore feature instead of the autoplay, I was able to avoid the ‘squashed photo’ that occurred when a landscape format photo was forced into a portrait format image holder.
The autoplay feature has the user come to a table of contents which allows one to view the acknowledgement page. Here, one can find a bibliography, reference sources, and mission statement. This CD was created with the modeler in mind…and it shows.
Upon clicking on the Main Table of Contents, a new table of contents appears for the different guns. Each then directs the user to another table of contents which list each of the photos pages. Each HTML page has simple but interesting captions which point out details as well as a navigation which allows one to go to the next page, the previous page, the sections table of contents, or the main table of contents. Certainly a well thought out plan.
Quite interesting are the pedigree of some of the guns. For example, the small caliber 2-pdr has some red painted ammunition boxes. Also, the shields on some of the guns seem to have been repaired but I did not see any small caliber weapon damage on them. Sadly, Chris did not open any of the boxes to allow the viewer to see the contents as he did with the German guns. However, almost all other details are covered. One should never forget that these are restorations and, as accurate as MVTF usually is, compare the photos to period photos to ensure authenticity.
This CD-Rom is one of many references which I am really happy to have acquired. At the asking price, it is certainly a bargain when one considers that the average ten dollar book only gives about a 125 photos at most. I highly recommend the Toadman Walkarounds for any modeler whether on a budget or not! Get your copy by visiting: http://www.toadmanstankpictures.com/
Now, how long must we wait before we see new styrene plastic kits of these guns?
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